The moon calendar

Please dont ask me to explain it, all I can tell you is it works. It works for me anyway. Its basically the moon exerting a gravitational pull on the earth that creates more favourable conditions at different times of the month for different types of food crops depending on the moons position relative to the earth. O I did just explain it! and not too badly either! But that was a very scientific cold explanation- I can do better. This one will appeal to all you hippes and old indian chiefs who read this blog. Our pale brother the moon was once part of the earth and as we get further away from each other it tries to get our attention by reaching out to us in a desperate bid to hold on to the earth its other half. Sad, tragic and very romantic I know. I wish people would stop shooting probes at it. Every time I hear of another probe being sent to the moon I want to shout "leave the moon alone!!" I think I will start a "leave the moon alone" campaign. Whos with me?

Anyway the biodynamic calendar arrived as part of my order from Irish Seed Savers. Thanks to Jo and Co. for the spuds and seeds too. Every plant is put into a crop group and every month is divided up into days that favour certain groups. If I havent lost you each month is also divided between the northern and southern hemispheres. So New Zealand gets some days to plant crops and we get some days. Its only fair! At the bottom of this page is the page for February to give you an idea of what it looks like.

2012 calendar you can get it from amazon

Apart from precise planting days down to the hour there is always fascinating information in the book itself. This year Maria Thun writes about her father and I'm going to quote a piece of it because I was so taken with it;

"As a child she had always been amazed at the way her father worked. In their village of Grossfelden, near Marburg, he was the seedman. The seedman was the person who sowed the seed grain for the farmers. There were no seed drills in the village at that time. Her father was particularly skilled in this work. He would observe the evening and morning sky for many days until he sensed that the correct time for sowing had arrived.Then the fields would be prepared and the seed sown out by hand."

The green bar represents our planting times, the purple belongs to the southern hemisphere

I think that is just fascinating, and it puts in my mind a picture of my own grandfather walking out looking to the west and judging the weather. For all the weather forecasters we have in tight black PVC(yes Jean Byrne I mean you!) there was a lot to be said for the unspoken knowledge that people had before the advent of teleifis eireann and probes to the moon.