Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases if you buy something through one of my links. Don’t worry, I only promote products or services that we have used or would want to use ourselves!
My husband, Cody, is the resident gardener here on The Compound. He has a natural green thumb, and what’s more, he’s passionate about growing our own food!
Every year right around mid January he starts getting the gardening bug (which led to experimenting with winter sowing this year!). By late spring, the greenhouse is always overrun with summer veggie starts ready to be planted and the garden is popping up with all kinds of yummy things to eat!
Cody loves to experiment, always trying new seed varieties and new growing techniques; gardening is definitely a creative outlet for him! But with so many different ideas and experiments going on, it can be difficult for him to keep track of what’s working and what isn’t.
Enter: garden journaling.
What is a garden journal?
All the great gardeners will tell you to keep a garden journal. Trying to keep track of what you grew where, what you did new/differently, and how good a harvest you got each year is very difficult to do if you’re just relying on your memory.
But by keeping a written log of everything you do in the garden, you can look back and reference it year after year, allowing you to repeat that things that worked and discard ideas that weren’t so useful.
How to use a garden journal
The easiest way to start a garden journal is to have a separate page for each thing you are planting, and update that same page as time goes by. So you’d have one page for tomatoes, a page for cucumbers, a page for zucchini, etc.
Write the plant kind at the top of the page. On the first line below, write the current year, then below that describe what variety you chose, when you started the seeds, how many plants grew, how big a harvest you got, etc. This can be as detailed or as simple as you like. Cody likes to add notes about what seed-starting methods he used and if they were successful, watering schedules, and thoughts about what might’ve caused a crop to fail.
Drawing pictures or diagrams can also be very useful as a planting visual aid, or even just remembering how the garden was laid out.
Choosing a notebook
You can use a standard spiral-bound notebook for this if you just want to get started quickly, but depending on how many notes you keep per crop, you can easily fill a whole page in a year or two. If you fill up your page on tomatoes and the next page is about carrots, then you’ll either have to start a new notebook for the next year, or start a new tomato page somewhere else in the notebook, which leaves you flipping through the pages trying to find all your tomato information.
Some people use a 3-ring binder and loose lined paper to get around this dilemma, but then you’re dealing with a bulky binder, and the pages tend to tear at the holes if you’re not super careful.
For Cody’s journal, he bought a Filofax refillable notebook. It’s a small slender book (A5 size), making it easy to tote back and forth to the garden, but the pages can be rearranged! This design makes it super easy to simply add another page to keep writing about tomatoes instead of jumping around in your notebook trying to find everything tomato-related.
(As a bonus, you can buy refill pages in tons of different styles – lined paper, dotted journal, calendar or address templates, etc… Check out some of their refill options here!)
Starting an online garden journal
All that said, as great as this garden notebook has been for the past few years, Cody is trying something new this year.
The downside of having a paper garden journal is that sometimes you want to write something down right away, but you don’t have the notebook with you. Sure you could make a note and try to remember to transfer it to the journal later, but let’s be real… a busy life often gets in the way of our best intentions!
Cody was finding that he had a hard time keeping up with the journal and it was never with him in the moments when he needed it, so last week he came up with the idea of doing an online garden journal here on the blog!
He’s starting a new post for each crop he’s growing this year, and he’ll continue to update them with his planting notes, growth pictures, and harvest data as the seasons progress. He always has his phone on him, so he can add a quick note to the post or reference back any time he needs to.
Cody has really enjoyed keeping a garden journal, and I hope having a digital one will be even more useful to him. Hey, and as an added bonus, now you guys can read his gardening notes too! Check out his new page here:
The Leekton Post
(If you want to know what’s up with the name “Leekton”, you’ll have to read about it on his page. 😉
Whether you prefer a solid notebook that you can physically write in, or an online diary that you can edit on your phone, I encourage you to consider starting a journal to keep track of your garden this year. I promise it will be super helpful to look back on come next planting season!
Subscribe to our monthly newsletter, The Compound Communiqué, for fun extra content that didn’t make the blog!
Check out our Instagram for daily snapshots of life on the homestead.
Follow us on YouTube for cool video content
Feels Like Homestead 
Leave a comment