Planting by the light of the silvery moon....
I’ve been looking at the moon just lately.
Usually you only really notice the moon when it’s full, and it’s a clear night, and as your silhouette lengthens on the path before you and you put the torch back in your pocket it occurs to you that the hippies may have been right after all, and there really is such a thing as moon shadows.
Such an apparently esoteric thing as the cycles of the moon may pass you by while you’re scurrying around getting on with things. But they’re the key to a very great deal of what happens: the tides, the female of the species, my dogs’ moods.
When you start thinking about it, our non-lunary 30- or 31-day month looks increasingly arbitrary.
Time to out myself: I’m a closet hippy chick. When you spend your formative years weighed down by multiple bangles, playing Tangerine Dream and the Floyd in a fug of joss stick smoke, it kind of stays with you. I’m terribly sensible these days, of course, with a mortgage and a dishwasher and not a single Indian smock top to my name. But I’m still a believer in the importance of forces of nature we barely understand: the power of the soil, the purity of the air, the pull of the moon.
It just makes sense to me that something that can govern the difference between high tide and low tide would also have an influence over water levels in our soil, and so the growth of our plants. So I’m planning to dabble in the ancient art of moon gardening, just to see if it makes any difference.
There are three types of moon gardening: synodic, biodynamic and sidereal. Biodynamic I’m crossing off the list right from the start. Nothing, and I mean nothing will induce me to spray weeds with urine from a sterile cow, even if I could find one, or for that matter bury anything wrapped in a stomach in my veg beds.
The sidereal method has something to do with the moon’s position relative to the stars: I can’t even envisage what a 30-degree section of the moon’s orbit even looks like, let alone work out which one it’s in.
So that leaves synodic: a posh way of saying you plant according to the four phases of the moon.
Starting from a bright new moon, the first two, roughly seven0day quarters are when the moon is waxing: in the second two it’s waning back down through grampian, half and crescent to dark.
The theory is that you sow and planting fruiting and leafy crops in the first two quarters, when the ground water is highest, and roots in the third quarter. In the fourth, when water levels are retreating, use the time to weed instead.
In my diary it helpfully notes down the days of the new moon, so this isn’t quite as difficult to work out as it might seem. There was a full moon yesterday (explaining why my dogs were so antsy), so we’re now in the third quarter of the moon’s cycle: for the next week, so roots (that’s my long-overdue garlic going in, then).
Then have a break for a week: the next new moon isn’t far away, on Thursday, just in time for those early greenhouse crops to go in.
It all seems so easy when you write it down like that. As long as I don’t complicate things any further I think I might just about manage it.
