I have often glanced at the Maria Thun calendar and sometimes it might sway my decision to plant today or tomorrow - but I can't say it has been a major aspect of my garden planning.
But last year I submerged myself in the idea more and looked into the research. I wondered why it wasn't used by everyone and soon realised that there are many systems of moon planting out there with followers of each. And what really galvanised this considera project was realising that not even everyone in the Biodynamic world agreed with Maria Thun. When Hartmut Spiess tried to replicate the results he couldn't - but then Nick kollerstrom reanalysed Speiss' work and found there was a 8% yield increase after all. Then it became clear that Kollerstrom had also made an assumption about how Thun worked which was not completely accurate and he has now had to reevaluate his own recommendations. The picture emerged of a certain degree of uncertainty.
I began to wish for two things; first was the 'raw data' of all these experiments by which I mean what was planted when and where and how did it differ from otherwise similar plantings. The second thing - useless without the first - was a way of analysing all that data.
So I asked the folk at the Swiss ephemeris if there was any software which worked backwards from data to astronomical patterns. They thought it could be done and indeed it has. There is a program called AstroDataBank which is a kind of reverse astrology. Instead of taking a time and place of birth and looking for meaning in this for ones life, one rather has lots of information and looks for celestial correlations in that.
So one can take all the raw data and see if there are patterns emerging with the three main zodiacs - topical, sidereal and constellation. One can see if the four quarters of the Moon determine the productivity of the crops. One can do all of this and much more once one has the programme and the data.
That's the idea and the site is the result. Abhi is Tallinn has been working on a fuller and swifter set of algorithms than ADB and has helped in creating the database and analysing the data which I hope we all will submit to the site.