Organic witchery

Last Thursday and Friday morning, the moon was in aquarius apparently. This was pleasing not only because I'm an aquarius but also because this meant that these two days were "Biodynamic Flower Days".

If you are a biodynamic gardener you are meant to divide your activities like seed sowing, weeding and planting up around the moons travels through the various constellations. Dfferent constellations are associated with either flower, leaf or root plants and to sow and tend to your flower plants on flower days is meant to reward you with a super bumper crop of those in question.

Now to be honest, over the years I have not paid much heed to the moon's travels other than to be wary of the full moon in May which often brings a frost just at the point that you are wanting to plant out tender plants. My science head has always bossed me into thinking that getting the plants raised and into the ground with enough support, food and water whilst fitting in the millions of other things you have to do in life is enough of a challenge.

This year in darkest December I bought the Biodynamic Sowing and Planting Calendar by Maria and Matthias Thun and to my dismay found in completely incomprehensible. I think that's me being a bit impatient and dim but this did put Biodynamics on hold for me for a while other than getting very excited by all the preparations you can make which involved filling a cow's horn with cow dung and burying it. I asked for a cow's horn for Christmas, apparently you can order them from a biodynamic website but alas Santa did not oblige.
(Note from Santa: "I only had Reindeer horns last Christmas")

Then a couple of week's ago by chance I found a nice website called www.the-gardeners-calendar.co.uk which has a lovely simple approach to the whole thing and will email you every week telling you what day is which. I'm wondering whether the "knowing" will actually govern what I do that day but certainly last Thursday and Friday I managed to fit in about 7 hours of continual seed sowing and also made a push to split an enormous clump of Giant Scabious into about 54 plants and get them planted. Feeling that I was working in harmony with the moon gave me a witchy feel about the day which is probably what made me kick off my sweaty wellies and pad around the polytunnel in bare feet all day.

The weather's been a bit wild over the past few days, we snunk off to the Gower for what will probably be our last weekend away until October and left dear Charlotte to water seedlings and wrap them up from the frost at nights. I think the responsibility was a bit daunting but all was well on return.

We're not using heat at all up at the farm, infact other than petrol for the rotavator and diesel for the Landy we're not using energy at all. This is both intentional and circumstantial as I only want to grow plants that don't need that extra energy input ie. those that will grow unforced and "naturally" and also quite frankly it would cost more than we have available to put in electricity of any sort. I've concocted a Heath Robinson style arrangement of poltunnnel inside polytunnel for some of the half hardy plants like Dahlias and Zinnias and so far they seem happy enough.

We'll just have to wait for that frosty full moon in May.
JI