A garden journal becomes a living storybook of your garden, as well as your journey as a gardener. Each season, you can reflect on the growth of your plants, all the experimenting you did, and the changes that occur with every season. Here’s why you should start a gardening journal and what exactly you should be writing down in it.
Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned Master Gardener, keeping a gardening journal is an invaluable tool for your garden. With it, you can celebrate your triumphs, the seedlings that didn’t make it, just how BIG that tomato harvest was, and your favourite plants you must grow again next year.
A garden journal allows you to track your personal and plant growth in one spot, letting you learn from this year’s experience and apply it to gardening seasons to come. Not only does it become a useful tool, but it deepens your connection to the garden.
While documenting a garden journal is good for keeping track of everything you’ve learned, it’s also an amazing tool for your mental health as well.
Let me explain!
Knowledge Passed Down
This winter, I was gifted a wonderful treasure: my mother’s garden journal. My mother passed away in 2019, and discovering a new piece of her through her gardening journal has been such a blessing.
Her journal is a scrapbook full of tidbits she collected over the years. She has lots of newspaper clippings, seed packets and info, and her own planting notes and findings. Her journal is what you see throughout this post.
It’s absolutely stunning.
Out of all the books on the shelf, it’s my favourite gardening book. There’s information from many gardening writers from decades ago and the musings and drawings from my mother that are completely priceless.
When you start documenting notes from your garden, you’re creating a complete picture of the garden season that can be used for years to come. You’ll always have something to reference and pass down to your future self or perhaps a fellow plant lover like me.
The Power of Writing Things Down
In herbalism, we like to do monographs for each of the plants. This is when we dive deep into the plant, writing down everything there is to know, like its background and history, traditional uses, planting instructions, harvesting notes, and other useful information about the plant.
Really, a monograph is just an edited-down journal about a specific plant!
When I was writing Garden Alchemy, I created a gardening workbook to go along with the book. It was my hope that it would help people get to know their garden by making their own observations and notes.
I’m a big fan of garden journaling, so this was my way of helping people really get the most out of their experience gardening alongside my book. You can download it for free here!
While it’s helpful to keep track of your garden, I also find it a great activity for my mental health as well. It’s a great way to practice mindfulness by encouraging us to slow down and be present.
Our brain moves quickly, so we can often skim over our thoughts rather than linger on them. When we take the time to write things down, our brain goes over the word many times and we process the information better.
Journaling can also give us an outlet. Consider your journal a non-judgemental space where you can express any of your thoughts and feelings, and it doesn’t have to go anywhere. Burn it after, or keep it and read it for years. The choice is all yours.
Keeping Track of Your Garden
When it comes to gardening, the journal allows you to keep track of your progress. Our memory isn’t as good—even when you think you remembered what seeds you planted, you’re surprised when your cucumber seedlings were actually the marigolds you planted.
My memory isn’t as good as it used to be. If I don’t use labels or make notes, I might not be able to stay on top of those details. Having those notes to reference is a great way to keep on top of things amid the gardening season.
One of my favourite things about a garden journal is referring back to it over time. You can put your notes in it for five or ten years and use that to help you with your planning.
For instance, you can make notes of what days you planted seeds and how they’re doing. The following year, you might look back at when you planted peas and made notes about how you started them too early or too late. So this year, you know to plant a little bit earlier.
You might also notice different weather patterns and how certain conditions affect your plants. So, having that historical data can really help you prepare and problem-solve.
What to Include in Your Gardening Journal
Everyone’s gardening journal will be different. And that’s the point! You want to ask yourself why you’re keeping a garden journal and what you’re the most excited about it.
Our gardens are so personal, so it makes sense for you to personalize what you document.
We’re not landscapers; we’re gardeners. For us, our gardens are an art form that is created over a long period of time. Journaling helps us document how we created our art and match the science alongside it.
Here are a few things I like to include in my journal that you might also want to add to yours.
Notable Plant Dates
One of the most common ways to use a garden journal is to note when you start your seeds or planted seedlings. Note how long plants take to germinate and grow, when they were transplanted outside, when they first flowered, your first harvest date, etc. This will be such helpful information when you’re planning future gardens.
Important Dates
While I wish all calendars had important gardening calendar dates, like first and last frost, you can include those in your gardening journal. Having a calendar where you can note important milestones, such as vacations you may be taking and need to coordinate plant sitters for or the last day to sow seeds for succession planting.
Herbal Monographs
This was my favourite part of my mom’s gardening journal. Sketch, add stickers, press flowers, use different colours and fonts, make doodles, put in pictures, and add all the little side notes to begin making plant profiles for your favourite things to grow in your garden.
These elements really help to personalize it, making your garden that much more special but also a very helpful tool for your garden specifically.
Gratitude Notes
As a gardener, you’ve probably experienced moments where you just found a plant so beautiful, a bee so cute, or the wind so delicious. I like to make notes about how my garden makes me feel and those moments when I find peace, joy, or excitement.
Weather Conditions
Each year, the weather is getting wackier and more unpredictable. It’s getting harder to anticipate all the different conditions, so having a history of different notes from different seasons with varying weather conditions can be a very helpful tool. Note how little or lots of rain there was, any short or long growing seasons, temperature highs and lows, sunshine amounts, and any unusual or notable weather occurrences.
Tips and Thoughts
I’m always learning tidbits from my peers, social media, a book, or even from my own thoughts and observations. Note down any of these thoughts—because they can disappear from your brain in an instant.
I love how my mom would collect bits from newspapers, magazines, and the seed packets themselves to hold onto. You can always print webpages, like my guides on Garden Therapy, to keep handy in your gardening journal.
Gardening Journal Templates
All you need to get started with a garden journal is to grab a notebook. But I know that having prompts and a place with information already organized can be helpful!
For starters, I have a free printable seed starting journal you can use at the beginning of the season to help keep track of everything you plant and help you figure out the right timing for starting the seeds.
I also have the Garden Alchemy Workbook that you can download and print. It will help you take notes, log experiments, add gardening recipes, and more.
West Coast Seeds also has a free printable gardening journal you can use as a framework to get started.
As for physical editions you can get, I love this one from the Knotty Garden, as well as The Gardener’s Logbook and this garden planner.
Trust me, once you start a gardening journal, you’ll find yourself so much more connected to your garden and excited about every little change that happens. Let me know in the comments below how your journal fares. Happy journaling!
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