A biodynamic planting calendar

I bought a planting calendar. I've thought about it for years but never wanted to be that structured about my gardens. No more. It really is time to get rigorous about what I'm doing or all I'll ever have is chaos.

But in all honesty I didn't expect this calendar to do the trick…especially after I opened it and drowned in astrological/astronomical symbols. Must be my dyscalculi. I'm not dyslexic, which is letters; my eyes play tricks with numbers, hence dys-calculi, calculi meaning numbers. 4s are Rs to me. Until I discovered Lotus123 (I've since moved onto Excell) I couldn't add or subtract.

Anyway, the biodynamic movement is about living into the wholeness of the natural world. The idea of this calendar, not unlike the Farmer's Almanac, is to chart forces that affect plants, only the biodynamic people are a lot more detailed than just moon phases, including in their calculations all the sun, moon, planets, constellations and the etheric, or force of nature. Or maybe they mean that weird, wacky force that no one can explain: gravity. Actually, the ideas espoused in the calendar remind me of quantum mechanics, the whole being more than the sum of its parts.

Neither here nor there at the moment. I needed rigor and HERE IT IS! The calendar tells me when to do what. And, it has a space beside each day where I can log what I've done….WOW!!!

Yesterday was a Leaf day. Leaf means anything that has leaves we eat, such as lettuce, spinach, herbs, asparagus (actually I guessed at that one, but it is the stem and unfurled leaves we eat). So, I potted up spinach seeds like crazy, along with parsley, watercress, and specialty lettuce. The 12 6-packs of asparagus–72 squares of soil with multiple plants in each square; not quite sure how I'm going to thin–I bought last week went into the ground. I put them on the wild side of the ditch, which meant me sliding down the steep hillside into dirt so soft and black I just sighed. Great stuff. Leaf day also meant it was time to harvest the leaves we eat. So I thinned the cold frame that plays host to my favorite Romaine varietal, Freckled Lettuce and the Pagano Winter Giant Spinach I planted in December. I hadn't tried them yet and was a little disappointed because although the leaves were beautiful the taste was far more mild than I expected. Ed, on the other hand, loved it.

Today is a fruit day. Actually all of today is a fruit day along with all of tomorrow and early Sunday. Fruits are tomatoes, peppers, and anything else that turns a flower into something we eat. I'll be popping more tomato seeds into pots and putting them into the shower in the laundry room. (Ed had a brilliant idea to turn that unused shower into an incubator. He put a clamp light on the shower head and, with the shower door closed, the enclosure maintains a nice 75 degree temperature!)