Hello! I was wondering if any of you keep garden journals. I got a post in my email this morning that encouraged starting a garden journal and I am intrigued at the idea. The author of the post says she mentions why she plants certain flowers and she intends to press flowers between the pages, add photos, quotes and poetry. She hopes someday a great grandchild may read the journal and learn about who she is. I'm hoping next year to add garden stones and maybe a simple bench. I love this idea!

Well, I'd love to say I have an heirloom-quality garden journal, but the old spiral bound notebook works great.

I log everything, when my tomatoes sprouted, when I put them out, etc. It's awesome. That way I know EVERYTHING. Even when I picked my first lemon cucumber.

I majored in accounting, so the fact that I have a whole notebook with areas devoted to receipts for things I ordered online, a seed inventory, graph-paper sketches of the garden, and lists of things I plan to plant each season shouldn't come as a surprise.

It would be a crushing blow for me to lose the garden book, as I call it. LOL

I also have a cheap photo album filled with photos of my garden. It's right next to the wedding book. LOL

I too keep a very informal journal where I jot down dates planted, notes, sketch ideas and current layouts. It is very helpful to refer back to throughout the season and for future planning. I would eventually like to find some binder type thing to hold all this with a way to organize my seeds within. Any ideas?

Yes. I use a spiral notebook. It is great; no way I could keep all the details in my head. I draw the beds each year and note what, where, when...what amendments are added...what varieties do well and which don't. The more detailed the better.

I fully planned on doing this for my new garden, but haven't done it. Now, I'm already harvesting. Do you think it's too late for this season?

I don't think so, but that's just me. I keep very detailed journals, more ledger-like actually. I use actual old-fashioned ledgers. Bug activity, when they show up, what they're doing, weather patterns, plantings, behaviors and performances of plants and varieties; I get pretty detailed. Not that everybody has to do that. Your season is far from over, you would still have much to record. It's all very helpful toward following seasons. Never too late.

Cool, I love an excuse to use a pretty journal.

I've been gardening for 20 years or so and this is the first year I've really consistently kept a garden journal and I sure wish I'd started it sooner!

I just jot things down in a little spiral notebook, but someday I hope to be a little more organized. I love the idea of making it a sort of garden scrapbook to hand down to future generations.

Garden Chic, I just got a back to school type binder, some of the divider envelopes, a penholder, loose (3 hole punched) binder paper, and loose notebook paper in addition to the spiral notebook. Colored pens and pencils, and I was still less than $10.

When I get my soil test results they are going into their own folder. I really love it.

I don't keep a garden journal, as such. Instead of leaving markers on all my rows of veggies and tomatoes, I draw a map of my garden in that marvellously versatile spiralbound notebook.

It's quite grubby -- but it works great!

I always use pencil, too, because ink will bleed if the pages get wet -- even ball-point and felt-tip marker.

On the facing page of the garden map, I jot down notes halfway through the season (July) and again at harvest, noting how the plants have thrived (or not), how much they produced, whether they suffered from mildew, fungi, or succumbed to an insect massacre, and whether the soil conditions were amended (my community garden didn't do so hot this year because the compost I used had too much wood in it). At harvest time, I also note whether I enjoyed the taste of a particular tomato or bean, and advise myself against planting it again, or exhort myself to seek out that variety again, and plant more of it.

I have 5 years of gardens in that notebook. Almost time for a new one. It's really interesting to see how the vegetable garden has expanded, how my front yard has changed, and how I've included a couple of plots at the community garden over the last 3 years.

Nothing but HB and ruled paper. No frills. Down to earth. You can tell from the stains. I guess that'd teach quite a lot to the next person who thinks that kind of stuff is interesting.

I think it's nice, too, to press flowers and plants or bits of plants (leaf samples and such) into the journal, include garden photos and /or sketches, and notes such as "grandchild #1 grew his first 9-foot sunflower summer '05", with an accompanying photo. Things like that.

Nowadays everything can be done and stored on the computer, but it is just not the same as descendants holding the books in their hands, with the occasional dirt-smeared page, real handwriting, and flowers of old slipping from nooks and crannies into their hands.

I have a bunch of four-leaf clovers pressed in my teenaged scrapbook from my lawn in France. (No longer exists... )

I agree, that there's nothing like handling a book. And who knows whether the box of silvery discs will even be READABLE in 20 years, or whether our grandchildren will will even have a retro-compatible technology to look at our digital photos, our electronically-stored anecdotes, emails, letters, our accounting... I have a (photocopy) of my great-grandfather's mortgage on his farm, his copy of the bank receipt and title to the land; he'd scrawled "BLOODSUCKERS" across the page! :^O Can't tag your electronic stuff like that!

The most enduring form of record-keeping has always been hard-copy: paper, clay tablet, petroglyphs, tapestry, painting... The electron is far too flighty a master for master copies.

I love that. Bloodsuckers. Boy, they are, too.

Aside from my ledgers I have my father's 1937 Wildflowers, by Homer D. House, a massive green-cloth-bound hardcover book about, well, wildflowers. It was given him by my mother's parents and has his name and their initials in the front in fountain-pen ink.

The nature of the paper and its 1937 chemistry is such that you can put flowers in at "their" page, close the book, and they're perfectly pressed and preserved with no additional efforts and no damage to the pages. This old book is filled with flowers and leaves my father collected on walks with me, and those that I've collected on walks with my son. He intends to use it with his children.

I can, and do, open it all the time for reference, but for sentiment, too. To be able to open a book and have something from my dad's life drop into my hand, I can't think of a word equal to that.

What a wonderful treasure, beebop! I wish I had something like that. I did keep some of my dad's fishing lures to remember fishing trips. I am pressing some of my flowers this year to put in my journal. I may include some of my favorite recipes using garden stuff as well in my own handwriting. I think that is important.

I am not the best at journaling, but I try (some might say I am very trying). I include a lot of daily things (not all gardening). Something I read in a book called "How to Think like Leonardo Da Vinci". His journals ran the whole gambit from his concept of a helicopter to how much he spent for lunch that day. In retrspect it is all rather interesting and your journal can give you interesting memories in years to come (maybe a few stories to tell the grandkids.