Full Strawberry Moon in the Lovely Month of June

Tonight the moon is large and round and shows not the slightest sign of any strawberrieness. Apparently no one sent the memo to the moon that it is suppose to be the Strawberry Moon this month.

The Strawberry Moon is thus named because of the fact that this is the month that strawberries are harvested. Practicality in naming conventions once again abounds in the world of nature.

All the full moons have names. The names we generally use for them here in the US were handed down from the Algonquin Native Americans who were among the tribes that resided on in New England where we Yankees first moved in on the Native American turf. Native American didn’t measure time by months but by moons, so this was their way of tracking time. Other Native American tribes had other names for the June Moon. The Cherokees called it the Green Corn Moon. The Choctaw tribe called it the Windy Moon. The Sioux called it Moon When June Berries Are Ripe (ahem, in other words Strawberry).

But the Native Americans were not the only ones to name the moons. In China, June is the month of the Lotus Moon. In Europe, it is the Rose Moon. Celts called it the Moon of Horses. In the Middle Ages, it was called Dyan Moon (yeah, I don’t know what a Dyan is either). If you happen to be part of the modern day Pagan movement, you may refer to it as the Planting Moon. If you do though, you are a little behind the real gardening world schedule. Planting should have been done weeks ago.