How I Made a Garden Journal

For the last 3 years I have used a blank book as a garden journal, but it doesn't work for me very well.  I would forget to write down what I did and then have a catch up day.  And it was hard to compare plant lists, what worked and what didn't and what the weather was like.

After reading about bullet journals I came up with a design for a garden journal that works for me.

I bought a green binder, some divider pages, regular ruled paper, graph paper and those pretty garden stickers for fun.  Here's what my divider pages say:

Building Projects

Garden Layouts

Seed & Plant Lists

Months

This is a building project page that shows how I build my raised beds:

 In this case I pasted the original journal page onto a ruled sheet of paper.

This is this year's garden layout.

You can click on the photos to enlarge them.  For the seed & plant list pages I wrote the items in green then made notes in red if there were problems and a red star if they did well. 

On the back of the page I taped labels for things I wanted to keep.

I drew up my own calendar pages because I wanted them to be vertical and I didn't care about days of the week.  I like garden quotes and I've added them in on the backs of pages for fun and color.

Each month has its own divider so it is easy to compare say February with other Februarys from different years.  I am making my notes in pencil so they don't bleed through and because I am used to pencil from doing genealogy.

I put the current month in the very front of the binder for quick and easy access.  One thing I have started is adding the high & low temps for each day and when it rains.  Having it right on top in the binder and adding the weather info is keeping me active with it.  Not much to report this month except I am still picking tomatoes.  Our first freeze is due in a couple of weeks though.