Although we’re keeping up with a lot of our day to day stuff in this blog, I’ve started a garden journal in a binder to track the progress of the plants and garden. There are many ways of keeping a journal and many suggestions and plans on the web…but I unfortunately couldn’t find any true online journals. And I guess that somehow, for something like this, I prefer a tangible book that I can write and draw in, as well as paste pictures and save seed packets in anyway. I find it’s much easier to draw out our garden on graph paper versus drawing it up with some piece of software. I change things so often and like to see how our plans and thoughts evolve over time. Plus this makes it easy to keep track of where things were planted in the past, where they thrived and so on.

I’ve read that no matter how you keep your journal, the most important this is simply that you keep one. With that being said, I’ll go into a bit more detail about my own. I will preface all this by saying that little “projects” like these are what have S and me constantly referring to my similarities to Monica (Courtney Cox Arquette’s character on Friends). I tend to be a bit anal retentive on these matters and love to have it organized to a tee. Yes, I have a disease…I’m fine with it 🙂

So here’s what I’ve done…

The basic components of the binder are dividers, graph paper, lined paper and plastic sleeves.

There are currently 6 divisions:

  • Planting – here I’ve got a log of each time we plant seeds, including how we planted them, how many pots and what plants. This will also give me a quick overview later on so I can look up specific plants from various years.
  • Layout – this is full of various drawings and plans that we’ve made so far for the garden. Now that we basically have the dimensions set, this section will include a lot of plans of the raised beds and what we plant there.
  • Greenhouse – we’ll take notes about what we have growing in the greenhouse here and also have our plans for building the compost here. We can also keep track of how long the materials last for things like the compost and greenhouse with these records.
  • Veggies, Fruits & Herbs – Each of these has it’s own section but they’re basically broken down the same internally. I’ve started a page for each type of seed we’ve planted. I’m tracking when they sprout, how many and so on. I’ll also keep notes about whether they do better in certain beds or under certain circumstances and how they tasted. I’m also keeping the seed packets with the growing information on them. Those with information I’ve put in a plastic seed so we can read all the info…others I’ve just taped onto notebook paper.

I imagine I will eventually add a few more tabs as we add various new things to the garden that don’t fall into these categories as we get time to start growing them. But this is pretty much it at the moment. Writing it out, it doesn’t seem quite so nutty…but then again, it probably is. lol