The Daily: 13 August 2026

The Hay Moon, or Mead Moon, went dark yesterday in spectacular eclipse at 1:36pm. Today begins the Blueberry Moon. This is the tenth lunation of my calendar. It is new between 19 July and 16 August, full between 2 August and 30 August. The Blueberry Moon of 2026 is very late, another three days and we would begin the Nutting Moon, and there would be no Blueberry Moon this year. But I’ve engineered this calendar — based on ideas I found in the Chinese and various Native American lunisolar calendars and the timing of moons found in the Gaulish Coligny Calendar — so that the only two cycles that come and go are the Nutting and Falling Leaves Moons. Every year one of those is dropped to accommodate the Harvest Moon, the lunation that is full nearest the autumnal equinox. It is rare that both are dropped, but that is what happens this year. This is the Blueberry Moon. The next lunation is the Harvest Moon. And then the final month of the year, the Hunter’s Moon. No Nutting Moon, no Falling Leaves Moon.

You’ll notice that this year only has twelve moon cycles originating within this solar cycle. Usually, it’s thirteen. But my Hunter’s Moon is designed to soak up the difference between the solar year and the lunar year. It can only be new before Samhaine, the first of the cross-quarter fire festivals and the renewal of the solar cycle. In practice this means the Hunter’s Moon begins between October 14th and the 31st, and the Winter Sleep Moon begins a new lunar year after the Hunter goes dark.

But that’s weeks away. Today begins the Blueberry Moon. The full moon that falls in August is also called the Cherries Ripen Moon or the Sturgeon Moon by peoples in New England. Both of these names show that August is drifting somewhat relative to the solar year. Cherry season is usually over by the end of July here in New England. And this year’s Cherries Ripen Moon will not be full until the tail end of August, when actual cherries are naught but a fond memory of snacking and many bags of frozen sweetness in the freezer. Similarly, the sturgeon run in New England is dwindling by late August. Adult sturgeon are heading back to saltwater in September and October. There are still fish to catch, but nothing like the hauls in June and July when you can see sturgeon literally leaping out of rivers as they rush to reproduce — and do whatever else it is that makes them so happy that they must take to the skies.

These sorts of discontinuities between the names and what the names should be celebrating are why I created a new calendar. I wanted my months to better reflect what was happening in this time… And the principal joy of the tenth lunation in my part of the world is the blueberry harvest.

New Englanders are mad for their vaccinium berries! We cultivate them wherever the soil is acidic enough — which is just about everywhere in our slate- and granite-derived soils. We tromp up the hillsides to find and raid wild, low-bush blueberry patches (being mindful of bears, of course). We brew blueberry beer and blueberry cider and blueberry wine. We bake pies and muffins and scones and quick-breads loaded with blueberries. We make ice cream and crumbles and fritters. We dump them on top of our summer morning oatmeal, toss them into autumn salads with walnuts and apples, and dry them into tiny tasty snacks for dull winter nights. We blend blueberry syrup into our ubiquitous maple syrup and pour the mixture over blueberry pancakes for Candlemas. And we eat them fresh by the fistful from mid-July to early September. There are even bushes that will bear fruit as early as Midsummer and as late the autumnal equinox. A good orchardist has a range of all these early and late bearing varieties — because we will eat them all!

So… this time is my Blueberry Moon. And I would have more of them if I could…

I once was given a poetry challenge to describe my ideal fantasy world in 10-12 lines. This was what came out…

fat sweet sundrops
free for the taking
if only you climb these hills
and no bears to bear away the berries
all the candied days for your harvest
time distilled in blue orbs
and dew crystalling the autumn leaves
this is my world...
the magic is in the sharing

Apparently, my ideal fantasyland is blue…

But there are other aspects, other colors, to this lunar cycle.

Saturday the 15th is the Feast of the Assumption, Lammastide in the old calendars and still celebrated as Old Lammas in many rural communities. In fact, if you truly want to tie your rites to the seasons, the 15th is closer to Lammas weather and agricultural activities. If you live in places that historically celebrated Lammas, your calendar year better matches Lammas to the 15th than the 1st. And if you are actually trying to observe the exact cross-quarter day, the Games of Lugh, then you would tie your rites to August 7th in 2026, because that is the exact middle between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox.

Of course, this illustrates just how arbitrary our dating systems are. I just claim this weekend as another opportunity to bake corn bread. Maybe with blueberries in it… But then, I don’t have any particular rites to go with Lughnasadh other than celebrating my community and my garden and a plentiful harvest. But I do listen to special music. Here is Chanticleer’s Magnificat, a collection of Marian songs, most of which were composed for the Marian holidays. The album concludes with a stunning recording of Josquin Desprez’s sublime “Salve Regina”. And here is A Lammas Ladymass recorded by Anonymous 4. Perfection! (I’ve linked both of these to YouTube so you can sample the music, but that’s not the best listening experience. I recommend buying the albums, both to support the artists and to avoid advertising and the inevitable compression of internet audio — which just flattens the human voice…)

I will say that this weekend is definitely is more like Lammas here in Vermont. Two weeks ago, the harvest had not yet morphed into superabundance. But now… Summer squash are ubiquitous. You-pick blueberries are everywhere. Summer apples are ready. And this is typically when pick-up trucks show up along the roadside, piled high with white and golden sweet corn, $10 for a baker’s dozen (or a witch’s dozen, as my favorite corn guy says). I buy many dozens and turn them into bread, muffins, chowder, and stew, while putting at least ten pints of blanched kernels in the freezer. That’s the target anyway. Some years it’s more… much more… I do like sweet corn…

This Sunday, the 16th, we see the last 14-hour day in Vermont. This is the signal for maples to begin winter preparations. The Blueberry Moon is usually graced with the first reds, oranges and golds of autumn as the maples break down chlorophyll in their leaves to store valuable nitrogen in their roots, to be protected from winter.

This year I will be planting autumn carrots, peas, bush filet beans, and various greens under the Blueberry Moon. I am hoping that the cool temperatures in the forecast are not just AI slop predictions based on obsolete 20th century averages. But even if it doesn’t cool down immediately, it will be cool by the time the sprouts are up. If I sow the weekend before the full moon, then it will be September before most of the plants have their first true leaves, and September brings true autumn weather. There will still be warm days, but the nights become cool quite rapidly in Vermont. By the end of the Blueberry Moon this year, we will be flirting with first frost, which used to come around September 24th, though recently it’s held off almost to Hallowe’en most years. (That said, it’s also snowed on Hallowe’en many times in recent years…)

On Sunday, August 30th comes St Fiacre’s Day, the day dedicated to the patron of gardening. I’ve always found this ironic. The patron saint of gardens is honored when the garden is usually a dying mess. But I suppose in places with longer growing seasons, the cabbages and kales and carrots will be growing for weeks to come. And Fiacre comes from Ireland, the land of perpetual green. It never gets that cold… though it never gets that warm either…

The traditional weather marker, St Bart’s Day, falls on August 24th. It is said that if the sun shines on Bart’s Day, then the harvest will be plentiful. St Bart is a patron of tanners and butchers, but this saint’s day has mostly become a harvest celebration. One of the longest running fairs — from circa 1133 to 1855 — was the Bartholomew Fair at Smithfield in London. In its latter days, it was a hospital fundraiser, but it kept its seasonal color. It has the distinction of being the first place to sell apples coated in honey, the forerunner of caramel apples. (St Bart is also a patron of honeymakers and beekeepers…)

The Saturday closest to St Bart’s Day brings us a truly pagan ritual, the Burning of Old Bartle. This festival, held in the village of West Witton in northern England, has many echoes. From Burning Man to the burning of Zozobra in Santa Fe, these are ostensibly harvest festivals that seek to preserve the harvest and bring good fortune by burning off Old Man Gloom, meaning the old year and all its bad luck. I’m not sure these are particularly ancient. The oldest stories we have of burning a large man in effigy come from Roman patricians sneering at the Celtic and Germanic paganis — but there is scant evidence that those “human sacrifices” actually happened. (Not least because most northern villagers could hardly afford the cost…) The oldest actual burning of a human effigy during the harvest season is probably Burning Bartle, which dates back to the early 16th century.

So if you want to see the original Burning Man, head to Yorkshire for the weekend of the Full Blueberry Moon, which falls on August 28th (barely, at 12:18am). This full moon brings a partial lunar eclipse which is at least partly visible over Africa, North and South America, and much of western Eurasia. You’ll get a lunar eclipse on Friday and then a bunch of drunk villagers burning a scarecrow on Saturday. Pagan enough for you?

Or you might want to head down to Cornwall for the Full Moon, because in Helston (near Penzance), the harvesters gather on the last Friday in August to cut down the last sheaf of grain. This is a perilous labor. The spirit of the grain, of the land, is concentrated in this last standing grain. So the cut is made by chance. There are many varieties of the ritual, but most commonly the harvesters take turns tossing a sickle until someone manages to cut the grain. I suspect this is mostly a case of bludgeoning the wheat, since it seems unlikely that a tossed sickle is going to hit the stalks at the right angle to slice through. Especially with the amount of beer that is normally quaffed at these ceremonies (which makes me wonder how many harvesters get cut instead…). But once the stalks are undeniably down, the last to toss the sickle gathers the grain into a sheaf and begins shouting some version of “the neck”. Everyone else takes up the cry and the whole party noisily marches off to the center of town to display the sheaf — and drink more beer.

(For the record, I have no idea where the name comes from. There are so many theories, most of them implausible, all of them conflicting… So, I’ve written it off to just being one of those inexplicable traditions with whatever rational roots it might have had lost to time… Many games fall into this category…)

There are many other grain harvest traditions, from weaving dollies and naming a Harvest Queen to corn shucking bees. In these latter years, we’ve even made a celebration of grain that is not harvested. Corn mazes are an industry unto themselves these days. In this ritual, corn is left standing on an acre or two, and elaborate paths are cut through the stalks. Most mazes are designed on computer and mapped out with GPS coordinates. There is one in Albuquerque that covers several acres and is carved into such shapes as roadrunners and the Kokopelli. Thousands of New Mexicans troop through the twisted tunnels under the autumnal stars. Most mazes are fairly tame, just a walk through the corn. But you can get lost in the one in Albuquerque. Trampled stalks attest to the frustration of taking a wrong turn too many times. In the spirit of the spooky season, many mazes include theatrics to titillate the teenagers. And terrify the tots… It’s best to do corn mazes by daylight if you have little ones.

But, in any case, by this point in the season, the grain harvest is mostly over, but for corn. The garden harvest, too, is beginning to dwindle, falling into that liminal time between summer nightshades and the autumn squashes and well before the cool-season veg planted for harvest under the Harvest Moon. However, as the Blueberry Moon’s name implies, the orchard harvests are gearing up and will keep on going right through to the Winter Sleep moon. The apple season is underway and will be in full flow by the Dark Blueberry Moon. Pears are only just starting to ripen, but I’ll be picking the early Asian pears soon enough. The grapes are turning purple, and it won’t be long before the cranberry bogs are flooded so that the berries can be floated into the harvesting buckets.

Still, orchards aside, for humans and most of the green world, this lunation is about closing up and gathering in. Leaves will turn and fall, with most being gone by the Full Harvest Moon, just six weeks from today. For some beings, this is the beginning of migration season. Hummingbirds leave my part of the world in a week or two. Most of the hibernating creatures are gorging themselves. Groundhogs are so fat by now that they hardly wander more than a few meters from their burrow entrance. Any further, and they wouldn’t be able to run to ground if a predator turned up. They will be the first to bed down, coming out for the last time around Michaelmas. And the last day with more than 13 hours of daylight, the last day before we enter the equinoctial season, is Saturday, September 5th. This is when summer is well and truly gone.

In the US, the first Monday in September is Labor Day, September 7th this year. This is a day that is supposed to honor working people, but is celebrated by firing up the barbecue and going to the beach or lake-house for one last hurrah. That is, it is the ritual closing of summer, mostly for people who are wealthier than working class. In these days of late capitalism, most of the working class does not even get the day off… There are sales in the box stores and someone has to keep the grocery stores open. However, the bean counters are off… I will be celebrating by going down to Brooklyn to visit Son#2 and celebrate J’Ouvert. The parade route is just a few blocks from his apartment, and the parties last all night! Also… there are food trucks… with a million versions of warm doubles for breakfast.

The Blueberry Moon goes dark late in the evening of September 10th, with the New Harvest Moon — and Rosh Hashanah — following on the 11th. And by that point we’ll be just over a week out from Mabon, the autumn equinox and Harvest Home.

Amazing, isn’t it! Autumnal time does fly!

©Elizabeth Anker 2026