I like to think I have a good memory, I definitely brag about it. But heading into a new grow season, it’s easy to forget all the ups and downs of the previous year. I can remember that we were swimming in hot peppers, chard, and pumpkins but I couldn’t tell you what their names were or how many I might have planted. Since my homesteading aspirations weren’t realized this time last year, my garden records were pretty non-existant.
This year I’m going to be more involved in our ⅛ acre, or whatever size our small plot of suburban hell we occupy is. I appropriated one of the many empty notebooks I’ve squirrled away for this journal, along with some colored washi tape and markers to give it some personality. While I’d like to record all the minutiae that I’ve seen on Pinterest and other garden-y blogs (rainfall amounts, daily temps, moon cycles?) collecting that data on a regular basis sounds overwhelming for a paper garden journal. Instead, I’ll probably make a spreadsheet, spend a day or so making all the columns and rows look cute and then never use it.
For now, I’m going to add useful information as the summer drags on and figure out what was useful and go from there.