Keeping a video log has been huge in helping me troubleshoot problems and benchmark how things are growing year to year.
My favorite use for it has been being able to easy extract information that you would have to spend a lot of effort manually keeping a record of. For example, bloom / harvest times, times when pest / disease pressure increases. It’s also easy to see very recent cause and effects, for example looking back two weeks ago before you fertilized to compare how the plant like looks now.
Here are the things I do to keep the process very simple and streamlined:
- Use my phone’s camera and then sync with the Google Photos app so that the recorded video is automatically viewable on all my devices
- Try to keep the walk-though as one video preferably under 20 minutes, and try to walk the same path in every video, starting from the same spot every time
- While doing the walk-through comment on notable things that have happened recently (bloom dates, fruit ripening, disease, pests, etc)
- Try to capture both closeup and landscape type shots so that you can reference the whole tree as well as finer details in future viewings