Lunar gardening is a tradition with a lot of believers and not much personal data to back it up. The new Lunar Experiment report changes that — it matches your own harvest records to the moon phase at planting and calculates which phase produced the best results in your specific garden.
The report works by looking back through your planting records, identifying what moon phase each plant was sown or transplanted during, then matching those plantings to their recorded harvest weights. It groups everything by the four traditional lunar quarters — New Moon, First Quarter, Full Moon, and Last Quarter — and calculates the average and total harvest weight for each group. The phase with the highest average yield gets flagged as your statistically best phase.
The important caveat is right there in the report: this is correlation, not proof. Planting dates are affected by weather, availability of seedlings, time constraints, and dozens of other factors. A plant sown at the Full Moon because it was the first dry Saturday in three weeks is going to perform differently than one planted intentionally at that phase as an experiment. The report is honest about this — it shows you what your data says, and leaves the interpretation to you.
What's genuinely useful here isn't a definitive answer about whether lunar gardening works — it's having your own data in front of you rather than relying on received wisdom. If you've been sowing tomatoes at the First Quarter for three seasons and getting strong harvests, the report will reflect that. If your carrots don't seem to care what the moon is doing, that'll show up too. The report grows more useful the more harvest data you have recorded, so older accounts with full season histories will see the most meaningful patterns.
The Lunar Experiment report lives under Reports in the sidebar. It needs at least a handful of plantings with recorded harvest weights to show meaningful results — if you're newer to MyPlot, it's a good reason to start logging your harvests properly now so the data builds up over the coming season. Find it at Reports → Lunar Experiment.