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Photos: drizzling March sunrise over the Rhone River valley, Brig in the distance [Ed. note: all photos on GenevaLunch can be viewed larger by clicking on them.]

Every spring I decide to invest a little time in learning about moon cycles, since more and more credit is being given to old farmers’ tales about the importance of planting at the right time. If you do it right, say the old geezers, you need less fertilizer and you’re on the path to using fewer chemicals to treat your plants.

Despite good intentions, most springs I don’t make much progress.

This was a weekend for reflecting on what the recent soft weather in the Alps is doing to my garden and where in the moon-garden cycle were are. Saturday’s sunrise appeared to come in a gentle drizzle of rain over farmlands below and my garden at 1,100m. The snow line has risen, somewhere up around 2,000m. Not good news for skiers, and possibly not for my garden, since the first of March is too early at this altitude for buds and young flowers. We could still have a hard frost and we’ve had snow up to 15 May every year in the past four.

Photos: the view from the balcony on a fine March day. Moonrise over the Alps, 4 March.

By Sunday the gentle rains were gone and it was a good day for sitting on the balcony and, later in the day, taking walks. The garden was too soggy to do much more than pull up a handful of weeds but the sun was shining and the weather was balmy.

The elegant, slim moon that slipped into the sky behind the Alps Monday morning has me wondering if there is a right and wrong time to prune.

My butterfly bushes and roses need to be cut back, and early March is the right time. The 100-year-old apple tree gave us an abundant crop last year of mediocre-flavoured apples, so we’re going to give it (and us) a year off from pruning its high, awkward skinny sticks that point up to the sky. As my nearly 90-year-old neighbour said, strongly encouraging me to leave the tree be, "It’s earned the right to just sit there."

Almost. It does have half of the job of holding up the hammock in summer.

The pruning shears were sharpened and now I’ll have to read about moon phases.

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