Without the squalor, you can either conclude that I have promoted you to a homesteader, or demoted you to hobbyist. What? If you are doing a ton of gardening AND keeping house nicely, you are much more dedicated than I, and you are therefore a homesteader. If you aren't doing enough gardening outside to significantly interfere with home upkeep then you're really a hobbyist. In either case you should continue reading the following directions for being an "organized homesteader" or an "organized hobbyist."
Anyways, that was silly. On with the real thing, already!
OK, so really there are just four things you need, and lets get started.
Please pardon the hideous linoleum of my kitchen floor!
First, the fun part. This is where good habits began for me. It's like scrap booking without the work.
What to get and how to make it:
Go get a great big empty photo album with those pages they call "magnetic" which are just sticky paper with plastic over. Get one that has a sort of three ring binder set up inside so you can shuffle the pages when needed.
While your at the store, pick up some stick-on tabs. These are going to be section labels. You can see them in various colors in the picture on the right and left so you see what they are. "Adhesive index tabs" is what they are called at office supplies company. You just need a few, one package will be enough.
Write yourself a spine and cover label and tape it on with packaging tape or something similar.
Stick the tabs on some pages in the book - I put them on seven pages and staggered them so I can see them all.
Put a few un-tabbed pages between each of the tabbed pages.
Here are some label ideas for your tabs:
Designs (garden layouts and building instructions)
Perennials (the ones I have or had and notes on how they did)
Veggies (same as the perennials)
Annuals (same again)
Wishes (where I track what I want to order some time in the future)
Notes (this has my soil test results, botanical information on various plants, etc)
Articles (clipped from magazines, newspapers and the internet)
How to use it:Get yourself into a good habit! Here's how - start putting all sorts of fun stuff in between the gardening stuff you stick in here. Insert stuff you'll want to look at often. Pictures of your kids, doodles and funny song lyrics, your astrological chart (a focal point of mine) and all kinds of stuff like that. Don't worry, you can peel anything back out later when your book starts to get crowded and you'd like to get that cute picture into a frame, or something. It will be there. The point is to get you into this book, enjoying it and looking at it. This book will be your answer lifeline this time next year, so just use it. I show a good example of pages above. My "veggie" section has the plant tags from the first year I ever bought veggies from the action warehouse. Next to each plant tag is a little cut out paper note about what I like about the plant, what went wrong, how I fixed anything that went wrong, and whether I wanted to get it again. The next year I used this page to go buy what I really wanted. And my process improved. On the page on the right hand side there are some doodles. Can you see them? It's kind of embarrassing to say that I ever thought a system like that would actually work for supporting tomatoes. But there you have the proof. I thought that once. Any ideas on how to do things can be drawn, cut out and stuck into this book. I suggest dating things. It's amazing how useful that is later.
OK, so do this one thing first. Do that and forget I said anything about number 2 through 4. Develop that habit of record keeping. Don't jump in so suddenly that you overwhelm yourself and don't accomplish anything. Just do step one. That's all. It's fun, it's cheep, and it's more useful than you yet know!!!
Wait, you're still here? I guess you really want to know about step two then! I hope you already did step one, I hope you have a great habit and are reaping the benefits of garden tracking.
Step two is to get a garden journal together.
What to get:
I'm not thrilled with the layout and design of the one I have, but it was given to me and it was my grandfather's and has his handwriting in it still and notes from the garden he kept. It feels like I'm living his garden through me, sometimes, like he's still here a little bit. And besides that it works and has made a HUGE difference. It really doesn't matter what you get, so long as the pages are sturdy and it has sections for months broken down in some way. The most common break down is this: early month gets one page, mid month gets two pages and late month gets one page, repeat for each month, chronologically. This is usually surrounded and interspersed by little bits about projects, tasks, grids for garden planning, and other such truck. I don't use the peripheral goop, but that "peripheral goop" was the most used part by my grandfather. I guess it depends on how you like to organize.
What you'll want to record:The biggest deal in your life is the weather! You know it, and so do I. So write it down! Just write the date, include the year, and then describe anything notable about the weather. Here's an example of how helpful this is: this February we had an ice storm right after a long week of 60 degree weather. Everyone at work was saying about how this is so unusual and how they never saw anything like it. Do NOT rely on your memory!!! Here's why - I went home that night and went to write the odd weather pattern in my garden journal and discovered something incredible: this had happened every single year for the past three years during the same week of February. No one believed me.
The other thing you'll want to record is planting dates, blooming times, harvest times, etc. And if you wish to do something earlier or later next year, put in a note about what you'd rather do in the appropriate month's section. You don't need to put anything else in here if you don't want to. I don't!
But however are you going to find time to actually write down first and last bloom dates, or harvest times or seeding dates? I mean, you're too busy out there in the garden, right? If there's a freak snow, you're way too busy running around covering up your tender plants, right? Yes, you are right. So here's my suggestion. In the winter - do you have a winter? Or a scorching hot season? Or any sort of lull in the gardening seasons? I do. So during this lull, go through your digital photographs. There is a new feature on digital pictures. They are digitally stamped with at "taken date" you can see this by hovering over the thumbnail with your mouse, or you can view it in the details section on the left bar of your explorer folder. Look for pictures of new blooms, of harvested food, of seedlings, of snow, or of plants that have died (yes you should take pictures of your failures too). You'll be able to figure out the date from this. Just make sure your camera knows what today's date really is! Ask a teenager to check it for you if you don't know how. It is amazing how technology can help you, isn't it! Write these dates down sometime when you do have time. You'll see when you planted those carrot seeds, you know - the ones that weren't ripe until December and you were harvesting them in the middle of the snow. Who? Oh, that wasn't you, that was me. So this year I know to plant my second round of seeds earlier.
Again I say - now just go do it! Go try this! Get into a good habit, and next year you'll be so amazingly happy you did!!! Doing this will get so much easier after you see the benefits. Stop here, ignore the rest of my banter. It's just too much to start all at once.
Yes, there is a thing-three. Thing-three is a simple three ring binder with sheet protectors in it.
So easy to make. So simple to explain. Just make it a good label so you can find it on the shelf.
How to use it:
This is for copies of good ideas out of library books, articles ripped out of magazines, or the entire magazine if it was that good of an issue.
Featured in the photo is:
On the left an article from Psychology magazine about the health benefits of the microbes in soil (they reduce inflammation in the lining of the brain which studies are showing this prevents anxiety and depression disorder).
On the right is a stapled packet of pages copied out of a library book (the best ideas from the book of basically how to recycle stuff for your garden).
Make sure you copy the cover of any book, too, so you can take that book out again some time if you'd like to read it again.
These are just a couple examples of what can be kept in here. It's a bulk pages version of the sticky pages binder from #1. Not useful as often, but a great reference, and so much better than having a bunch of loose paper.
And the fourth - last and probably also the least. Go ahead and get the month-by-month edition for you state, amend it with a heavy book mark for the vegetable section - which makes it easy to flip to the current month any time you need to pull it off the shelf. Highlight it to oblivion and scribble in notes until you can barely see the page behind your penciled marks! Not everything in this book is correct for your micro-climate, so write in what was correct. Some things, like chemical fertilizer suggestions, only apply to other gardeners, not you or me. Sometimes you need a phone number the same time every year. Put it in the margin. Some things are good to have as handy information, so highlight those. Very useful. Enjoy!
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