Sunday 7 October 2007

A GOOD FEELING

After going to Deb's Biodynamics day a couple of weeks ago, I bought a 'Moon Planting Guide for Gardeners' online. I don't know if biodynamics is related to bionics, but it arrived in the mail the very next day! It is a fold out, year-long calendar showing various rhythms of the moon and giving the gardener some ideas as to what should be done when, with little symbols and good explanations of the whole thing.

It is for next year but I knew that the last full moon was 4 days after Roger's birthday, this year, so I reckoned that if I took any full moon on the calendar and moved forward the right number of days I would get today and begin to find out what it all means. Not the best way to start but I didn't do a degree in Japanese for nothing - reading things upside down and inside out was second nature to me (then). Ok, the 3rd of October (Wednesday) should be heading towards 1/2 moon, on the waning side and corresponds to some cool little pictures of a transition between root days and flower days . For this stage of the month it says it is a good time to do composting and bed preparation. Yippee, I had been meaning to make a new compost heap but kept putting it off so today was the day. It felt good. I also prepared a bed for the romanesco broccoli to move into when it gets to be flower days again because they are not quite ready yet.

The weekend has been fully leaf days, with the moon rising in the sky and heading down to new moon. Leaf days means doing things to do with plants that are grown for their leaves. Hooray! I had badly neglected repotting my lemon grass, that has been shooting beautifully all winter, in the lounge. So, this was lemon grass day and I felt pretty good about it too. I went to the farmers' market early and bought, amongst other things, one of those Tassie Mountain Pepper plants. The man said it likes to be cool and shady so, after the lemon grass it was time to pot up the pepper bush - it being a plant grown for its leaves (primarily).

There is a lot more to it than this but I tell you what, it is good to have something to work towards rather than jumping around all over the place. I have been dreaming about what tomatoes to grow and bothered by all sorts of other unimportant little jobs I should be doing but this weekend none of that bothered me at all because they are all related to other stages of the moon cycles and I will do them when the time comes. So I am satisfied with my weekend's work and looking forward to getting to January 2008, so I can read this calendar without having to remember how many days it has been since 4 days after Roger's birthday! Thank heavens we only have one moon!

2 comments:

Bob said...

I'm one of those that jump around all over the place in doing my gardening. Whatever becomes critical gets done next. This calendar looks great & will help me plan my activities. Thanks Kate.

Anonymous said...

Kate you should read 'Gardening for Life' by Maria Thun and then everyone of your gardening days will be fully ultilized in a productive and aware way. Look out for node days thats when you can relax and enjoy your garden!
ps Its in the BD library