Lunar Superstitions

Open your chakras, light a stick of incense and get out your favorite stones: we’re talking about the moon and its influence on your garden.

Disclaimer: this humorous article is not intended to ridicule personal beliefs… only popular ones!

It’s Believed That…

According to gardening superstitions, plants are more or less receptive to certain treatments at different times of the moon’s cycle. For example, an ascending, waxing moon in a north-westerly position, three carrots away from the constellation of the tomato, would indicate that it’s time to put our spinach seeds in the garden…

True or false?

Well, from my intro, I guess you’ve guessed that I’m not a believer. In fact, Larry didn’t either! Depending on where you are in the world and what culture you’re from, beliefs contradict each other! And yet, new content on the subject comes out every year.

Moral of the story: you can sell anything, especially dreams… and excuses! “Your tomatoes didn’t grow well? It’s not your fault, the moon simply wasn’t at the right stage when you planted them! Follow our advice and next year your tomatoes will be great!” (… but it won’t be because you’ve learned from your mistakes, no, no: it’ll be because of the magic of the moon!)

Science Tells Us That…

The moon does affect our planet. Tides, for example, can be attributed to the moon. The gravitational pull of the moon (and the centrifugal force of the spinning earth) moves the water in the oceans to the side of the planet facing the moon, creating a high tide. The “sides” of the planet will be low tide, and the side of the earth opposite the moon will also be high tide. On full-moon and new-moon days, the tides will be higher, as the sun is aligned with the moon and its force of attraction is added to it.

But tides are a matter of a few centimeters (or meters, for the most impressive) over an incredibly gigantic quantity of water, in this case, the oceans. Take a lake and try to determine if there’s a tide… you’ll be bitterly disappointed! A few drops of water, that’s all there is in your plant! I guarantee there’s no tide in yit, any more than there is in your own body!

The brightness of the moon is very, very low, despite what our eyes perceive. In fact, the moon doesn’t emit any light at all, it only reflects that of the sun. As a result, the light we receive on Earth from the moon is on average 400,000 times less luminous than the light we receive from the sun.

Yikes? Well, it’s really not enough to make any difference to your plant.

Total Solar Eclipse

In Quebec, an extraordinary phenomenon amazed us at the beginning of April: a total solar eclipse. For us, this is a phenomenon that occurs rarely enough to be the experience of a lifetime. I saw a few questions about it on social networks: “Will plants suffer from the eclipse? Should we keep them away from windows?”

You know, the moon hides the sun, and we need special glasses to protect our eyes because the rays are just as present, even though the luminosity is weaker. Normally, if you want to look at the sun for several minutes, your eyes usually hurt: it’s dangerous too, but since it hurts, you don’t do it.

For your plants, it was just a big cloud. Neither good nor bad, because well… the sun isn’t any stronger and the moon… it’s just the moon!

Apart from light and water movement, I’m having trouble identifying what might tangibly influence plants, so we come to… esotericism. You know, I’m an optimistic skeptic and I’m a big fan of the placebo effect. If planting with the moon gives you pleasure, if it makes you love and pamper your garden more, if you think you’ll get better results that way… well, go ahead! Plant with the moon, with horoscopes and ritual chants! Maybe you’re right!

Astronomy Tells Us That…

The stars as we see them are only a point of view from the earth. You see, the sky, although often represented as a two-dimensional map, is a very complex three-dimensional plane. This means that if we change our point of view, by going to another planet, for example, our perspective will be completely different and we’ll no longer recognize the stars. The Big Dipper, the North Star, Orion, all that… Gone! A whole new version of the sky will be offered to our eyes as space travellers.

Our constellations as we know them exist because the first scientists to observe them had to name and represent them in order to study them. They saw shapes and gave them names, identifying stars that moved (planets), others that had a particular color or twinkle, and so on. But these stars are usually very, very far away from us, and also very far from each other.

So, two similar stars side by side in our sky may actually be in different galaxies! And the brighter star isn’t necessarily the closer one, it’s just bigger.

Why am I telling you all this? Simply to make you realize how gigantic and relative the universe is. Frankly, whether the moon is near one constellation or another, in the infinity of everything that surrounds us… Does it really mean anything?

Science Tells Us That…

In short, several scientific studies have been carried out on the subject, following the different beliefs of different cultures. On the whole, none have shown conclusive results as to the moon’s influence on agricultural plantations. I may be an eternal skeptic, but the scientific evidence is there.

So don’t panic if it rains during your waxing fruit moon in the fish dial: you’ll plant the next day and you should still have some lovely herbs to accompany your salmon this summer!