Foraging in Gaborone
South-East · Southern Savanna & Subtropical Coast · hardiness zone 10b
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16°C · Clear
Today
31° / 14°
Rain, 7 days
0 mm
Season
Spring · frost in ~245 d
Weather read at 12:34 a.m..
Writing your field guide — reading the forecast, the moon and the map…
Behind this week's foraging
The day, the ground and the sky over Gaborone
Above about 32 °C tomatoes drop their flowers and lettuce turns bitter.
- Ground beetlebest now — Running the soil surface after dark, taking slugs, cutworms and larvae. One of the best predators a garden has.
- Earthwormbest now — At the surface after dark and in wet weather, pulling leaves down into the burrow.
Overhead · Gaborone, Botswana
The sky over the woods
The two clocks nothing on the ground can argue with: the length of the day, and the phase of the moon.
The sun
12h 27m of light
Sunrise
05:51
Solar noon
12:04
Sunset
18:17
A month from now the day will be 0h 40m longer. Enough light for steady growth.
The moon
Waning Crescent
15% lit · waning · day 26 of 29.5
- Next full
- Oct 26 · 20d
- Hunter's Moon
- Next new
- Oct 10 · 4d
- Darkest nights
Planting by the moon: Last quarter to new: a resting phase — weed, prune, harvest, turn compost and prepare beds.
Anglers' solunar rating: good — the tradition says fish feed hardest in the days either side of new and full, and around moonrise and moonset. The evidence is mixed; light and weather matter more.
Turn of the season
Summer solstice
Dec 21 · 76 days away
About 245 days to the average first frost (Jun 9).
Next moons
- New MoonOct 10
- First QuarterOct 18
- Full Moon · Hunter's MoonOct 26
- Last QuarterNov 1
Right now · Gaborone, Botswana
Forces at work
Nothing here is a guess. Each of these is read from this week's forecast and this location's climate record, and each one is pushing the season one way or the other.
- Worth watching
Decay
22.3 °C soil · 0.1 mm
Warm but dry. Decomposition stalls without moisture — water the compost heap like a plant, and don't expect mushrooms.
Fungi and bacteria turning last season into next season's soil. The same warm, wet window that runs a compost heap also fruits the mushrooms.
- Holding things back
Rain
0.1 mm / 7 days
Only 0.1 mm over seven days. A garden wants roughly 25 mm a week — water deeply twice rather than lightly every day.
Sets the pace for everything: germination, fungal fruiting, slug nights, and how a river runs for the next three days.
- Quiet right now
Frost
310 frost-free days
Typically Aug 3 to Jun 9 here. Coldest night in the next week: 14.4 °C.
The hard edge of the growing season. Ice inside a leaf ruptures its cells — one night ends a tomato and sweetens a parsnip.
- Working for you
Soil warmth
22.3 °C
Warm enough for beans, corn, squash, cucumber and transplanted tomato and pepper. Roots run hard at this temperature.
Seeds read soil temperature, not the calendar. Six centimetres down is where the decision gets made.
- Working for you
Day length
12h 27m
Gaining about 1 minutes of daylight a day. Every extra minute is growth you don't have to pay for.
The one thing weather can't change. Plants count photoperiod to decide when to bolt, bulb, flower and go dormant.
- Worth watching
The moon
Waning Crescent · 15%
Waning, 26 days old. Full moon in 19 days. Anglers' solunar rating: good (a tradition).
It moves water — in the sea, in a lake's edge, and, by long tradition, in the sap of a plant. Fish feed hardest on the days around new and full.
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