19 Peach blossom moon time

and landscape calendars & sea buckthorn

Mar 24, 2024

Full moon in Libra
Each full moon has a name. We’ve passed Wolf Moon and Snow Moon this year; today’s full moon is known by many names – most commonly, the Worm Moon as insects in the northern hemisphere stir from winter bark or emerge from warming soil. It’s also the Crow Moon. But for me, it’s the peach blossom moon. It’s accompanied by a lunar eclipse in Libra, house of love and relationships – a powerful time, inward and intense. In a couple of weeks we’ll experience a solar eclipse in Aries.

As I step out into peach blossom, there are two or three long-tailed tits in it. I’m delighted to see that one of them has a fat beakful of the extensive clump of soft dog hair I coralled from the kitchen floor this morning: lovely to think of young chicks warming in that, rather than in the fibreglass insulation that somehow sparrows have excavated from our roof (much of the insulation here is sheep’s wool; much better environmentally, but a bit dodgy as insulation, since it’s not been cleaned, which means it likely hosts moths and larvae).

I hear before I see
bullfinches stealing blossom
and my heart too

I’m heading towards our little polytunnel to resow the 20-odd broad beans and 10 sweet peas that rodents dug up and ate overnight. There are still maybe 25 or 30 soon to go out into the garden to add to the (largely resown) block; after that, we’ll be sowing, successionally, another 100+ broad beans, this time the lovely red Karmazsyn. This time I’m armed with garlic oil in the hopes of repelling the mice/voles; and as backup two humane traps.

Lunar & solar cycles
As much as possible, I follow the lunar planting scheme that has you plant crops that bear their harvest above ground on a waxing moon, below ground on a waning. It does seem to me that it makes a difference. I have just enough time to resow the ones for the polytunnel before the peak of full moon tonight.

Our ancestors built massive structures that allowed them, we think, to measure the movements of sun and moon, and even in some cases to predict eclipses. Merrivale on Dartmoor, for instance, where for many years I led day retreats at the solstices and equinoxes, is probably such a landscape calendar. It consists of a double processional avenue (you can see it in the Wheel of the Year section), a Bronze Age stone circle, and a single menhir (‘long stone’), some of which align with natural or human-made features, such as notches in the distant tor. I’m looking forward to discovering others here in Brittany, a land very rich in megalithic structures.

I’ve just been reading Annie Worsley’s beautiful book Windswept, about her life on a croft in northwest Scotland, in which she says:

‘At a site known as Warren Field in Aberdeenshire, archaeologists found stones that record phases of the moon across a year, but when matched up to features in the landscape, create a calendar that can stretch out across hundreds and hundreds of years. The ‘Warren Field Calendar’ is thought to be ten thousand years old.’ That’s well before the Neolithic era in which farming arrived on British shores; so while such a landscape calendar might be associated with animal breeding and cropping cycles, that can’t have been the origin of this one.

Sea Buckthorn
Before we left Britain I was inspired by the idea of planting large amounts of sea buckthorn, partly as a windbreak and partly for its extremely nutritious fruit. This, like my saffron crocuses/croci, so enthusiastically purchased and planted by me and so enthusiastically eaten by rodents, was thanks to Rick Stein’s journey round Cornwall where he visited a buckthorn farm and inspired me to consider that option too.

Well, we didn’t (I have planted about 200 willow slips, though, both as a late hedge and for coppicing for woodchip if ever our brushwood runs out). But today we did plant two buckthorn bushes as a nod towards the fruiting shrub layer of the forest garden. We hadn’t planned on beginning that layer yet; but I found some buckthorn and couldn’t resist.

Small beginnings; but beginnings.

I’m determined to work by tree time now, not human time.