Keeping track of the garden in a journal has benefits
Keeping track of thoughts, plans, failures and successes in the garden can easily be done if you keep a garden journal. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. It could be as simple as a loose-leaf notebook. There are pretty journals available specific to gardening and there is the newest form of journaling, the blog, a personal, online diary or journal.
Regardless of how you choose to document the garden, the practice of journaling will be helpful and entertaining in the coming seasons. It’s always fun to look back a few years to see how the garden was doing before you put the fence up or started using compost.
Journal entries this time of year can include seed starting dates, plant descriptions and perhaps a sketch of what you imagine the garden will look like in July when it begins to produce an abundance of food.
A garden journal will be helpful in keeping track of crop rotation, which is important as it discourages soil depletion, pest outbreaks and soil-borne diseases. Moving crops each year to a new bed or location will benefit the plants and the soil.
When you have been gardening a long time, years run together and it becomes difficult to remember if it was last year or the year before the sweet peas did so well and the blight took your tomatoes…every last one of them. A well kept journal can be a reference you turn to in the planning, nurturing and harvesting stages of your garden.
I often talk about growing food in the garden but a garden journal works as well for growers of flowers, groundcovers, trees or basic landscaping plants.
Include photographs in your journal to document healthy plants and the unhealthy ones. Taking a picture of a diseased plant will give you a reference to turn to in case your plants fall victim again. You might be able to diagnose the disease sooner and save the plant from an untimely demise.
Record temperatures and weather related information. We’ve all been complaining about how cold it is as March comes to an end. If we consult our garden journal it will show what the weather was like last year at this time…and it probably wasn’t all that different.
Spring is cruel when she throws those 70 degree days at us and then takes them back. Remember, our region normally gets frost until the second week of May. Complaining about the weather while you are in line at the bank, picking up the kids from school, or making small talk with your local garden center employee will not make the warm weather come any faster.
Until planting can begin, take advantage of this time to tend to your cool weather crops. You did start those, yes? Nurture the seeds you planted indoors. Continue to prepare the garden with soil amendments like manure and compost.
Write it all down in your garden journal. Make notations about the birds and other wildlife you see from the garden. Birds might surprise you when they come to nest in the same location as last year. I have no proof that the doves building a nest in the basket on the back porch are the same ones who were there last year and the year before, but I’d like to think they return each year to call this place home.
To read more Avant Gardener, visit Kyle at www.TuscBargainHunter.com.
Regardless of how you choose to document the garden, the practice of journaling will be helpful and entertaining in the coming seasons. It’s always fun to look back a few years to see how the garden was doing before you put the fence up or started using compost.
Journal entries this time of year can include seed starting dates, plant descriptions and perhaps a sketch of what you imagine the garden will look like in July when it begins to produce an abundance of food.
A garden journal will be helpful in keeping track of crop rotation, which is important as it discourages soil depletion, pest outbreaks and soil-borne diseases. Moving crops each year to a new bed or location will benefit the plants and the soil.
When you have been gardening a long time, years run together and it becomes difficult to remember if it was last year or the year before the sweet peas did so well and the blight took your tomatoes…every last one of them. A well kept journal can be a reference you turn to in the planning, nurturing and harvesting stages of your garden.
I often talk about growing food in the garden but a garden journal works as well for growers of flowers, groundcovers, trees or basic landscaping plants.
Include photographs in your journal to document healthy plants and the unhealthy ones. Taking a picture of a diseased plant will give you a reference to turn to in case your plants fall victim again. You might be able to diagnose the disease sooner and save the plant from an untimely demise.
Record temperatures and weather related information. We’ve all been complaining about how cold it is as March comes to an end. If we consult our garden journal it will show what the weather was like last year at this time…and it probably wasn’t all that different.
Spring is cruel when she throws those 70 degree days at us and then takes them back. Remember, our region normally gets frost until the second week of May. Complaining about the weather while you are in line at the bank, picking up the kids from school, or making small talk with your local garden center employee will not make the warm weather come any faster.
Until planting can begin, take advantage of this time to tend to your cool weather crops. You did start those, yes? Nurture the seeds you planted indoors. Continue to prepare the garden with soil amendments like manure and compost.
Write it all down in your garden journal. Make notations about the birds and other wildlife you see from the garden. Birds might surprise you when they come to nest in the same location as last year. I have no proof that the doves building a nest in the basket on the back porch are the same ones who were there last year and the year before, but I’d like to think they return each year to call this place home.
To read more Avant Gardener, visit Kyle at www.TuscBargainHunter.com.
Published: March 29, 2011
