Just wondering: do you headcanon that Tatooine used to have seasons? I think I saw a post on this blog suggesting that idea, so I was wondering what you headcanoned regarding that topic
Tatooine still has seasons, and always has. I’m pretty sure the idea that it used to and doesn’t anymore is yet another thing from the Expanded Universe, which I don’t consider canon.
It’s also a thing, by the way, that’s directly contradicted in ANH, where Owen Lars explicitly refers to a harvest season, and implicitly to a planting season.
And no, that’s not a harvest season for water. The idea that “moisture farming” means somehow farming water is also an Expanded Universe idea, and one that doesn’t make a lot of sense, frankly. Owen explicitly refers to crops, crops which have a growing season and a harvest season. And we know from AOTC that mushrooms - and probably other food crops - are grown on the vaporaors, because Shmi was harvesting them when she was taken by the Tuskens.
Does Tatooine have a summer, winter, spring and fall like the temperate regions of our planet? Maybe, maybe not. Actually, the answer is probably varied because, well, it’s a whole planet. The climate is not going to be the same everywhere on the planet. Most of the settled areas seem to be fairly close to one another, but we don’t know where they’re located in relation to the planet’s poles, so it’s possible there is a degree of seasonal temperature variation, etc.
Most likely, Tatooine (the inhabited part, that is) has a dry season and a monsoon season. (Monsoon, btw, doesn’t necessarily mean a huge amount of rain. It just means all the rain comes at one time of the year.) If the settlements are located far enough towards one of the poles, there is probably some seasonal temperature variation, as well, and possibly even a winter season with snow. (As an aside, although everyone likes to assume Tatooine is hot, we don’t actually have any firm evidence that it is. It could actually be a fairly temperate desert.)
Tatooine has quite a few native animal species (e.g., banthas, anoobas, scurriers, dewbacks, etc.), which means that there must also be a diverse array of native plant species. And that means that it must rain. Maybe not a lot, but it does.
Humans (and other similar sentient species) live on Tatooine in large enough numbers and in concentrated areas, so they’ve had to develop techniques for harvesting water in greater quantities than the monsoon season provides. Hence the vaporators, which draw moisture from the air and collect condensation. And people also require food, which is where the moisture farmers come in. I suspect they’re doing some combination of growing crops directly on vaporators and probably some amount of dryland farming. (In ANH Owen refers to “the south ridge,” a section of his farmland, so I strongly suspect the Lars family is doing a good bit of dryland farming.)
