Weather signs, moon tables, and what the forest ignores

Every household in this district has a rule about the moon, the rye or the mosquitoes, and I was given all of them long before I was given a knife. Writing down every walk for six years has been an education in which of them were ever about mushrooms at all.

Collected: 14 September 2025
Written up: 8 February 2026
Locality: Varėna, Alytus County
Season: September 2025
Reading: 6 minutes
Parts: 4

The rules I grew up hearing

Everybody here has a grandmother's rule and a good half of them concern the moon. Pick on a waxing moon and the mushrooms keep; pick on a waning one and they go soft in the basket before you reach the house. Thunder in May means a heavy autumn. When the rye comes into ear, the first boletus is already up somewhere. If the mosquitoes are unbearable at midsummer, the bog will be worth walking in October. They were told to me as plain fact, in a kitchen, by people who had fed families out of this forest.

It would be easy and slightly rude to file all of that under superstition. These are people who watched one landscape for fifty years without writing a word down, and the rules are what survived the retelling. The weakness is not in the observing but in the memory around it, because a saying that failed in 1987 did not get repeated at the table and a saying that worked did. I wanted to know which ones would survive being written down and checked, which is a much less charming question than it sounds.

Field marks

Waxing moon, the basket keeps; waning moon, eat it this week
Thunder in May, a heavy autumn to come
Rye in ear, and the first boletus is already up somewhere
A bad midsummer for mosquitoes, a good October on the bog

Keeping score, badly at first

The first two years of the notebook are useless for this, and I only worked out why in 2023. I had written down the walks that produced something and skipped the ones that did not, so the record held forty good days and almost no empty ones. Against a page like that every rule looks true, because there is nothing for it to fail against. The fix was boring: one line for every walk, including the two hours in a wet August that produced a single bolete and a bad mood on the way home.

The second problem was the word good. A good day in 2020 meant a full basket of anything; by 2024 it meant a full basket of boletus in particular, because we had stopped bothering with the smaller species. Comparing those two years tells you about me and not about the forest. Since 2023 the notebook keeps columns rather than sentences for the numbers, with date, hours out, rain in the previous week, night temperature and weight carried home, and prose only for whatever will not fit into a column.

What the six years actually show

Two of the old rules hold up here. Thunder in May is a decent proxy for a wet spring, and wet springs have gone together with productive autumns in five years out of six, which is a correlation with a plausible mechanism behind it rather than a rule. The mosquito saying is the same trick from the other end: a wet midsummer makes mosquitoes and fills the bog, and the cranberries follow the water. Neither of those is folklore predicting the future. Both are folklore noticing something in the present and saying it out loud.

The moon does not appear at all. I have thirty-one August and September outings sorted by phase and the baskets are indistinguishable; how well they keep in the cellar tracks the weather on the day and how long the basket sat in a warm car, and nothing else I can find. What does predict a flush, week after week, is dull and already known to everyone: total rainfall in the preceding week, and whether the nights afterwards stayed warm. My notebook has spent six years confirming the forecast.

Field marks

Rain in the previous week: the strongest signal in the book
Warm nights afterwards, or the flush thins out to nothing
Wet spring, productive autumn, in five years out of six
Moon phase: nothing at all, across thirty-one sorted outings

Why the old rules stay in the notebook

I keep writing them down, and not out of sentiment. A saying about rye in ear is a phenological marker with the numbers taken out of it: one event in the year tied to another event in the same year, which is exactly what my columns do, only in a form you can carry in your head while your hands are busy. When the rye is in ear, something in the soil has already happened, and that is worth a walk even if the mushrooms are still a fortnight off.

There is also the question of where the rules came from. They are the reason I was ever taken into this forest in the first place, and repeating them at a table keeps a door open with people who would never read a spreadsheet. I say the moon one with a straight face and record the date anyway. If this notebook outlives me and somebody eventually finds it, I would rather they inherited both halves: what was said in the kitchen, and what the walks actually showed.