Image from Treehugger
Today is Mabon, the equinox when light and dark are balanced. From tomorrow until Yule, light will get shorter while dark will increase. It’s Our Mother’s descent into herself her time for a Winter Slumber.
Though we are often silent in our sleep, our bodies still digest and breathe, our minds work out the knots of the day through dreams. Mother Earth is the same way.
Just before winter really starts — in central New Hampshire this is around Samhain– is the best time to put root vegetables into your garden for next year. Garlic, potatoes, onions, horseradish, beets, rutabagas, turnips, and parsnips. You can also put some leafy greens seed and carrot seed in the ground. Each will start to put their shoots down then, when the ground freezes, the plants will sleep overwinter awakening with the first hints of spring. Spinach especially likes the cool wet weather of spring so if the snow in your yard melts early you may well have fresh spinach (and other leafy greens) in late winter/early spring and be the envy of all you know.
The root vegetables need more time to grow though you can often eat these in mid summer to late summer before most people have access to root vegetables. And because the cycle will go round and round, one can plant leafy greens around Lughnasadh to have for Samhain.
I like to plant with the moon. There are really complex ways to do so but I like things to be simple so I plant during the New Moon and harvest during the Full Moon. Some say to put root veggies in the ground during the Full Moon. I have not tried this. Let me know how it works out if you do.
I had always heard it that you plant root vegies and stuff that grows underground during the waning moon, and stuff that you eat the above ground parts of during the waxing.
I figure if I get something into the ground at all, I’m doing well.