Midsummer’s Day is past. The Strawberry Moon went dark yesterday at 6:31am. The Hay Moon is new today. (It is new between 20 June and 18 July and full between 4 July and 1 August.) The Old Farmer’s Almanac calls this the Buck Moon. Not sure why. It’s not deer hunting season, so that’s not their reasoning. The rut, when bucks are at their most admirably potent, is not until late in the autumn. This is the time of year when does are visible everywhere, usually eating your prized roses and trampling the squash vines, with one or two adorable mini-miscreants, still in their spots, trailing in the wake of each mother. But at Midsummer the deer with antlers are notable mainly in their elusive absence. No a lot of bucks running amok…
However, we have just passed the solstice. In the mythic calendar of Neo-Paganism, this is when the Summer King has passed his prime and the Winter Lord begins to wax in strength. The days are now shortening. The sunlight is diminishing each day until the winter solstice. It is time to spiral inward, toward gathering in the harvest, toward introspection and inactivity, toward senescence and death. This is when the Oak King, the Green Man, the spirit of growth and bright vitality, yields to the Holly King, the dark essence of the deep wood and the principle of winter. This essence is the Cernunnos, Herne, the Horned One, the Faithful Steward and provider in times of bleak want. This is the deity who chooses to manifest as an old man with many-tined antlers. A buck. So maybe this is His moon. Though I never would have pegged the Almanac folks for being so deep into pagan myth. I suppose they do go in for astrology and flower folklore and other oddities… but not the deep magic stuff…
But even in the deep magic, Cernunnos is still weak at this time of year. Winter is approaching, but very distant. The power is all in the blazing sun. The green world is running riot. This, the ninth moon in my lunar calendar is the height of summer weather, the peak of warmth, the greatest production in the fields and garden. It is traditionally called the Hay Moon because haymaking season falls at this time, and haymaking is essential to human life. All life comes back to grass.
All flesh is grass…
In the Old Testament, this phrase is meant as a metaphor for the ephemerality of earthly lives. But to a pagan and a naturalist, the message isn’t death, or not just death, but the cycling of life. True, the grass is short-lived and soon withered. But without its brief time in the sun, there is no food. Grass concentrates this hot summer sunshine into the energy of life, the perpetuation of living beings. Herbivores take that energy into their bodies and transform it into fat and muscle. Carnivores consume that fat and muscle, transforming one animal into another. Decomposers eat organisms after organized life has gone, turning bodies back into components to feed new beings, mostly plants. And the circle begins anew.
Not all grass is eaten while it is still green. Humans wait for the plant to turn all that energy into seeds, the next generation of plants. The grass is long dead before we harvest our fill of grain, but it is still grass. It is still cycling the sun’s energy and the earth’s nutrients into a form that feeds the future. In this light, even death is seen as a living process, a transformation of one generation into another. (Where there is rot, there is life…) And it all comes down to grass. All flesh is grass… transformed.
I like to think that whoever wrote those words, no doubt some desert pastoralist who lived intimately with the real world of grass and bread, knew exactly how profound a double meaning there is in this. All flesh is temporal, evanescent, and soon gone, leaving nothing behind but withering stalks — and a regeneration of life. And yet all flesh is utterly contingent upon that energy cycling that starts with the photosynthesis of sunlight within a plant’s body. We are all grass, its children and its transformed body. And we too will feed the future after but a brief time under the sun.
Haymaking is how we preserve that energy throughout the season of dearth. We cut the grass before it has set seed, when all its potency is still in leaf and blade. We quickly dry it in the sun and then bale it up or ferment it into silage. This, we feed to our livestock when there is no grass in the fields. No haymaking in the summer, no milk or meat in the winter.
Of course, we could, as the pastoralists did, dispense with all the summer labor. Fatten bodies in the summer months and live on that stored energy in the winter. Pastoralists don’t often make hay. They cull their herds in the fall, salting and smoking the transformed grass-meat, and they move their breeding stock to the lowlands and river bottoms where sedges and other hardy plants eke out a perennial existence. The summer’s energy is stored in the preserved meat, but it still comes down to grass.
All flesh…
Midsummer heat tends to make me a little lethargic and philosophical. But then, this is the season of slack, of very little change, of the lazy long days of summer, the time between the frenzy of planting and the frenzy of harvest. Though both planting and harvest will happen throughout the year, this is when the energy of the garden shifts from beginning the growing season to ending it. This comes as no little relief to most gardeners, though there is still as much or more work in keeping everything alive and healthy. But this is when we begin to see the end of our labors — and the cool resting season to follow — and we have some ideas on what the harvested rewards might be.
Moon Gardening
If you follow the modern regimen of gardening by the moon, then the waxing Hay Moon is when leafy herbs are harvested. It is the main lavender harvest, best done before the buds fully open on a dry and sunny day. There may still be strawberries and peas. This year in central Vermont, we are having a banner year for both. My garden is still yielding a pint or so of berries every day, and I can count on a fat fistful of snow peas for salad every evening and a quart bag of peas for the freezer every few days. Rhubarb and asparagus and spring greens are usually done by now, though this year the shaded beds are still green with spinach and mache and oak leaf lettuce.
Most years it works out that the waning Hay Moon is a time without much harvest, falling between the last of the cool season produce and first of the warm summer harvest. This is a time to cultivate and control the weeds, keep everything as well-watered as possible, prune out disease and pick the insects off your prized plants. (Let them eat their fill of what you don’t care so much about…)
I am a moon gardener of sorts, though I don’t put much stock in the effect of moon phases on the garden. However, paying attention to the time of year through the lens of moon cycles is very helpful. The first couple weeks of the Sap Moon are not mystically affective, but it does work out to be a good time to plant the early veg most years. So if you’re planning out the garden in space and time, that’s as good a time as any to pencil in the patches of peas and arugula. And because it’s good to give everything a couple weeks to germinate and get down to the business of growth, if you plant in the waxing half of the moon cycle, then it’s wise to take a break from planting in the waning.
Spend that time cultivating and tending to the new sprouts. Wait for the new Greenleaf Moon before starting the next flurry of sowing — which for me usually means the brassicas, potatoes, and cool season beans. Then the early Flower Moon gets the rest of the beans, summer cucurbits and most of the annual herbs and flowers. Most of the time I can plant out the nightshades sometime during the Flower Moon, but these are seeds that I start indoors well before the real growing season, so they can be somewhat out of rhythm. It’s just a matter of hardening them off and plopping them in the space reserved for them. Which is the whole point of moon gardening, in my opinion, that reserving of space and time.
To wrap up the planting season, in most years the first half of the Strawberry Moon is the best time to sow the veg that will be harvested late in the autumn. After that, I don’t do much planting at all — not even transplants — until the temperatures begin to cool in August. Some years, I might plant autumn peas and winter cabbages around the full Hay Moon after I’ve pulled out the garlic, but usually it’s best to let the bed sit for a while. So the autumn and over-wintering veg usually gets sown under the waxing Blueberry Moon.
As you can see, the moon is my garden planning mnemonic. I have chosen moon-cycle names (yes, somewhat cultural appropriation-ly) that fit the time. This is the usual way peoples around the world name the yearly round of seasons. Very few name their months after dead men — totally useless in keeping track of time. I don’t think any but the tragically unoriginal Romans named their months successively (and then threw off the sequence by shifting around the beginning of the year from March to January — which is why we have December, “tenth month”, for the last of the twelve months in the modern calendar). In most cultures, the naming of time is the way to keep track of it, there being no printed calendars or clocks and such like devices to count the days. And, as most cultures are primarily concerned with food, the naming of moons follows the cycle of food production.
And so, here we are under the Hay Moon, the middle of summer, time to make hay… except gardeners don’t do that. Our flesh is fed on seeds and roots and fruits. Still grass… but elaborated. In any case, there isn’t much to do in the gardener’s Hay Moon but make sure the pests don’t take over.
Interestingly, the Hay Moon also is a slack time for celebrations (as it is after the winter solstice, as well). There are a few civic holidays here and there, and the ancient weather marker of St Swithin’s Day nearly always falls in the Hay Moon. But the calendar is rather sparse in these four weeks. Not till the last days of the Midsummer season do we, once again, have reasons to gather and note the time. Aside from making hay, that is…
So now, it’s time to sit back and not do very much, stare at the garden beds a lot, wait and wait and wait on the ripening rewards. Become philosophical under the burning sun. There are weeds to pull and water cans to carry, of course, and the grass will keep growing. But it’s mostly slack time in the garden now. As it normally is under the Hay Moon.
It is, after all, time to make hay…
©Elizabeth Anker 2025
By My Solitary Hearth 