How To Start A Simple Garden Journal

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You don’t need to be growing a huge plot of potatoes to start a gardening journal.

If your only planting up a few pot on the patio, keeping a gardening journal can be really useful.

Especially if you are gardening with your kids.

You can also have a look at our planning sheets if you need help with your garden layout, seed sowing calendar and lots more really useful printables to get you started

A garden journal you can revisit time and time again is a wonderful way yo teach children life cycles, seasons, plant growth and so much more.

They can see their achievements laid out for them and if something goes wrong they have a ready made plan on what to do differently.

Why Use A Garden Journal?

Using a journal helps you learn from the year before.

• Did you plant enough?
• Were the spaces too tight?
• What support do you need to do better?

Popping this info into your journal saves you trying to remember everything.

Keep track of what crops you’ve grown, how much and where so you don’t end up with a glut of one thing and none of something else.

Keepin a garden journal, lets you keep track of sowing dates, when to add fertilizer, when the fruit should ripen.

You will be able to see patterns on weather and see your knowledge grow.

Use your journal to make plans for future goals.

If your out and see a garden with a beautiful pond, or a fancy trellis full of squash you can pop the idea down in your journal until you have time to think it over.

A garden journal can be anything you want it to be. You could just use it to sketch out your garden as a memory or you could plot every detail to scale.

I love to do a bit of both. The kids describe our activities and sometimes add pictures in.

I add sketches and photos in the gaps to add detail and fill it out so we have a beautiful memory to look back on.

You can also download some planning pages for your first vegetable garden, from

• Garden layout
• Sowing calendar
• Plant Families
• To do Calendar

SIMPLE TIPS FOR KEEPING A GARDEN JOURNAL

Use it regularly.
Try to add details regularly.

• A note about the weather,
• The first time you see the geese flying away for the winter
• or the date of your first planting.
• Stick in seed packets and make notes on what to do when.

Even in the winter when you don’t have much growing you can be adding to your journal whenever you have an idea for the season to come.

• Record sowing dates for early sown seeds and memories you had of the year gone past.

Make it beautiful.
We like to make it beautiful by wrapping it pattered paper.

We used to do this at school to cover our jotters and this just feels like a great ways to repurpose left over paper. Use brown paper and you can draw right on top.

We then love to draw on it and really cover it in anything important to us.

Inside you can add anything that is important to you.

-Empty seed packets,

-written instructions and

-dreams for the future.

We draw lots of pictures so we stick these in and we press and dry a lot of flowers and leaves so we decorate the pages with this.

Found an old feather, or a new photograph? Pop it in.

Make it something you love to look at and add to over and over again.

MUST HAVE INFORMATION FOR YOUR GARDEN JOURNAL

I’ve already given you lots of ideas of what you ‘could’ write but what ‘should’ you write.

This list will give you the main details to add to help your gardening, so you have the right information to improve each year.

• Keep a list of crops you grow each year
• A note of when you began sowing them, and when the sprouted
• Keep a garden plan of where you planted everything where you planted each plant. Even if that’s in pots on the patio.

Keep an idea of position so next year you know if you need to try a new position.
• How much did you harvest from your plants. This way you can work out if an adjustment you made worked or didn’t.

It’s also useful to record how much you ate, gave away or didn’t use to help you better plan your needs for next year.

Maybe you grew 2 courgette plants and had way too many to eat? -( Said every gardener ever! )
• Keep track of wildlife or animals you see, this could help monitor changes of numbers in your area.

Ok, so there is why you should keep a garden journal and what to write in it.

Now all that’s left is to get you started!

Here’s a few planning pages to get you started.

You can glue these into a proper book or make your own from a4 sheets in a binder.

Either way, get started today. Just start whatever time of year it is and where ever you plan of growing, just start.