Perhaps the item that has helped me the most in referring back to my recent garden activities and comparing them to the current situation in the garden has been a calendar, the kind that has a beautiful garden picture on the top side and the month’s worth of days at the bottom. For me, this is more effective than an official journal that I have to flip through pages, because the calendar enables me to see the entire month at once – and therefore more easily consider visually what I’ve done when and when the results showed themselves.
In the month-all-at-once layout, I start logging what I did on “Sunday” and write straight across the weekdays through to “Saturday”, beginning a new line for each main topic activity, such as “Seeded, Transplanted, Watered, Pruned.” I also note any weather specifics such as “cloudy, rainy, sunny, and temperatures like 70s day 50s night. All this detail is easily referred back to weeks or months later to see perhaps why seeds didn’t come up or tomato blossoms fell off, or how long it’d been since I’d planted beans and consequently which varieties to sow again.
This all got started years ago in early January when I had difficulty determining which of several beautiful gardening calendars to choose. I purchased 3 of my favorites, but instead of admonishing myself for excessive spending, I devised uses for each one – one for the kitchen where we keep our family appointments, one for the bedroom as a pleasant morning awakening picture and evening bidding adieu to the day, and one for my “official” garden notes.
So, instead of limiting yourself to one 2026 calendar, choose several. Surely you can invent more uses for the extra ones!
In the month-all-at-once layout, I start logging what I did on “Sunday” and write straight across the weekdays through to “Saturday”, beginning a new line for each main topic activity, such as “Seeded, Transplanted, Watered, Pruned.” I also note any weather specifics such as “cloudy, rainy, sunny, and temperatures like 70s day 50s night. All this detail is easily referred back to weeks or months later to see perhaps why seeds didn’t come up or tomato blossoms fell off, or how long it’d been since I’d planted beans and consequently which varieties to sow again.
This all got started years ago in early January when I had difficulty determining which of several beautiful gardening calendars to choose. I purchased 3 of my favorites, but instead of admonishing myself for excessive spending, I devised uses for each one – one for the kitchen where we keep our family appointments, one for the bedroom as a pleasant morning awakening picture and evening bidding adieu to the day, and one for my “official” garden notes.
So, instead of limiting yourself to one 2026 calendar, choose several. Surely you can invent more uses for the extra ones!
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