Gardening by the Moon

09/17/2024

We're nearly there! Just 4 days away from CNY Pagan Pride Day and Autumn Equinox Festival! We'll be offering our calendars, books, and art as well as a workshop on intro to Lunar Planting. This is a long-standing and cherished event for us and we're thrilled to support the event as much as we can :)

09/02/2024

We're soooo glad to be returning to CNY Pagan Pride Day! This year as vendors, sponsors, and workshop presenters ~ This is a community that's been important to us for decades and it's important for us to give back in all the ways we can.

We'll see you at the drum circle!

Wolf Hill Press, creators of Gardening by the Moon is a proud sponsor of this year's CNY Pagan Pride Day and Autumn Equinox Festival!

Wolf Hill Press is Pagan community-oriented and values-based business worker-owned and -operated out of Syracuse, NY by two lifelong Central New Yorkers with shared passions for Art; Education; the Natural World; and beautiful, useful, accurate, and scientifically rigorous printed materials for learners, studiers, and explorers of all ages.

06/25/2024

In the midst of feeling overwhelmed by health & time management problems, a snowshoe hare has moved into our garden (and driveway 😜)! I keep telling Maxx a lynx will surely be moving in next. 🤩

The huge increase in wildlife and native biodiversity since I started gardening here in 2018 is the most rewarding part of the whole process for me. (The fruit and veg is nice too!) There’s been a remarkable uptick in bird species coming through the yard this year as well 💚

06/13/2024

Hi friends! I know I've been quiet on here lately - we knew we were overlapping vending, teaching, gardening, and putting the finishing touches on the '25 calendar this spring, but we didn't know I'd be starting a new job as well! - but I wanted to hop on quickly to let you know our last zoom class of the season is TOMORROW, Friday June 14 11am - 1 pm EST.
This class is called Companion Planting by the Signs and I'm really excited to teach it! I've done a lot of cross-referencing between recommended planting signs/phases and recommended companion planting arrangements/techniques, and I can't wait to nerd out with you all about it.
You can find more information in out facebook events, or visit our website: https://gardeningbythemoon.com/about/teaching/ As ever our classes are sliding scale, with no one turned away - email or DM us if you'd like a no-cost ticket :)

06/04/2024

Upgrades underway! Last week we discovered that our business phone had stopped accepting voicemails ... some time? As calendarmakers we naturally receive fewer calls during the spring and summer so it's hard to know exactly when things broke down. We are now the proud owners of a new[ly refurbished] phone and an entirely different phone plan from a more reliable provider 🤞 so if you tried to call and couldn't get through, or left a message and never heard back, please try again!
We were ALREADY working on a brand new website so it's been an infrastructure heavy week! All of the Lunar Learning Library resources will stay exactly in place, but we're switching hosting platforms to eliminate some of the downtime problems we've have with our current host (godaddy), to improve the stability of user accounts, and to streamline the cart & checkout process. We inherited the current GardeningByTheMoon.com website along with the calendar when we took over publishing - Have you had any problems with the website, or do you have any suggestions on how we could improve it?
Our aim is that Wolf Hill Press will be our full time occupation one of these days, but as it grows, Maxx and I are each working demanding jobs and fitting in the many hats we wear for Wolf Hill Press around them. We appreciate your patience with our growing pains as we improve & expand the Gardening by the Moon Lunar Almanac & Planting Guide and your web experience 🌱

05/30/2024

We’ve been busy ... updates coming soon!

05/18/2024

We're in Fair Haven at the Color Run & May Fairy Fest! Lots of fun crafters and people dusted with colors

05/10/2024

Hi friends! We have no spots left for our class this weekend, Lunar Gardening for the Home Herbalist. We have two more zoom classes left in our spring session, both coming up in June and both with spots still available. Then we'll be focusing on camping & gardening for the summer and plan to host another slate of classes next year, starting late winter/early spring. More information (and a waitlist!) here: https://gardeningbythemoon.com/about/teaching/

05/05/2024

Today’s coworkers: unimpressed

05/05/2024

We're excited to have our first in-person event at the zoo right here in Syracuse. There's a lovely community event organized by Pride & Joy Families happening today, even with the rain 🌧

05/01/2024

A sure sign of the warm weather setting-in are the growing peaches, bursting from the buds. In this photo we use for May in the 2024 calendar, this beautiful peach tree (prunus persica, var. Reliance) had many peaches growing strong back in 2023 when I took this photo, but by June we knew something was wrong when they stopped growing any larger than a peach pit. Something we didn't know to look for was the peach tree borer, a kind of moth, that had laid eggs under the bark near the base of the tree. We weren't able to save this tree, but invested in a large bottle of neem oil and other petroleum-free measures to protect the other fruit trees in our yard. We'll be better prepared next time we grow peaches.

[Image description: The reddish-green branch of a peach tree grows from the bottom right corner to the top lefthand corner of the photo. The base of bright green leaves can be seen toward to top and behind the branch, and a couple peach fruits are just starting to push through the centers of small and dried peach blossoms]

04/23/2024

One of my favorite things in the world is when really large seeds BURST through the soil. These Lauki bottle gourds from Truelove Seeds are a little older but still germinating vigorously 🤩 Planted a few days under the just before the half moon 🌱

04/21/2024

How it’s starting (about half done with spring cleanup and a very small way into planting).

04/19/2024

Thanks so much to My Herbal Apothecary for giving us such a great shout-out!

04/18/2024

Three day germination on our Dyers’ Coreopsis! Planted under a few days ago and the first of three plantings in this year’s experiment : D

04/11/2024

There are little intricacies to the rhythms & repeats of lunar planting in a way that just delight me. The next two days the moon is in Gemini, a favorable sign for cultivating/weeding/all things bed prep, and for the two days after that the moon is in Cancer--most fertile of all the signs! Things are warming up here so I want to hurry up and get my second planting of peas in under a fertile sign before it gets too late in the season--once it gets hot here the peas will get cranky and stop producing.

On top of my peas I hope to get in some cold-hardy wildflower mixes... what are you planting this weekend?

04/11/2024

Coming up on Saturday we have our new workshop ~Planning Your Lunar Gardening Year~ This class is for people who want to bring their lives more in line with the monthly & yearly cycles of the moon, and for people who want to get into gardening by the moon but aren't quite sure where to start. I'll take you through the steps to make your own perpetual lunar gardening calendar, customized to your growing season & garden needs, with the tasks that are most important to you marked out with their most favorable moon phase & sign combinations.

All of our classes are SLIDING SCALE. Find the full information here: https://gardeningbythemoon.com/shop/classes/planning-class-240413/

04/08/2024

Maxx and I are taking advantage of this once in a lifetime celestial event to take the day off to spend some time together--without talking about work :p If you're in the path of totality, enjoy the day and keep your eyes safe!

(If, like me, you were confused about why the eclipse is especially dangerous--the moon blocks visible light so your pupils widen. But they are still taking in INVISIBLE light, which the moon does not block, and in fact they're taking in more of this invisible light than ever on account of being open so wide. The scarring that results may never heal so be real careful. I'll just be over here trying to wrap my mind around the concept of invisible light...)

04/07/2024

THANK YOU to everyone who attended our inaugural zoom workshop yesterday! It was great to meet some long-time customers, chat with some brand new gardeners, and share some of the history & principles of lunar gardening : D

We have another two sessions of the Intro class, one in May and one in June, plus three slightly more advanced classes coming up--the next one is Planning Your Lunar Gardening Year, and is scheduled for next Saturday. More information in our events or on our website: https://gardeningbythemoon.com/about/teaching/

04/05/2024

April has been upon us for a few days, but we've been busily preparing for the upcoming classes (gardeningbythemoon.com/about/teaching) and the fairs and festivals we'll be visiting this year. This is the original photo we selected for April for the 2024 calendar - the tiny flowers are growing from the fallen-over top of our walking onion (allium x proliferum) that we received from a local natural farmer, Dale Hass at his market stand. These plants self-propogate through our gardens now and have a strong flavor.

[image description: a blue-green stalk of an allium plant leans down over the top of the camera, setting down over another fallen stalk and a soaker hose. From the end of the stalk grow small onion-shaped bulbs and smaller stalks with tiny white flowers at the top. The alliums are growing among short green corn stalks. ]

04/02/2024

In addition to teaching this weekend, I’m also *taking* a class—virtual apple grafting with real apples. I’m interested in growing multiple varieties on a single tree (my garden is so small and I love so many apples!) so I’ve wanted to get into grafting for a long time.

When the heirloom scions arrived with the rest of the kit earlier this week, I was really excited to see that one of the varieties goes back to 1850 in Granby, NY, which is just around the corner from where Maxx grew up and a half hour drive from where we live right now.

I got to thinking, I know where the apple tree’s ancestors were, but where were my ancestors during that time? I asked Maxx as well and between us, our ancestors were in Holland, Sweden, Ireland, Ohio, California, Quebec, the Catskills, and we each had ancestors in central New York.

In 1850, Granby had been settled for 58 years. It had been 71 years since George Washington wrote to John Sullivan, ordering him & his troops to destroy as many Haudenosaunee towns as possible, fields and villages included, with the explicit goal of destroying their foodways and sovereignty.

I love the rural areas of upstate New York, and I love the small towns here, and I know many of them were settled in those decades, that my ancestors moved in in the wake of bloodshed and destruction, or may have participated in the annihilation themselves. It’s impossible to separate our own ancestral stories, foodways, and the history of the land we live on. It’s not easy to think of our forebears enacting violence and even harder to of them suffering it—but, I think, the only way to deal with these histories is to meet them eyes open, even when it’s painful.

From Indigenous orchards being razed and replaced by European cattle, to the Irish potato famine, to the wars fought for the oil that fertilizes & ships produce, to contemporary famines & landgrabs, the basic human need for food has often been twisted towards profit and atrocity. If we want to build a truly healthy food system, we will need to address not only the invasive species in our gardens and the poisons in our soils, but the histories that have left them there.