Poor Will's Almanack

On October 22, the Frog and Toad Migration Moon comes into its final quarter. The following day, called Cross-Quarter Day, the sun reaches half way between autumn equinox and winter solstice, entering the fertile but chilly sign of Scorpio. Today is the hinge of middle autumn and initiates the most dramatic period of leaf fall. After the September tier of wildflowers and the October witch hazels end their seasons, the floral year comes to a close throughout the northern half of the United States

The Frog and Toad Migration Moon waxes until it becomes completely full October 15. Rising in the evening and setting in the morning, the moon will be overhead around midnight. Full moon should strengthen the traditional mid-October cold front, increasing the chances for frost and even snow fluries. And this stage of the lunar orb may affect more than the weather. According to lunar lore, full moon is likely to cause problems for healthcare workers – making patients more difficult to deal with,

Under this waxing moon, a major shift in foliage color occurs all along the 40th Parallel. The nights grow colder; the mornings sometimes bring frost. The frogs and toads wander yards and gardens looking the right places to dig in against the winter. Throughout the fields, aster and goldenrod flowers lose their color. Brown beggartick burs stick to your stockings, and the winged seeds of Japanese knotweed fall. In urban ponds, water lilies stop blooming. When you go outside after the moon

The days continue clear and warm and bright. Two weeks ago, much of the landscape was still deep, late-summer green. Now, a few maples and dogwoods are red and orange, cottonwoods and catalpas and sweet gums and shagbark hickories are yellow, and grape vines and nettles are bleached with age. Locust leaves drizzle steadily to the undergrowth. The serviceberries are almost bare. The black walnut trees keep only their last fruit. Purple poison ivy and Virginia creeper outline the changes. The New

I wander into the chilly, wet morning of an old farm on equinox, swallows circling above me, crows, blue jays and cardinals and mockingbirds, ground crickets and field crickets and tree crickets accompanying me on my walk. Common ragweed everywhere has gone to seed. In patches of soil between slabs of old cement and blacktop grow ancient chicory and Queen Anne's lace, horseweed past its best, pink smartweed in large clumps, blushing wild dogwood, small white asters (two tiny bees huddled- one on

Now when the nights are cool and the moon is dark, those giant puffball mushrooms swell in the woods, getting so big... September fogs, the sliding sun, and one of the most radical weather shifts so far in the season, calls them up from the ground. As the day moves to within a few degrees of equinox, other creatures tell the time as well as puffballs. The rich scent of late summer pollen is almost gone by end of the week, replaced by the bittersweet odor of fallen apples and leaves. Cicadas are

Deep in the woods, tall wood nettle, wingstem, ironweed, and touch-me-nots have obscured the web of spring and summer, all the trilliums, the violet cress, the ragwort, the purple phlox, toothwort, Jack-in-the pulpit and bluebells, honewort, waterleaf. In my garden, giant hosta leaves have covered the foliage of snowdrops, aconites, crocus and scilla. Pigweed, creeping Charlie, wild violets, waterleaf, dandelions and amaranth have filled in all around the remnants of the April windflowers. The

I have fond memories of puffballs and their moon because twenty-eight years ago, a friend called me up with some news. “There’s a lady out on the street,” he said, “with a real big mushroom.” I went to see the sight, and there, indeed was a young woman holding what was to become the world’s largest puffball mushroom (calvatia gigantea), 18.38 pounds, 77 inches around. In our conversation years later, the woman told me that her giant fungus (“Puffy, as she called it,”) had made the 1990 and 1991

Having dropped below the celestial equator in the first week of late summer, the sun has now left the stability of Leo and entered the more volatile sign of Virgo, the first of the most violent periods of change in the second half of the year. At the transition between Leo’s great plateau of heat and color in July and Libra’s sudden collapse of the forest canopy in early fall, Virgo brings the first turning of the leaves and the first chance of frost. Under Virgo, the latest flowers of the

The Katydid Moon is waxing bright and gibbous these evenings. It will be full on the 18th dominating the sky sky and tides this week. The full moon is always overhead in the middle of the night, and if you walk under its glow, you might see the high bloom of velvetleaf, jimsonweed, prickly mallow, wild lettuce, ironweed and wingstem. You might pick soft elderberries and blackberries. You might see rows of tall great mulleins gone to seed, pokeweed the size of small trees, great, white puffball