As the growing season wraps up in Vermont, I'm finally starting to jot down notes in my garden journal. Typically, I forget until spring, so this is a step up! I'm curious about what specific things you all write down that you find truly useful and refer back to. Do gardening journals actually get kept, or are they just a nice idea that we don't follow through on?
5 Answers
Taking photos is a game changer. I started a 'Garden 2025' album, and it really helps to document everything with a time and date. When winter hits, I can just look back at the album to see what my plants were like and what was next to them. It’s way easier than trying to remember everything!
Honestly, I don’t bother with much record-keeping. It feels like it would take the fun out of gardening for me. I don't even label my plants! Every time I'm in the garden, it's a new adventure!
I use my calendar app for a lot of my record-keeping—probably more than I should! Photos from my phone are super helpful for tracking when certain plants flowered or produced fruit. I also have a spiral-bound notebook for notes, though it's not the most organized. This year, I focused on logging the productivity of over 30 tomato varieties with an Excel sheet, tracking each fruit I picked and weighing them. But as the harvest picked up, I kinda fell off the wagon with that project.
I keep track of when I plant and harvest my crops, along with how much I harvested. This really helps me understand the timeline for my plants. I also make maps of my garden beds and note what didn’t work out. For example, my pole beans ended up shading my eggplant too much, which cut down on production. Next year, I'll move my fall crops to a sunnier spot.
This is my first year gardening in a new spot with containers, so I've been keeping notes on seed starting and transplant dates, as well as frost dates. I want to have useful info for next year instead of just guessing!