How to Document the Growth of Your Garden
Our gardens are always changing—from one day to the next, a new shoot can appear, or a tree can come into bloom seemingly from nowhere. But trying to remember those changes and keep track of them season by season can be challenging.
Documenting your garden throughout the year offers many benefits, not least an opportunity to see how productive your outdoor space has been. It’s a chance to not only see what’s performed well and what hasn’t, but to have a record of what you’ve grown each year and how the seasons impact the growth of different plants. Here, we’ll take a look at why a journal could be your most valuable piece of garden equipment and some of the methods we recommend getting started with.
Why Create a Garden Journal?
Gardens benefit considerably from documentation and observation because you can build on the knowledge you gain each year. Even if you’ve lived in the same property for years, your garden can change so much depending on a variety of factors. A journal helps you note down those changes so you can build on the experience you gain from each challenge.
Documenting helps you experiment with the discoveries of gardeners before you, work out what grows well in your specific part of the world, and reflect on different experiences you have in your garden too.
It’s an opportunity to track the progress of the plans and understand their development, identify patterns like pest problems or weather conditions, and celebrate successes. Historical records show us that many successful gardeners throughout the years have kept horticultural journals, and you too can follow in their footsteps by tracking the ebb and flow of your own outdoor space.
How and What to Journal
Methods for Documenting
The first step to create a practical document of your garden is to decide which medium you’re going to choose. Maybe you’re a keen writer, in which case a classic notebook might be the way forward. With the garden being such a multi-sensory experience, photos can also work extremely well. Invest in a beginner-friendly camera and take regular snapshots of your garden each month, paired with observations and notes that you can reflect on in subsequent years.
If you’re a keen artist, sketching or painting your garden in its various stages of life can be a relaxing way to unwind and stretch your creative muscles while also celebrating the beauty of the garden throughout the year. Of course, you’re not limited to one format. A journal that combines personal reflections, photos and sketches, classic diary entries and cut-outs from magazines or blogs can be a beautiful way to capture the highs and lows of managing a garden that you’ll treasure for years to come.
What to Journal
In terms of what to journal, there are a few essential elements that will make your garden journal as comprehensive and useful as it can be. The first is planting dates—keep a record of when and where you planted each type of plant, and how they’ve performed. On a similar note, keep track of the weather conditions as these will affect the performance of your plants. Temperature, rainfall, and frost dates are all key to a successful garden.
If you love to experiment with different varieties, tracking your seed purchases can be helpful to monitor the varieties you enjoyed and which you’d want to grow again in the future. Document what you’ve harvested from each seed or bulb, the quantities and dates of the harvest, and the growth stages of the plants from seed to harvest. Another useful note to take is pest problems or diseases that your garden might suffer from, and any methods you’ve used to control them.
Finally, don’t forget to draw diagrams of your garden layout each season, as this will help you track which layout works best in terms of light and shelter from the wind. When you find a layout that’s particularly fruitful, you’ll value having a record of it to improve your garden’s performance in the future.
No matter what the format of your garden journal, documenting your successes and failures offers so much potential for growth, reflection, and knowledge. Whether it’s a weekly entry, noting now and again, or a commitment throughout the seasons, your garden journal is sure to become a cherished component of your gardening hobby.
