How to Start a Garden Journal (15 Tips for Success)
How to Start a Garden Journal (15 Tips for Success)
A garden journal can improve gardening success. By tracking and documenting successes and failures, gardeners are more likely to repeat positive gardening activities. There are many journal options, and Gardener Scott discusses 15 important topics that should be included in a garden journal and how he uses them. (Video #106)
03:10 Journal options
04:34 Plant Info
05:26 Important Dates
06:03 Weather Conditions
06:22 Gardening Techniques
06:52 Crop Rotation
07:08 Fertilization
07:35 Seed Info
08:05 Insects
08:31 Milestones
09:07 Successes & Failures
09:44 Next Year’s Plan
10:08 Garden Sketch
10:33 Plant Tags
10:56 Photos
11:15 Receipts
11:48 Steve’s Journal
“Gardener’s Log Book: A 5-Year Planner”
https://amzn.to/2pcNSm5
“A Year in The Garden: A Guided Journal”
https://amzn.to/3u8TV6Z
“The Garden Planner, Planner, and Log Book” https://amzn.to/2PAPHnH
“Garden Journal: Gardening Planner and Log Book” https://amzn.to/2Nr0YnN
You can help support the GardenerScott channel in three ways and it won’t cost you anything:
1.) Be part of the community by liking videos, subscribing, clicking the bell, commenting, and sharing.
2.) Watch the ads whenever you can. It just takes a few seconds and helps me a lot.
3.) If you use Amazon and want to buy anything at all, click through with this link: http://www.amazon.com/?tag=gardenerscott-20
It doesn’t cost you any extra, but it helps me pay for plants, gardening supplies, and all of the other costs associated with running a YouTube channel.
Thank you for your support!
As an Amazon affiliate I benefit from qualified purchases.
Gotta love this man made weather 😅, anyhow great video 🤙
My journal is incomplete… I forget to add sometimes. But it’s STILL useful! Luckily I have a weather station, so at least my weather data is recorded automatically :). But it’s my harvest dates, etc, that sometimes get forgotten and not added
Thank You Gardener Scott..💚👍😊
Thank you very much) very interesting and useful information. I plan to make my own garden journal
Good Job Scott, well done
In Nursing we have an old saying "If it was not written down, it was not done". In the Army we call it CYA , Cover Your A$$. I live by this addage. I have tons of note books. Going back to when I was 9. Just the important writing I treasure. Taught my Eldest son to do scientific journalling. We took a snapshot of the plants he grew, and he made notes of his observations of growth. Started when he was 2. It was awesome. When he was 10 and he made slime. I tried to make him keep a journal of his formula of experimentations. He got frustrated. He wanted to make a muck. Then he learnt why, because he could not reproduce the success of his experimented recipe because he had no notes. Lesson learned. He did have fun. But if you change things a lot write it down. I bake a lot, I write down any and all changes too, because it is chemistry it matters. I try to be a living example for my kids. Fun and practical. Share your wisdom. There is no point in knowing things if no one knows you know. That’s why people are social creatures by nature. Writing it down provides wonderful ancedotes for life later on too! I have lovely stories of almost every plant, planting bulbs in our front garden with my Boy’s.
We had a heavy frost two days ago. That’s nearly four weeks early as our average frost date is November 22nd. Our growing season is getting shorter.
I will take your advice to heart. I just moved to southwest Idaho and am new to gardening. I have four raised beds to start with in this sandy desert climate (zone 7a). Love your channel! Thank you!
That’s a lot of good advice. There are many, many things I’ve done in my garden where I’ve completely forgotten the details. I specialize in Southeast Asian vegetables and not only would I like a log of when, how, and what I did, but I’d like to have photos of my results. I wish I had done what you are recommending.
(
Thanks so much for your run down on what to put in a gardening journal. I’ve been trying for years to be a good steward of my tiny amount of land and really struggle sometimes to remember "that year the strawberries did well" what the heck did I do to make them so successful… lol ♡ ty ty
A journal . great idea,
thanks.
Thanks so much for sending me in this direction.
👍👍👍👌👍😊
Sounds like something you should publish—there are many such historic
journals available
Xin chào anh.anh ơi có tuyết rơi kia, chắc là lạnh lắm anh nhỉ
Thanks for the nudge. I used to keep a garden journal and had gotten away from it. Need to start again.
Spreadsheets etc are nice, but I prefer a simple notebook for each year. They will never require electricity or batteries, they will still be accessible if my computer or phone blows up, and even after I’m gone the "software" needed to read them will still exist. Barring getting lost in a fire or left out in the rain somehow (which would also destroy an electronic version anyway), they’re pretty fool proof. If one is running a more serious business based around their garden I’m sure they will want a digital version as well.
I like your friends journal where did it come from?
Excellent video ! Maybe someone can help me get organized. I’ve been making videos of my garden and fruit trees for the past 6 years and have 100’s of videos that are only organized by dates they were taken. It’s really nice to look back over the years and see how things have changed. Sometimes if I’m looking for problem like borers, fungal issues, pests, or deer issues, it can be a handful to start looking at all these videos. Maybe someone has a better way. Thanks again for the great videos !
Lovely. Thx 🙏. This is exactly what I have been looking for— a gardening journal. I also wonder if there is a good app for phone or iPad.
Which journal is shown at :56 under the title?
great information. This is helpful for us as we are farmers and love houseplants too. New friend Ruthie
Amazing video ! Thank you so much! I started gardening last year, and this year I have my first tulips ! And this week I planted Lily’s and Dahlias. I hope that it works as good as the tulips. I live in Ireland and here it rains every single day .. that’s my problem. Less sun, more rain. But I’m in love for my garden, and I’ll start my garden journal tomorrow!
Gardener Scott, this is one of my favourite videos of yours. Please share some of your spreadsheet ideas for the nerdy types like me 🙂 Thank you so much for all the work you do on this channel.
I grew up on the west coast in Zone 9a and now I live at high elevation in the Rocky Mountains in Zone 3a with mountain valley weather that really has a mind of its own! I really appreciate your guidance on tracking & learning about my own specific garden. My new location is beautiful but it’s also like gardening on a different planet! So I am learning as if I am brand new. I am really enjoying your recent comments and answers to your fellow Colorado gardeners lately as these questions often apply to my zone too. Info like that is difficult to find! Much appreciated.
As I was just typing this I got a message from my neighbour showing a severe hail storm warning this afternoon! The irony.
Thank you thank you thank you for sharing your wonderful world of gardening!!
Awesome idea. I’m in Idaho Springs (Colorado), and came across your channel several weeks back. Thanks for all of your great tips. I have a lot of clients who use WordPress (content management system) for their websites, and I’ve used WordPress as an organizational tool for various projects as well. Until this video, I hadn’t thought about using it to keep track of garden stuff, but I’m going to get it set up and in place now. Thank you for the idea!
Really enjoying your work…but i have to say STOP doing a great job…everytime my fiance sees your work…your putting me to work as well..👍👍👍…Great job buddy. Keep up the good work…
Thank you for this. Now when the winter came I will need to think how systematically collect all the data for my next year.
For this year I only took photos and videos of my progress in the garden but I want more data like temperatures plant varieties and so on.
Hope your plant will survive the cold under the hoop-house.
I think the video is great and makes perfect sense. From my point of view I hate writing and am not very good at keeping diary’s etc. What i do is take photo’s and group the plants starting with sowing , the first sprouts, first flowers, first crops and photos of the crops on the scales etc. i find it much easier and rewarding than writing ( ugh). I keep them on the computer in folders by year as you say Scott if you do not record things some way you forget and i sure forget things but i find the photo’s jog my memory. Keep up the excellent videos super quality by the way.
I started a garden journal with your recommendation. I love it. Makes it great for checking age of seedlings, transplants, and so on.
Last year I picked up a weather station that connects to Weather Underground. I use it to track the weather for my garden. I’ve noticed the expected weather is always a few degrees different than my temp. Also noticed the rain fall is much different. Most the time rain avoids me. In a flat land I’m on the side of a hill creating a micro climate bubble. Most the time to include much higher winds. Anyway. I love this internet connected weather station because it automatically records historical weather data for my garden. This is also important information for the pasture grasses.
I am using the no dig method of gardening and growing in raised beds. I am in
England and I wonder if you have heard of Charles Dowding and his No dig method of gardening . Here is a link to his main video which got me interested in his method. I have had great success using it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HATC3rG6NbQ
Thanks for sharing all of this great info Gardener Scott! Requesting permission to add your video to my gardening playlist? I’d love to share with my gardening friends.
THANK YOU! <3
Steve reminds me a lot of Jordan Peterson. Thanks for the great video Scott.
My grandmother journaled daily from the time she was a newlywed in the 1920’s about all aspects of her life, especially her garden. Everyone who knew her swore she could put a chunk of firewood in the ground and have an oak tree in no time. There’s so much wisdom in those pages and when I wonder how she would handle a garden problem I have, I just turn the pages. She started me on garden journals many years ago. Thank you so much for emphasizing the importance of journals.
I journal on line kinda like blogging or I would loose the book or forget to write things down etc… I take pictures and videos and keep track that way
Wow that’s cold!! We’re the opposite too hot in Australia. Great gardening advice, many thanks!
Thank you and I am SO bad at this
I’ve loved this video so much. You remember me my father, which was a gardener too! <3 Thank you so much for sharing this with us!
Since I’m trying to learn all I can this winter about gardening, especially small space gardening, I’ve been keeping a sort of pre-journal. In it I’m keeping notes on videos I watch, books I read, tools and other garden equipment I need before it’s planting time, and seeds I have either ordered or am planning to order. I am also trying to figure out where the best place to put my raised beds and containers in my small (63 square feet) garden. My garden is in the north west corner of my yard, and I’m wondering if there is a best way to orient my garden? Tall plants on the north side or the west side?
What was the dark green journal? I don’t see that in your lists of journals. I have a garden journal, but I like the idea of a page for each day of the year so you can glance at the same day over multiple years. Where can you get a journal such as that?
Great ideas! I have my journal in MS Word. In my Excel "Garden Sketch/Plan" workboo, I have placed screenshot of my 3 acre property from Google earth, with beds labeled by clickable text boxes that take me to more detailed pages, where I can insert thumbnail-sized photos of all my flowers & shrubs.
20 degrees and no gloves?!
My father was a journal-er from way back. When he passed away we found a box in the basement that had his calender’s from when he first bought his property back in the 1940’s with so much information like weather, what he did with the property everyday, his hunting/fishing journals were so detailed with the weather, and the days catch/kill it was fun to read through these. I think that some of his habits were passed down to me, especially the dates of events and such. Thank you for this video and the remembrance of journal keeping and how important is can be.
I started gardening just august 2019 this year and I started instinctively a journal as I wanted to note all my success and failures, the lessons and experiments tried so I also recommend this for any gardener as it is a valuable tool.
Oh! Thoes journals are cool, and thanks for recommendation. If there is any electronic version, that will be even better.