A Guide to a New Garden Season: Create a Garden Journal
A garden journal is a very important tool that every gardener should use. It helps document the garden space’s history, which includes success and failures along with those who tilled the soil. It can also include family recipes, seeds, and pictures and even pressed plant material that document a family’s journey through modern-day urban homesteading.
But before you sit down to document last year’s garden space, lets talk about some choices in journals. A garden journal is only good if it is used and used often. It needs to be gardener friendly and in a style that fits you. Some people like to use scrapbooks to document every year’s garden while other simply use a spiral notebook or school notebook. Other choices include using a folder to store loose-leaf paper, handmade journals made from scrap or junk mail or even a journal on the computer. If you use the later approach, consider pulling it up on your smart phone when you are at the nursery or garden center. This could be very valuable, especially if you have a question about plant material.
Once you have chosen your journal style, the next step is to fill in some useful information. While all information is important there are key elements that need to be covered in a garden journal. This includes where the garden is located, size of garden, directions, soil type, external features that affect the garden space, and environmental elements.
The journaling process should start in January. This is a good time to get a grasp on your garden design. To begin this process, sit down and draw out the garden space. If you are skilled at drawing things to scale, then by all means do so. If you do not know how to draw a plan to scale, do not worry. Just do a rough sketch that you can use and include the dimensions of each side.
Do not limit yourself to the traditional idea of what a garden is but instead include mulch gardens, straw bale gardens, container gardens and even hanging baskets.
Next, mark the directions on your garden map and indicate where the sun rises and sets. Later on in the season, indicate where the sun hits the garden space.
If you are using a traditional type of garden and have not done a soil test, then you need to do one. This can be done any time of the year and a garden’s down time is a great time to do it. If you have already done a soil test, then indicate the results on the garden map and/or add the results to the journal.
Keep in mind though, that if you are using a less traditional type of gardening technique then you do not need a soil test.
While you are waiting to get into the garden, take note of the wind direction. Does it blow straight across the garden space or does it generally just blow from one corner to the opposite corner. Although different things affect wind, you need a general idea of how it hits the space.
Another piece of information that needs to be added to the garden journal is external features that are present around the garden space. This can include fencing, buildings, trees, and shrubs. Really anything that affects the garden space and affect can be defined as several things. This affect can be from shade, drainage and even chemicals from fencing or other plant material such as black walnut trees.
The last thing that needs to go on the plan is something that needs to be noted throughout the year. It can affect planting dates, plant health and even plant choices. This last element of the plan is the environmental elements. This needs to be done year round and should include moisture amounts and temperatures. This will help the gardener deal with any type of microclimate that may exist due to an urban environment.
A garden journal is an important part of any successful garden plan and should be continued the life of the garden space regardless of the type of garden it may be.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mindy McIntosh-Shetter has been an Agricultural Science educator, and is a horticulture and/or environmental blogger who earned a degree from Purdue University in Agriculture Education with a minor in biology, and natural resources. Presently she is finishing up her Masters in Environmental Education and Urban Planning for the University of Louisville while working on her own agriculture/environmental blog.
