By Jeff Favelle February 3rd, 2025
A garden journal is an ongoing documentation of what’s happening in your growing spaces throughout the year. Good or bad, it is a method of recording success, failure, and key highlights that will help inform you to make better decisions and grow more efficiently.
Often confused with garden planners, garden journals are used to record what happens during the season. They are not used to plan out your year, merely, they document it. Most certainly they can and will inform your planning and decision-making, but a journal is just that, a journal. A garden diary.
Comprised of 3 main parts, a Garden Journal will help you to document all that you see throughout each season. There is an Individual Crop Page, a Specific Garden Location Page, and a Garden Calendar. Also often included is a grid page so you can map and label your growing spaces, as well as a Quick Notes Page that can be used to document all your crops at once.
Use the Individual Crop Page for all observations witnessed for that crop during its life cycle. If you had a particularly good harvest with say Garlic that year, this page will be a record of that and what you did to be so successful. Refer back to your notes, and then replicate that success. Similarly, if you had a poor year and were able to observe why, this page will help you to eliminate repeating the same mistakes in the future.
The Specific Location Page focuses on locations within your garden and highlights any important observations you see. Sun exposure issues, drainage problems, poor soil, crops doing well, crops not doing well, etc. This will inform you of any steps you may need to take to fix the issue, or simply what grows well and where. It can be hard to commit all of these observations to memory, so recording them on these pages is really important.
And finally, we have the Calendar. Similar to a Planner, but far different use case. This is where you record specific important dates and things that you either did or observed in your garden. When your beets were planted, when they germinated, and when you harvested them. On top of that, major events like frost dates, storms, heat waves, etc should be recorded as they will give you a more accurate picture of when and what to plant for your specific setup. The Calendar is our window into things like planting ranges and harvest dates and is very useful to reflect on as the seasons pass.
After just a couple of those seasons of diligent journal taking, the level of information gathered for your garden will be staggering. Use this information to inform how and when you plant future gardens for even more future success every year. To help you get a jump start if you’re just beginning, I have made my template into a free PDF download! I hope you can make use of this free template that I use in my garden, feel free to share, print, modify, and use the document. Spread the word and happy gardening to you all!
