A few years ago, I started keeping a gardening journal for the first time. As a year-round gardener, I have multiple gardening spaces including 4 raised beds, a small unheated greenhouse and a deck which I use to house 10-12 large pots and numerous small-to-medium-sized containers in the warmer months. My aim was to grow enough food to meet at least half of my family’s needs for fresh produce. I also wanted to be able to share a surplus with neighbors and friends. Little did I know that a garden journal could help me achieve so much more than I expected!

At first, I started out sporadically recording information in the journal, mainly keeping track of what I had planted, and which crops needed to be rotated and when. Eventually, writing in the journal became a more regular activity and one that I looked forward to doing, especially in the spring through fall seasons, when my garden was at its most productive. Over the past 3 years I’ve found that not only has keeping a garden journal enabled me to surpass my original goal, but it has also made me a savvier, more efficient gardener. It has also provided numerous benefits to my mental and emotional health, including enabling me to reduce my day-to-day stress, improve my focus, and helped me to become more reflective and grateful for the ability to provide my family with pesticide-free, healthy food, much as a mindfulness journal would do.

10 Benefits of keeping a gardening journal 

Whether you’re a beginning gardener or someone with many years of experience, a gardening journal can enable you to become a more skilled grower. As the summer months come to an end and the fall gardening season begins, there’s no reason to stop gardening, whether you grow food, flowers, or some of both. There are numerous physical and mental health benefits to gardening, so why stop now, especially when keeping a journal can help your garden to perform to its best ability? Here are 10 reasons why you should start keeping a gardening journal this fall season (or any season).

1. Track the progress of your garden

Keeping a gardening journal allows you to track the progress of your garden. If you are starting or have started planting for a late fall or early winter harvest, or if you live in the southern hemisphere (I'm thinking of you, readers in Australia) and are just gearing up for your warm weather planting season, keeping a journal can be the deciding factor in your ability to plant, maintain, and harvest a healthy, thriving and productive garden. You can record when you planted each crop, how it is growing, and any issues or successes you encounter along the way. Tracking the progress of your garden is the best way to learn from your successes and failures and get better at gardening over time.

2. Learn from Mistakes

One of the hard truths about growing a garden is that at some point you will experience failure. Sometimes it's minor, but at other times it can be catastrophic. And if you use your garden to earn income, failure can be the difference between being able to pay your bills or not. By documenting your gardening journey this fall, you can learn from any mistakes or failures you may have experienced and improve your performance with your fall crops or plantings. By recording the details of mistakes you've made in the garden or documenting the decline or loss of plants, you can identify patterns or trends that may have contributed to the issues, allowing you to make adjustments so that your fall garden is more successful.

3. Plan for the Future:

In some ways, keeping a gardening journal is a beacon of hope: it helps you envision and plan for the future. You can review your notes from previous seasons to determine what worked well and what didn't, helping you make more informed decisions for the next year's garden. You can also keep track of the things you want to plant in your garden, or how you'd like to redesign or improve areas of your garden that no longer serve you well.

You can also use a garden journal to keep track of your harvest: in fact, fall is a great time to enjoy the cooler weather while harvesting your summer-grown fruits and vegetables. When you’re picking your produce, be sure to jot down how much you collected and what quality they were in. This information can help inform future planting decisions, as well as give you an idea of how much yield to expect in the future.

4. Remember important details about planting

It's easy to forget important details about your garden, such as when you sowed seeds, the date you transplanted a particular flower, the specific variety of a certain vegetable you are growing, or when you need to begin succession planting so you can continue harvesting up until the cold weather hits. Sometimes stickers, planting labels, or signs come off or fade beyond recognition in the weather and you're left guessing what you planted. By jotting down these details in your journal, you can easily reference them while you're waiting for your garden to grow.

5. Track Pest and Disease Issues:

Keeping a record of any pest or disease issues you encounter in your fall garden can be incredibly helpful. A common way to do this is to note which pests or diseases have attacked which plants, what steps you took to remedy the problem, and the results of your efforts. Another, even more efficient method is to keep records of the life cycles of herbivore pests like squash bugs, Japanese beetles, aphids, and others, so you can plant earlier, or later, depending on when they will appear.

You'll also find that keeping track of which pest control methods worked on which pests will enable you to be more effective at keeping insect damage down this fall and preventing similar problems in the future, Keeping track of pests and diseases can also potentially allow you to grow more successfully with few or no pesticides, which cause damage to the environment, your growing soil, and may in fact worsen the insect or disease problems in your garden!

6. Document Sunlight and Weather Patterns

Did you know that tracking the movement of the sun in your garden is crucial for ensuring robust flower growth and a plentiful harvest? If you have a small space, or a large growing area with shady and sunny spots, taking the time to track the movement of the sun through your garden will let you know what you can plant where for the best results. Most flowers and flowering vegetables and fruits need 6-8 hours of direct sunlight, while many leafy greens and some flowers can tolerate much less sun or even partially shady areas. As the days shorten in the northern hemisphere and lengthen in the southern hemisphere, knowing how much sunlight you have to work with, and where it shines longest in your garden is invaluable for growing a thriving garden this fall.

Aside from the sun, weather plays a significant role in the success or failure of your garden. By documenting the weather conditions in your journal this fall, you can identify any correlations between certain weather patterns and plant growth or issues. With an in-ground or raised bed garden, you have fewer options for mitigating bad or harsh weather than in a container garden that allows you to move plants around for more sun or protection from the harsh elements. Either way, tracking the sunlight and weather patterns in your garden will enable you to make informed decisions and take appropriate actions to preserve your plants and help them grow to their full potential. 

7. Track your experimentation and successes:

Gardening often involves experimenting with different crops and techniques. Sometimes, too, what works well one year doesn't work as well the next year, so knowing where your experiments have yielded unexpected results is important for being able to repeat or adjust them the next time around. In other words, by documenting your experiments and noting the outcomes, you can remember what worked well and what didn't. This will allow you to refine your gardening practices over time and increase your chances of success in future seasons.

8. Share Knowledge and Tips

A gardening journal can serve as a valuable resource for sharing knowledge and tips with fellow gardeners. If you like to visit farmers' markets, you can gain valuable tidbits of information from fellow growers about how they handled a problem in their garden, where to get varieties of plants you've been searching for, or even what plants perform best in the fall season. You can also refer back to your journal when offering advice or answering questions, helping others learn from your experiences.

9. Personal Reflection

Using my gardening journal for personal reflection and connection with my garden was an unexpected benefit I discovered when I first began keeping a journal. It also allowed me to record the times when I was more or less attentive to the plants in my garden, to reminisce about crops and flowers that I particularly enjoyed, and to dream up new, bigger plans for my garden. While keeping a gardening journal is primarily about improving your garden's performance, it doesn't only have to be about that. You can also write about your thoughts, feelings, and observations, creating a deeper connection to the natural world around you.

10. Preserve Memories

Last, keeping a gardening journal is a wonderful way to preserve memories of your fall garden. You can look back on previous years' entries and reminisce about the beauty and joy your garden brought you. Depending on what you record in your journal, it may also be able to serve as a meaningful keepsake that can be passed down through generations.

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We are in the process of developing a garden journal for sale as a digital download or as a hard copy on Etsy and Amazon.com. We'd love for you to visit our Etsy shop and take a look at the downloadable journal pages we currently have to offer and consider making a purchase to help support our small business. We are adding new items frequently and will be publishing the entire gardening journal this month (August); if you'd like to be notified when the journal is available for purchase, please sign up for our mailing list. By doing so, you'll also have exclusive access to our library of free resources as well as discounts on our online courses!

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