The Hay Moon went dark at 7:13am yesterday, over 36 hours before moonset today. So the 10th new moon of my year, the Blueberry Moon, should be visible as a thin crescent following the sun down to the western horizon this evening. This month is the second of the harvest moons and the first that brings true autumn weather. With its name you can rightly deduce that this is when all the berries are ripening, though the strawberries are done by now and the cranberries won’t be scooped out of the bog until October or November. Still, now there are blueberries!
The holiday of Lammas (2 August) almost always falls in this month, and there is another Marian festival — usually indicating an older goddess feast date — a couple weeks after Lammas — The Feast of the Assumption, or Old Lammas (15 August in Roman Catholic traditions, 28 August in Eastern Orthodox). The Old Farmer’s Almanac says the Dog Days end around Old Lammas, but some years autumn cooling begins as early as New Lammas. And this year, it is possible that this horrid humid heat and constant rain might be breaking this week. The forecast looks very different, with lows in the upper 50s (°F), cool enough to cool off the house at night for the first time in a while — even if it stays humid.
I hope we have clear skies by the end of the week though. This year’s Perseid meteor shower should be good with the moon setting long before the shower’s radiant point rises. This shower, left over from Comet Swift-Tuttle, can produce up to 50 meteors an hour, well worth getting up in the middle of the night to see. But even better, this year, the peak begins pre-dawn on Sunday the 11th. No work the next morning! Though if you miss it, this shower is strong in the pre-dawn hours August 11th through August 13th.
The moon is full on Monday, August 19th. Old lore says that a full moon on Monday is extra lucky, though this year the Moon is opposite Mercury in retrograde. Apparently that’s a bad thing. I don’t know what takes precedence when folklore is in conflict. Maybe it just cancels each other out. But then, it’s the people who believe in these things that make them happen. So do more people believe a Monday full moon is lucky or do more people believe in an inauspicious retrograde? I guess we’ll see…
St Fiacre’s Day, the feast day of the patron saint of gardeners, falls near the end of the Blueberry Moon on August 30th. In my calendar, Lughnasadh, fair season, gives way to Mid-Autumn, a time of falling leaves and nut gathering, on St Fiacre’s Day. So really his day marks the end of the growing season. There are still berries and the nightshades will remain productive as long as the frost holds off, but the summer cucurbits are giving way to pumpkins and winter squash. This year, the Blueberry Moon goes dark on September 2nd (which is also Labor Day in the US) so the next moon is the Harvest Moon, which presides over the autumn equinox and the traditional Harvest Home festivals — though that’s not until the end of the Harvest Moon. Right now, I can count on about eight more weeks of gardening before frost puts the garden to sleep for the winter. And even then, the brassicas and peas may keep going until it freezes hard in the Winter Sleep Moon.
But that’s all weeks away. Today is only the beginning of the Blueberry Moon, and all those changes are yet to come. The Blueberry Moon, like the Snow Moon, is a lunation of flux from day to day and from year to year. The days are getting shorter. Whole hours are dropping into night’s cooling darkness. Soon the sun will be down before 8pm, and then a bit later the last sunrise before 6am will pass me by. By the time the Blueberry Moon goes dark, there will be less than 13 hours of light between sunrise and sunset.
The Blueberry Moon is new between 19 July and 16 August and full between 2 August and 30 August. So if this moon hangs early on the solar year, becoming full about now rather than new, then the weather is still very hot and blueberries are only just ripening. If it falls at the end of its period, then the blueberries have all been gathered and we could see light frost by the dark moon. It could be more of a blackberry moon in that case, though it’s hard to grow true blackberries in my part of the world. They don’t tolerate deep cold, though you can usually protect them from winter. The bigger obstacle to harvesting marionberries, boysenberries and loganberries in Vermont is that these fruits won’t ripen after a frost — and frost can happen as soon as the third week in September, right in the middle of blackberry season.
But wherever the Blueberry Moon falls in the solar calendar, it’s a time of increasingly rapid change day to day. In the garden, I’ve already seen a shift from growth and cultivation to harvest and storage. But it’s also time to plant for cool weather foods like peas and carrots and brassicas that will be harvested later in the fall or left in the ground over winter for an early spring harvest. My garden calendar says “Plant peas” on August 17th, and I have the flats of fall cabbages already seeded. No sprouting yet…
So there are still garden tasks, but the bulk of the work is concentrated in the kitchen and root cellar at this time of year. Usually when I get home from work, I spend a few minutes keeping the weeds under control and picking the day’s round of roots, cucurbits and nightshades. These get tossed into the fridge until I have time to process them, usually not until the weekend. I will also head back out some days to gather what greens I’ve managed to save from the groundhog, which is never much but often enough for a salad to go with whatever I’ve cooked up for the week. This week, I am fully into harvest mode. There is a vat of pickled cucumbers and onions in the fridge. I made a summer veg frittata with kale, tomato and summer squash. I am picking a few tomatoes every day and, for now, mostly eating them fresh as they come into the house. The paste tomatoes won’t be ready for picking until later in this month. That’s when the real tomato work begins.
In the next week or two, the potatoes and onions and garlic will be dug up, cured and then stored away. More and more time is spent each day trying to keep up with the squash. The eggplants are turned into baba ghanouj or roasted with summer squash and sweet peppers and turned into the makings of ratatouille for the freezer. The beets and turnips that were not marmot-destroyed are coming into the house a little at a time. Most get roasted and frozen right now, but as soon as it cools off a little I will toss the rest in the root storage bins in the basement. As the moon goes on, this routine becomes increasingly frenetic. Sometime in the Blueberry Moon, I will give up on the summer greens and start cursing the tomatoes and zucchini like a proper gardener. The elaborate recipes like fruit preserves and chutneys give way to a quick blanch and toss it into the freezer — which is all that ever happens with corn and fillet beans — though there will still be chile roasting and saucing of the tomatoes until the frost.
Meanwhile, everybody else in the garden is matching my pace. The groundhog is gorging on whatever he can reach. He’s about the size and shape of a rugby ball now. Same color too. The squirrels are digging up everything apparently so they can take one bite and discard it where I will step on it. There was even a gnawed onion in front of the garage a few mornings ago. I have heard that squirrels store food away. I am not sure that grey squirrels are aware of this bit of lore. They seem to rely on humans for food year-round. But they do eat more than usual in the fall to put on fat, like every other rodent. The birds are also eating as much as they can, preparing for migration or Vermont winter dearth. In the Blueberry Moon, the youngsters are fledging and adults are molting. They’re a raggedy mess right now, but soon they’ll be sleek and as fat as they can be and still fly. And then one day I’ll realize that only the winter birds are left.
The garden itself is moving with increasing speed toward dormancy. Plant most brassicas in the ground right now and you will have seed stalks in about ten days. Same for most greens, though this is the best time to grow kale and chard who both like warm soil for germination but cooling nights at maturity. My blueberries will ripen with this moon and then the leaves will turn scarlet and fall before fall really gets going. But there are already turning leaves here and there. The honey locust is scattering little gold coins everywhere and the maple crowns are turning orange. Meanwhile the herb beds are a mess — or a picture of abundance, depending on your perspective. However, by the end of the Blueberry Moon, there will be little green left. Somehow this always surprises me.
This is the harvest season, but this is also the time of year when I am beginning to plan out the next garden. OK, I’m always planning the next garden. I think all gardeners are always planning the next garden. Planning the next garden seems to be the point to gardening…
But as garden beds are emptied of their veg and the summer perennials are dead-headed for the last time, I am making mental notes on what is working and what is not. I remember what my goals are and decide whether the garden is meeting them and, if not, how that could be better facilitated — or how the goals could be modified to fit what is happening out there.
This year, I have had it with fighting the groundhog. I’ve spent way too much time and money planting veg and flowers that hardly grow taller than my thumb before the damn rodent obliterates the entire bed. The garden has so much mesh and fencing it feels like a siege state. It’s producing well enough now, but I don’t want to repeat this experience, neither the expense nor the prison garden look.
I don’t think I can just fence off the whole veg patch. For one thing, it’s sited at the top of a bank and the edge is not linear. Wood fencing, or anything that needs to follow straight lines, is just not possible. But it’s unlikely that plastic mesh is going to keep the groundhog out. He’ll just go under it, all the more easily because the outside of the fence is lower than the inside. He might not need to dig at all, just pull out the bottom a bit. The other problem with fencing is that the bank is full of roots. I suppose it is possible to dig post holes, but I’m not sure that I have the strength for it. And paying someone else to do that seems… not in my budget. In any case, traditional fencing would be costly and yet would probably not keep the marmot out.
So I thought of hedge planting. For a bit, I was considering putting in more blueberries and nannyberries, but the hog can already go under that stuff. Don’t think that’s going to keep him out of the veg. It’s also not going to be much of a barrier to climbing pests like squirrels and raccoons. So then I got the idea of using perennials that are thick at ground level. At first, I thought I could just add more herbs, but then — and it’s embarrassing how long it took me to get here — I thought… grass! I am constantly pulling the crabgrass out of my garden. I know grass loves this soil. I also know that prairie grasses are nearly impenetrable at their base. If I plant a hedge of dropseed and bluestem, which grow several feet high and wide and send down roots up to ten feet deep, I’ll get a dense barrier as well as an excellent bank stabilizer. And it’s really hard to climb grasses, so it might even keep the squirrels from coming in from the jungle sides. They’ll have to go around into the road.
This will not keep out the hog. I’ll still have to use my siege garden apparatus. But I can put it on the outside of the grasses and not have to look at it.
A benefit to growing grasses is that there are seed heads. I could even add a few perennial sunflowers and well-behaved thistles to round out the seed supply. This would help keep my summer birds fed without drawing the grackles and starlings who can clean out an eight pound seed feeder in less than a week. I never had a problem with these birds until this year, but since this last round of flooding they have taken over. The local birds can’t get close to either the feeders or the water basins, and I’ve not seen goldfinches for weeks. Plus, these bigger birds make much bigger messes. I don’t even know how they did it, but both kitchen windows and the back door all have bird poop running down the glass. Or it was running. Now it’s like rock. Smelly rock. And I have to get on ladders to clean most of it. So… I’d like to not repeat this experience next year. Growing grasses on the other side of the road from my house ought to at least keep the poop off my windows…
And finally, I am so very tired of cleavers in the front yard. I don’t know why the former folks planted that crap. They didn’t even have the excuse of feeding chickens, not that you could feed chickens where the cleavers were planted — outside the fence on a vertical bank that drops down into a busy road. I think they saw that these plants will grow anywhere and spread quickly, and they looked at the muddy bank and thought — bam! let’s do that! So it was a bank of cleavers when I moved in.
I’ve since removed most of it, but there is still a sizable patch intergrowing with some pretty phlox. I’ve been reluctant to pull the cleavers because I’d lose the phlox as well. But this year, that patch of cleavers has grown up the bank and under the fence and into my asparagus bed. Which just can’t be allowed. Nor do I want cleavers sticking to me when I walk through the front yard, as they are doing. And there’s not that much yard between the asparagus and the front perennial bed where the plants are only just getting established. They won’t be able to withstand a cleavers infestation. So something must be done.
I’ve resigned myself to losing the phlox, but then there will be mud again. So… I need more plants. I had thought to add some structure to that bank, but that’s thinking too much like a gardener. What I need to do is think like a bank of plants. It’s not going to be a garden. It’s a meadow or a prairie. It is messy and overgrown and a riot of wild-life-feeding flowers and short grasses. The phlox never quite looked right anyway. So I went to Richter’s Herbs and got a bunch of North American natives and my favorite Mediterranean herbs, all at end-of-season clearance prices. (Score for the gardener!) Next year there will be sage and lavender and echinacea and agastache and monarda, among other things. And if those spread into the asparagus patch, I won’t mind a bit.
So those are the goals. What is nice is that there are fewer goals this year than last. Fewer even than I had back in the spring. This tells me that I am making progress, that soon the building process will be over and then it’s just annual maintenance. I’m looking forward to that. I’ve forgotten what having a free summer weekend feels like. I have this wonderful lounge chair out back that I hardly ever get to sit in… because as soon as I do I notice everything that NEEDS TO BE DONE NOW! And even though I know it’s never that imperative… I still can’t relax. So it will be nice to have a few days here and there when there aren’t battles to be fought — and largely lost.
I know you are smiling now because, yes, I know… that day without big projects will never come. Today it’s the groundhog and bird poop and cleavers… tomorrow, the garage… and the jungle… and the basement… and, and and… maybe when I’m 80 I’ll get to use that lounge chair. Though by then, I probably won’t be able to get into it, much less out…
Oh well… what’s life without goals…
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 