It’s that time of year.  It’s February and the urge to plan and plant this year’s vegetable garden rises like sap in the trees.   If you are like me, this urge dulls your ability to discriminate between reality and air-brushed photos of the most luscious vegetables. It goes on to erase all thoughts of future drought or weeds.  Our gardening force is in full season and we must heed the call.
    The mountains of catalogues have arrived.   Many of my choices are dictated by our classes and camps at Boxerwood. We’ve had several parents call to tell us their child was converted to a bean or pea lover by one experience of grazing in our garden where the food is fresh and all the sugars and nutrients are present and luscious.  Green beans, carrots, lettuce and even radishes do wonders, but Sugar snaps are a true catalyst for change.
   I want these beauties to be “just right” any and all the time between mid-May through mid-June. So I have to do the math.  I choose the desired maturity date and then back through the growing and germination times required. 
   That’s simple enough, but there is the moon.  It turns out there’s some research pointing to benefits of coordinating your tilling, planting, and even harvesting with the moon. For hundreds of years, man (and woman—the old wives who told the tales, I suppose) have been gardening by the moon.  They believed the moon affected the water, the soil, and therefore the plants.
Now it would seem they may have been on target.  Dr. Frank Brown of Northwestern University performed research over a ten-year period of time, keeping meticulous records of his results. He found that plants absorbed more water at the time of the full moon. He conducted his experiments in a laboratory without direct contact from the moon, yet he found that they were still influenced by it.
   RJ Harris, the head gardener at a private estate near Cornwall, England conducts his own experiments. Each year he cultivates a selection of crops in opposition to the best practices of moon-gardening methods. Crops planted according to the lunar cycle fare much better, he said. "I've got a large area in potatoes. We've got some planted at the right time of the moon and some crops at the wrong time of the moon. The difference is so obvious and there for everybody to see." 
    Seeking to preserve knowledge about moon-gardening techniques before they were eclipsed entirely by modern gardening practices, Harris wrote RJ Harris' Moon Gardening with the help of journalist Will Summers.
If you are going to turn your garden over, Harris says the best time to turn over a garden is during the last quarter of the moon because that is when the water table has dropped to its lowest point. "It means less moisture is within the soil. It is far easier to turn drier soil," he said.  
More research is needed, but I like this moon idea.  So, let’s see.  I can turn the soil between now and March 3; plant seeds whose edible parts will be above ground (peas, spinach, lettuce) March 10-25; and plant seeds whose edible parts will be below ground (potatoes, carrots, beets) March 25-April 1.  Got it!  Now, all I have to do is stay organized and find the time. 

Planting by the moon