USA. Eden’s Almanac is a new biodynamic calendar app that enables farmers and gardeners to track the local weather and astrological cycles to guide their planting decisions, track their progress, and eventually, support a community of spiritual scientists researching the sky-earth connection. Charles Cross spoke with the developer, Robert Pepitone.
How did the idea for this app arise?
I was introduced to biodynamics by a friend back in 2009. Over the last few years, my family has been looking into homesteading and learning everything we can. This exploration led me back to biodynamics. When I looked around and found that the only quality planting guides were available on paper, I realized there was an opportunity to fill a void and make biodynamics more accessible to a larger audience.
What is your intention for the app?
Eden’s Almanac is designed to be a tool for farmers and gardeners to plan and track their activities and correlate them with the astrological influences. Folks at the same location can collaborate on tasks and track progress by taking pictures and journaling about what they’ve done. The app draws from the NASA data sets and pulls in Apple’s Weather so that folks can get the most precise information for their locale. Users can choose between the constellational zodiac followed by Maria Thun, the sidereal zodiac, and the tropical zodiac.
But beyond the calendar, I want to make it easy for folks to start implementing biodynamic practices in their backyard garden or on their farm. The app includes a Biodynamics 101 section that provides a background on working with plants and the energetics of the day to help beginners get started. I plan to include information about the preparations and their application in the near future. My hope is that this will help people that work with the earth to synchronize with the celestial rhythm and strengthen our collective knowledge of the relationship between the plants and planets.
You’re working with the Agricultural Section of the Anthroposophical Society of America. What is your vision for how you can help spiritual scientific research?
You know, the folks in the Agriculture Section are constantly innovating and love to share the results of their experiments. One of my colleagues spoke about how she sprayed the Valerian prep on her trees in the high mountains during a late 3-day hard frost last year, and it saved the trees—everything else in a 60-mile radius dropped blossom. She thought to do this because of the warm energy associated with valerian and its ruling planet, Saturn. No one had heard about using sprays in circumstances like that before. It would be great to have a shared format to collaborate and communicate stories and results like these year-round.
There’s a lot of inconsistency across the various astrological calendars, and the better we can track what happens, the more we can move toward clarity, improve our systems, and eventually deepen our understanding of the relationship between the cosmos and the earth. The app facilitates this by enabling folks to look back at what happened in the past and correlate what they did with the astrological influences prevailing at that time.
Learn more and get the app (for iOS and Android) Eden’s Almanac
Header photo Sofia Lismont
