A planting diary is a good habit to learn once you begin gardening seriously. The diary will allow you to keep track of a multitude of things, from planting dates, to plant care, and even weather conditions. Your diary will serve the purpose of tracking garden history so you can learn from failures and repeat successes.
Keeping a Planting Diary: Types of Diaries
Depending on how you can best keep organized, you can choose a specific type of diary to use. These are some other types of diaries to consider aside from the traditional diary.
Binder:
- Accessible because of loose-leaf pages; things can be added and taken away
- Allows you to organize different aspects of your garden into sections
- Can add things like photos or printed articles from the internet
Photo Album/Scrapbook:
- Best for people who like to see what their plants looked like at different stages
- Allows you to keep notes about your plants in correlation to how they look
- Can keep visual track of weeds you’ve encountered and need to continue removing
- Is visually attractive and easy to show to others what you’ve been doing in your garden
Day Planner:
- Can keep track in a day’s allotted space everything you did on that day
- Allows you to look ahead and write down reminders to do things on a specific day
- Maintains an organized calendar that will be easy to find dates in
- Can also keep track of other events in your life
Web Blog:
- Is sharable with friends, family, etc
- You won’t be able to misplace it
- You can have entries, photos, calendars, etc.
Keeping a Planting Diary: What to Write
You can choose to keep track of what you think will help you improve your garden in the seasons ahead. Here are some of the things that other successful gardeners have kept track of in their planting diaries.
- Source and cost of plants and seeds
- Planting dates for plants and seeds
- Transplanting dates
- Soil treatments applied, including fertilizers & chemicals used, and on which plants
- Plants characteristics as they grow (germination date, first blooms, etc)
- Weather particulars either every day or an average over time (rainfall, frost dates, etc)
- Dates of harvest, and details about appearance/taste of resulting plants
- Any additional observations
Keeping a Planting Diary: Other Items to Keep
Aside from daily notation about your gardening, there are other things you should consider keeping either in your planting diary or in a box, just in case you ever need it.
- Receipts from buying seeds or plants
- Empty seed packets to see what you’ve used
- Names of websites (or even the articles) you used to do research or buy supplies from
- Layout of your garden this year, or improved layout ideas to consider for next year
- A wishlist for next year
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