Moon Planting – Biodynamic Balderdash

“But the people that didn’t develop their id, that were too exposed to the influence of the sun, they were like plants: They produced far too much carbon under their skin – and became black. That is why the negroes are black.”
             - Rudolf Steiner, Geisteswissenschaftliche Menschenkunde, 1908–1909, s. 5:9
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The full moon today set me wondering which are the looniest garden practices. Talking to plants has to be up there among them, not least because plants don’t have ears, although one of my children pointed out in fact that corn does. 

But the looniest has to be the belief in moon planting, which is sometimes given the pseudo scientific title of “bio-dynamics”.  The moon planting theories were thoroughly tested by Which? Gardening in 2003, who followed the instructions given in the lunar sowing calendar published each year by Nicholas Kollerstrom* and couldn’t find any difference at all in the yields of vegetables sown on “good” days or “bad” days.

Moon planting was popularised by Rudolf Steiner, who is considered to be something of a saint by the biodynamic movement.  His credentials for believing in the unbelievable are very impressive.  He claimed to be a clairvoyant and believed that humanity began with the sinking of Atlantis in 7,227 BC and that after 3,573 AD all humans would regain the clairvoyant powers which they had possessed prior to the time of the ancient Greeks.

The moon planting calendar says that on Monday is a good time to do some sowing. The weather forecast is for torrential rain all day.  When the ‘moon planters’ are out there planting in the pouring rain will they be the only people who don’t think they’re raving mad?
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* Kollerstrom was stripped of his honorary fellowship with UCL after publishing ‘The Auschwitz Gas Chamber’ Illusion,’ in which he wrote that there were no lethal gas chambers in the Nazi’s concentration camps, and that cyanide gas chambers operated in Auschwitz only for the purpose of hygiene and disinfection.