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Home and Gardening

New North Texas gardeners benefit from old-fashioned advice



Look for the iconic yellow cover for "The Old Farmer's Almanac" with its ancient signs and contemporary science.

There’s a hole punched in the corner of The Old Farmer’s Almanac for 2014. It’s a nostalgic remnant of the agrarian homestead, where it hung on the outhouse wall for reading material and toilet paper.

This is the very same annual that guided early American farmers, and it’s just as important today, but for a whole new audience. Now backyard food growers can learn how to link sun, moon and stars, seasons and cycles, and folklore with tending the sustainable home garden.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac is useful because it reminds you of planting dates and other important times in the agricultural year. It is a primer for new gardeners to discover the older, less expensive ways to get things done. Moreover, this annual publication details how astronomical happenings, such as moon phases, historically governed the tasks of the gardener-farmer’s world.

Why, you ask, is this important? That farmer used the old-time methods of going by the phases of the moon to govern his work, and that helps gardeners, too. It dictates the kind of tasks he performed in the waxing moon or a waning one, when the moon is full or there is no moon at all. The Almanac utilizes very old symbols for celestial goings-on, from day length to the sun’s position with signs of the zodiac and many things other similar publications lack.

The farmer’s monthly cycle is broken into four moon phases. The new moon is called “the dark of the moon.” Soon after, the first sliver of moon appears, called the fingernail moon, which expands nightly in our view until the first quarter is complete. This signals it is on the increase or waxing incrementally larger each night. This continues through the end of the first quarter into the second, which ends in the full moon. Then the moon wanes or grows smaller each night until the third quarter is completed. In the fourth, you come around to the new moon again.

An old farmer’s rule is to plant crops that fruit above the ground (lettuce, peas, tomatoes, etc.) while the moon is waxing, from new to full moon. Underground crops (beets, radishes, carrots, potatoes, etc.) are planted when the moon is waning from full to new. It was believed that the strength of the moon is greatest when full and, therefore, would bring more growth energy to seed germination. As the moon begins to wane, planting continues through the third quarter, but only those plants that produce below the ground, such as root vegetables.

The fourth quarter of the moon is a time of destruction, and planting is forbidden by Almanac rules.

Other publishers are getting on board with similar versions of the Almanac that lack the age-old wisdom and 21st-century data.

MCT Information Services

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