I keep a blog with lots of information and photos of my potager - started mainly to keep a friend up to date on what I was doing, but it has turned into a very useful record of what I plant, when I harvest etc. I find I am referring back to it more and more to check what I did in previous years.
I use Google sheets on my phone as well. My phone is always with me as I constantly take photos of my potager/ vegetable garden and orchard. Using sheets mean I can add comments while I am in the garden - though my lists are not as detailed as others have mentioned. It is mainly for planting dates and variety names (I am hopeless at remembering) I am now also recording germination temperatures of vegetable seeds in a sheet too.
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Wow!!! I am ashamed to even take a picture and post of mine…only I could understand it or find much. My daughter will have fun with it someday though. HAHA
Wow, you all have some pretty nice journals. I actually just started my first garden journal a couple of weeks ago. It is ~ 7 years too late but c’est la vie. my daughter got a hold of it a few days back and decided to add a couple of entries with crayolas and pencils. I am sure she was making detailed drawings of the state of her blueberries . 
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I just write in my journal book. It is one of those diary looking books. I keep a map list of my trees on one side of a page with the year on it. I measure my fruit tree heights every year. Then I put the information about particular weather events in it. I also put blooming times and ripening dates in it each year. It really helps me.
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Not a Journal… but a Excel Sheet to help me keep up with what all I have growing and to better estimate what I had getting ripe when… to see what else I needed to add. Would love to have several things getting ripe in as many weeks of the year as possible.
TNHUnter
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hi Dmitri,
Great spreadsheet. Have you been any adjustments in 5 years? Did you input the data manually - harvest calendar etc? Interested in starting my own. I had a written journal and 2d sketch but I need more space and more data!
thanks
I am so old school, it is time I grabbed a grandkid & learned to use that free application @Auburn depicted.
My notes are on paper calendars: first & last frost, 10%, full & 90% petal fall for each fruit tree; harvest dates, amounts & Brix, length of storage in some cases. Then I have an item in a flash drive where I keep grafting & planting information & overall strengths & challenges.
Some day I will designate a book to journaling each tree that stays the course, probably devoting 20 pages to each.
Since the number of trees is small: 10 apples (two in neighbor yards) & now three plums, this casual approach has been adequate.
I already have a journal for the first bee hive, so that precedent is established.
You all are good for me.
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I have a really nice old school journal that I write all ideas and plans and thoughts in. I take photos of EVERYTHING and can order those by date to see what I planted when and where and when a thing happened to it. I use graph paper laid over a google map satellite image of the property, traced, to plot out a map. I did that by printing out a screenshot of my plot from maps, then putting it on a lightbox with graph paper on top. (you could do it with a bright window)
I’ve enlarged sections, I’ve got SE,SW, NE, and NW sectioned maps to show where perennials are and often add notes about them.
I keep a graft list by year in the journal.
I have ADHD so I rarely look at the stuff I wrote down before- it took me a long time to write it down at all. going back to read it may take another decade
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I have five grandkids with ADHD; I may have a touch myself. The thing is when those kids get focused they are really, really focused. My son calls it the ADHD superpower!
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I have just a single page for each year for our peach trees where I record bloom, petal drop, shuck and spray dates. After a spray I record rain fall and when it adds up to one inch I know to respray.
I have lost a peach crop because I forgot the last spray time or just how much it rained since the last spray.
Some times, I’ll count the ripe peaches from one scaffold that represents a typical scaffold to estimate qty of the 3 peach trees. I also count boxes of peaches that get given out.
I do go back and compare bloom times harvest times.
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From time to time, I add entries to my calendar app on my desktop. Here is a snapshot of the index:
Here is a snapshot of one of the detail records:
The app I use is one of my own device: Tonto2.
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hyper focus feels like a super power! until you remember you had a bunch of other important stuff to get done instead… haha
edit- and yep it is inherited, I think my grandma and great grandfather both definitely had it. brilliant, funny, forgetful and distracted people.
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To be a successful farmer you have to be a keen observer and detailed record keeper.
As a closet scientist it was easy for me to fall into the pattern of logging everything i did.
When i first took up farming there were many questions that just couldnt be answered by anyone.
The only way to do/grow the things i wanted to was by trial and error.
Keeping good records was essential. Also essential was accurate weather data. Recording temps and rainfall goes a long ways towards planning varieties to grow and calculating actual heat/growing units for your location.
Just coincidentally to this thread… there is an apple orchard a few miles from me that was sold to a partnership that has no experience in apples.
This 40 acre orchard, at one time had over 150 varieties.
The new owners did not get any log or map or anything telling them what apples are what.
The original manager, owner kept it all in his head and is diseased.
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I use a notes app (Apple Notes) with a note for each month of the year. Within each month’s note, I add the date as headers with bullets below and I sort the dates by day of the month, regardless of the year. Example:
May
5/1/23
- Planted Pink Lemonade blueberry and Gerardi Mulberry
5/3/24
- Planted Montmorency cherry tree
5/4/25
- Planted cucumber, green bean, and squash seeds
- Planted peppers
5/6/24
- Started harvesting honeyberries
- Blackberries have started to form
After many years this might become unwieldy but I find it really nice to see what was happening throughout the month in previous years - it definitely helps with planning for things like pests and harvests.
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I can tell you what I planted in my veggie garden beds each year back to 2011.
I created and printed off this garden grid sheet (using excel) and each spring… i plan out and plant my garden according to the plan.
This helps me ensure proper crop rotation over the years.
TNHunter
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“keeping track”
big journal is indoors and has lists, thoughts, sketches etc . the little notebook is waterproof paper made out of rocks? goes everywhere w me. the graph paper is maps and lists of everything
I’ve the one big map then a section map for the 4 quadrants, and I’m not going to map each bed in the back two it would take forever and I tend to sow extra seed on a whim here and there.
the majority of the annual/veg beds are in this section
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Love it!
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That is stupendous work!
I’m lucky to get the tree name down. I just bought some aluminum tags. I lost my notes to the first trees I planted in '08. An when I say notes, I mean the tree name.
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Good work! I need to make a map of the trees. I had an old one from a couple years ago, but it is a mess with all the news things I planted.
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I had to look up old invoices and messages and all kinds of stuff to do this. the notebooks were not much help!