🦚Peacocks and allotments🌻
...plus some musings on Pocahontas and fake foraging books🪶
Dear friend,
I hope this newsletter finds you well and enjoying the sunny weather here in the U.K. My courgette plants are loving the warmth and I have more than I know what to do with. I’d love to hear your recipes or tips in the comments below!
Last time I wrote we had a beautiful trio of cosmic and seasonal shifts with the pagan sabbat: Lughnasadh; the height of the Perseids Meteor Shower and the Lionsgate Portal which closed for another year on 12 August. What creative insights or wild visions came up for you during this time of evolution to a newer self? Feel free to share in the comments below and catch up with the last edition here:
Before we dive in here are some terrestrial and celestial events for August:
17 July-24 August: Perseids meteor shower active
12-18 August: National Allotments Week
19 August: Full Blue Corn Moon in Aquarius at 19:26 BST
23 August: sun moves into Virgo
26 August: Summer Bank Holiday (U.K)
28 August: Mercury stations direct
🌍The first half of this newsletter looks at the terrestrial - the news and events that are happening on Earth over the next few weeks. The second half looks at the celestial - what’s going on up in the skies.
🌻National Allotments Week
With last week being National Allotments week, I‘d love to hear from you about ways you make space for biodiversity in the green spaces you have stewardship over - whether this be an allotment or a window box.
At the beginning of the month, I wrote about the concerning lack of butterflies seen around in the U.K so far this Summer, as reported by Butterfly Conservation during the 3 weeks of this year’s Big Butterfly Count. Since then, I’ve noticed that one species in particular, the Peacock butterfly (pictured above), seems to be more abundant than other species this year. The Peacock is one of our larger native butterflies along with the Red Admiral. The latter is the species I’ve seen more commonly in years past, but this is one type of butterfly whom I’ve seldom seen this year. Another species who seems to be responding well to the late warmer weather is the large white and I found 10s of these in caterpillar form munching on my sacrificial Nasturtiums last week.
If you’re looking for inspiration, Butterfly Conservation have some great tips on how to make wild spaces for butterflies via the link below.
⚠️Fake foraging books
After watching this video by Alexis Nikole (a.k.a @blackforager on Instagram) about how fake foraging books written and published by AI have been misleading and poisoning people, I thought it would be helpful here to share some reputable sources for plant ID and foraging knowledge.
These authors are real people who are experts in their field: Adele Nosedar, John Wright and Roger Phillips. To get a copy of their books, follow the buttons below.1
✨Now onto one of my favourite parts of Moontime Musings - the segment where we look at what’s happening in the skies over the next few weeks.
🔵Once in a Blue Moon…
Looking back to last August’s Full Moon edition of Moontime Musings, I wrote about how to determine the time when it’s a Blue Moon:
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