Gardening Journals
Posted in Gardening Tips on December 6 2011, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
With the holidays around the corner, this is the time of year when we start giving the gardeners we love the gardening memorabilia they’ll adore. I am always delighted to receive new gardening books, calendars based on gardening themes, and pens adorned with silk flowers.
If you would like to give the gardener in your life–and that may be yourself–a practical gift, then I would recommend exploring gardening journals. Getting into the habit of keeping records during the gardening season is a wonderful way of compiling a history of your endeavors and organizing your seasonal tasks. Your favorite varieties can be recorded for future use and the successes and failures of the season are always instructive.
Gardening calendars remind you when to plant your peas, pinch your asters, and stake your grasses. Keeping notes on your favorite varieties is a way of recording taste, performance, color, and growth habit. This is instrumental in helping you order seeds for the upcoming season or create successful combinations in your perennial and annual borders.
Many botanical gardens provide seasonal calendars on their websites that outline monthly gardening chores–we do the same here at The New York Botanical Garden. It is a helpful way of reminding you to think about your own garden maintenance. And when you do it on your own, it becomes more personal and specific to your particular garden arrangement.
Here are some suggestions for the type of information useful in a journal, notebook, or calendar:
- Soil tests and soil analysis
- Sowing dates/germination dates for seeds
- Planting, flowering, and harvest dates
- Gardening chores/maintenance
- Fertilizer and amendment types, uses, and application dates
- Weather information
- Pest and disease problems
- The sources and costs for seeds, plants, and products
- Diagrams and gardening plans
You can find commercial journals available in most large bookstores, while many garden catalog companies will have nice choices as well. Some of them contain blank pages for you to fill in; others are formatted with different templates that provide you with headings and charts; and many include regional gardening tips from experts.
If you have a creative bent, you can make your own gardening notebook, be it of simple or elaborate design–whichever suits you best. Diaries, three-ring binders, or notebooks can be used as a starting point. And to help you figure out where to start, there are several good online sources that provide templates for garden journals. Two that I have recently come across are Northern Gardening and Garden and Crafts, and if you need other examples, you can click here to visit them.
Gardening notebooks and journals make simple yet welcome gifts for the gardener. It is a wonderful way of remembering the seasonal cycles in your garden so that you know how your garden responds to drought and to heavy rains; it allows you to anticipate tasks such as staking your ornamental grasses before the dreaded flop over, or when you need to gear up to divide your hostas and prune your roses. A good journal can be an object of beauty and function, and serve well for years.
If you keep records of your gardening activities, what are your favorite methods of doing so?
