Starting a Garden Journal You'll Actually Keep
Honestly, I almost didn't teach this lesson because I know how it sounds. A journal. Something else to keep up with, on top of watering and weeding and the aphids and whatever the frost is doing this week.
But three seasons in, my garden journal is the single most useful thing I own for this yard. More useful than any book, because it's not about the county average, it's about my dirt, my slope, my well water. Yours will be about your yard. That's the whole point.
What I actually mean by "journal"
Not fancy. Mine is a cheap spiral notebook from the school supply aisle, the kind you buy three of for a dollar in August. I've got soil pH notes in there, sowing dates, what died and when, and some pencil drawings of leaves that are, honestly, pretty rough. I showed Keith a sketch of a squash leaf once and he asked if it was a map. I've decided that's fine. The drawing doesn't have to be good. It has to remind you what you saw.
If a notebook isn't your thing, use your phone. Notes app, or just photos with the date stamp doing the remembering for you. I do both. A photo shows you the truth, a note tells you what you were thinking at the time, and you need both because your memory by October is garbage. Mine is anyway.
Why this matters more here than the gardening books let on
Every gardening book you'll read was written for somewhere with a longer season and kinder soil than we have at the point of the mountain. Their averages don't help you. What helps you is your own record of your own last frost, your own soil, your own water.
Case in point, and I've said this before in this course: ignore the seed packet dates. They're written for somewhere warmer than here. What actually protects you is knowing your own yard's pattern, year over year, written down instead of half-remembered. That's the journal doing its job.
What to actually write down
Keep it simple your first year or you'll quit by June. I'd track:
- Sow or transplant date, and what you planted
- Weather that surprised you — a late cold night, an early heat spike, hail, whatever got your attention
- What died and your best guess why. Don't skip the failures. They're the useful ones.
- What worked, and what you'd do differently
- A quick sketch or photo when something looks off or looks great. Compare it next year.
I write the sow date on a popsicle stick in the bed too, because I learned the hard way that I cannot trust my memory on when I planted something. I direct-sowed carrots too early one year, guessing at the date, and half the seed just rotted in cold ground. The half that came up were fine. Now the stick tells me, so I stop guessing.
Make it a five-minute habit, not a project
The trick to actually keeping a journal is making the entry short enough that you'll do it standing in the dirt with your coffee. Three lines. Date, what you did, what you noticed. That's a full entry most days.
The exception is when something's really going on, a frost hit, a plant's leaves went yellow overnight, you finally figured out why your beds have that white crusty film on top in August (mine's the hard water here, took me an embarrassingly long time to connect that one). Those days you write more, because those are the entries you'll actually reread next spring when the same thing starts happening again.
A good afternoon makes for good entries
One spring my daughter Jane was home for a weekend and we spent an afternoon stringing up pea trellises together. We didn't talk about anything important, just worked side by side, handed each other twine, argued a little about how tight to string it. That evening I wrote maybe four lines in the journal about the trellis height and when the peas went in. Nothing dramatic. But I still have that entry, and every time I read it I remember the whole afternoon, not just the peas.
That's what a journal actually gives you, if you keep at it. Not just data. A record of the seasons, in your own handwriting, that means something to you specifically. The pea trellis note means something to me that it wouldn't mean to anybody else reading it, and that's fine. It's not supposed to be a public document. It's supposed to be useful and yours.
Before next time
Grab whatever notebook you've got lying around the house, even a half-used one from something else, and write down today's date and one sentence about what your yard is doing right now. That's the whole assignment. Once it's started, it's a lot easier to keep going.
- D