Last week I was color copying the Urban Roots DVD cover art to make more DVDs. A stranger approached me in the copy store and handed me some papers and said "Here this will help." I had no idea what he was talking about. I looked more closely at the photocopies and read "North American Biodynamic Sowing and Planting Calendar 2010. It's a chart with zodiac symbols indicating the best times to sow root vegetables and do transplants etc. I still don't entirely understand it. It seems that your plants will grow the best if you time the sowing of seeds and transplants with the moon and stars.

For example, ideal northern transplanting time is: April 19  8am to April 30 6pm.

I have heard of this before. A wwoofer who studied permaculture shared her learnings about this with us. She suggested it was best to sow seeds like tomatoes and peas and beans on a full moon because the power of the moon will pull the energy up and make the plants grow faster and stronger. On the other hand, it is best to plant the root vegetables like carrots, beats and potatoes with the new moon, so the roots are not pulled up with the energy of moon but down to the earth.

I lived in a small rural village in Northern Italy last year, and the farmers all believed in the power of the moon. The men would cut their hair on the new moon for the same reasoning as the root vegetables. They wanted full thick hair so they encouraged the roots to go down rather than falling out! I visited an agri-tourism farm that had 40 pregnant goats. When were all the babies due? March 15, the night of the full moon of course. At the time I was also pregnant. They predicted my due date to be Sept.24, however, technology proved more accurate as the date was Sept.15 and surprise surprise, Emily was born on Sept.15. Only 4% of babies are born on their due dates. But I digress. Perhaps humans are more complex than goats and carrots, BUT, we did conceive Emily with a method called LUNACEPTION. This is where the woman sleeps for 14 nights in complete darkness and then sleeps for 3 nights with the light on and back to darkness again for the rest of her cycle. The light encourages the body to ovulate, so if you know you are fertile around the 14th day, you can time intercourse to achieve pregnancy or avoid it.