The moon has not ceased to be a thing of beauty, poetry and romance even since man first set foot on it all those years ago. Moonlight still transforms the night scene in town and country. And the planting of seeds is often influenced by the state of the moon, be it waxing or waning.
The Field Book of Country Queries says plainly: "The simplest of several theories is: plant all crops maturing their produce above ground when the moon is waxing, preferably in the first quarter; plant all crops maturing below the ground, such as roots and potatoes, when the moon is waning, preferably in the third quarter ... Dr Rudolph Steiner, the anthroposophist, held that plants such as leafy greens and brassicas growing above the surface should be planted with the moon, Mercury and Venus in the ascendant. Then a following remark refers to the "rules" in inverted commas. There are beliefs which appear in various parts of the world which say how dangerous it is to fall asleep exposed to the rays of the moon. A current French magazine devotes many pages to the same heavenly body.
A farmer is quoted as saying that the phases of the moon are very important when it comes to felling trees. If you cut your firewood while the moon is waxing, he says, it will be difficult to dry: it will smoke, ooze and give you problems. So you should always cut it while the moon is waning. For wood that is to be worked, it is the opposite. You must cut it while the moon is waxing, so that it will last a long time. The tides of the seas, of course, depend on the pull of the moon, and there's not much you can do about that, though Laurence Grousset a yachtsman of Brittany, warns of the speed with which water, on a change of tide, can rush through the many hidden rocky underwater passes and bring disaster to any who have failed to watch the tides, and thus the moon. And mycologists? The spokesman for the local society at Oleron, on the Atlantic coast, says that fall connoisseurs of mushrooms watch the phases of the moon. The great time of growth begins three days before the new moon, more or less, and lasts for about a week. And he says he has never found anyone who can give him a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon. A sea fisherman says that full moon is bad for his type of surface fishing, even when it is hidden by cloud. Y