Document your garden!!!

Garden Diary

Its important to have a garden diary. This will help you get a better understanding of what is going on in your garden season to season. I have a garden dairy which has helped me tremendously on understanding what was going on in my garden.

When I first started not everything was growing as quickly and nicely. Until I started to document the garden and getting a better understanding of all of my veggies and herbs. This gave me a better idea on what I was succeeding at and what needed more attention or a new approach. It gave me the ability to have multiple season gardens within the same garden space between the seasons.

Why you should document your garden:

• It will teach you what you have growing in your garden.
• You will be able to see what you have had success with or not.
• It will help you plan better for the next season.
• If you move you will always have record of what was done.
• This will also help you with  succession planting.
• Keeping records of garden pest.
• Keeping track of weather
• It will help you better with companion gardening.

Some of the ways to document:

• Label plants to learn their names.
• Draw sketches of your garden & plants.
• Take pictures of everything.
• Save seed packets & receipts.
• Writing everyday in the dairy
• Write down the care instructions for all your plants.

GARDEN DEFINITIONS:

-- Succession Planting: Is when you are using the same space for multiple crops. Its pretty much following one crop with another to maximize your garden's yield.
-- Companion Planting: Its the close planting of different veggies and herbs, which helps each other's growth and at times protects each other from garden pests.

There are several online apps to help you keep a garden diary. But my favorite is still to keep a hard copy of it all.

Taking pictures

Keeping the labels

Sketching the garden