On a Twitter chat, I once heard a gardener say that she inherited a notebook full of gardening advice from her grandmother. It was full of advice on the local growing conditions, her grandmother’s tricks and tips that she’d learned over probably decades of gardening. Talk about an heirloom! That’s information that should probably be published. A gardener would sell their favorite trowel for information like that.
Looking back on my first year of vegetable gardening, there are so many things I feel I’ve already forgotten. I kept some notes, but a more diligent tracking of my moves in the garden would have made for a much more robust starting point for next season.
Here’s my effort to remedy that. Have you heard of bullet journaling? It’s a note taking system that really stuck with me over the last few years. Now I’m using some of its ideas to track what I’ve done in the garden and what I want to do next.
Garden Bullet Journal Pages
Here’s what I have for my gardening bullet journal pages:
Garden goals: What I want to accomplish in 2017 and how to get there. Writing them down makes them a little more real and makes it less likely that I’ll fall behind on a goal or forget it completely.
Seed varieties/crop details: A place to aggregate all the info you find on your plants. There are slightly different variables to take note of for flower varieties versus vegetable varieties.
Monthly calendar. I prefer a monthly calendar for the garden over daily or weekly. Dates to keep track of include seed starting, transplanting, germination, harvest and frost dates.
Crop harvest count: A list of the crops you grew and notes on when and how much you harvested.
To do differently next year: Here’s where I’ll make notes through the season about what didn’t turn out exactly as planned.
Advice to remember: Be sure to keep track of all those tiny pieces of wisdom that you pick up, whether they’re from other gardeners, books or the internet.
You can see more of my gardening bullet journal, with printable templates you can use, by filling out the form below. The printables include templates for variety notes, garden goals, a fertilizer calendar and more.
