A garden journal that's worth keeping: what to write down

Write down what you sowed, where, on what date and which variety, then what came of it: when you first picked, how much you harvested, and what went wrong. Add the date of the first and last frosts you see. Five minutes a week in the growing season is plenty.

The value builds up over time. After two or three seasons your own notes tell you when to sow in your garden, which varieties did well and which bed suits what, more reliably than any book.

What to record

Note	Why it’s worth it
Sowing date, crop and variety	Lets you repeat a good year or move a bad one earlier or later
Where it went: bed, row or pot	Needed for crop rotation, and to spot a bed that always struggles
Germination	How many came up, and how long they took. Old seed shows up here
Planting out date	Shows whether you planted out too early or left it too late
First and last frosts you saw	Builds up your own frost dates, which beat any regional average
First harvest date	Tells you how long each variety really takes in your garden
How much you picked	Shows what earned its space and what to grow more of
Pests, diseases and failures	So you can act sooner next year, or try something different
What you’d change	The note you’ll thank yourself for next January

Keep it simple

Most garden journals are abandoned by June because they ask for too much. A few habits help:

1. Write when you do the job. Note the sowing as you label the tray, not at the end of the week.
2. Use the seed packet. Write the sowing date on the packet as well. It’s a backup, and you’ll see how old the seed is next year.
3. One line is enough. “12 April, Bed 2, carrots Nantes 2, three short rows” covers it.
4. Weigh harvests roughly. Kitchen scales and a running total per crop are enough. Precision doesn’t matter, trends do.
5. Take photos. A picture of each bed once a month shows spacing, timing and problems better than words.

Frost dates: the note that pays off fastest

Every sowing date is counted from your frost dates, so the most useful thing a journal can give you is your own. Note the last morning in spring you see frost on the grass or the car, and the first one in autumn. After a few years you’ll know whether your garden runs ahead of or behind your area’s average. Put your own date into the seed sowing planner and every crop’s dates move with it.

Using it for rotation

A journal that records where each crop grew makes crop rotation easy. Each winter, look back at what was in each bed and use the crop rotation planner to see what should go there next.

The end-of-season review

In autumn, spend half an hour going back through the year. For each crop, ask three questions: did we eat it all, would we grow it again, and would we change the variety, the date or the place? Write the answers on one page. That page is next year’s plan.

VegLog’s Journal does most of this for you: it logs plantings, harvests by weight, notes and photos as you go, and with Pro it adds up harvests by crop and by bed.