It is early spring and it is time to plant the garden again. You try to think back and remember "did the cucumbers like the mulch I used last year "and "What day last year did I plant the tomatoes"? These are both good things to ask because they can both be used to fine tune your planting schedule because you never plant a vegetable garden all in the same day.

With all the hard work you put into your garden wouldn't you want to know your effort is producing results? The only way for you to keep track of your efforts and analyze what you have done is to keep a gardening journal of some type. Your journal can be as easy as what and when you planted, right down to the amount of time put into weeding and how much natural rainfall you are getting. Other items that can be recorded could be trimming, fertilizing, temperature and hours of sunlight. It all depends on how in depth you wish to get into your garden.

You could easily buy a garden planner or organizer from a local nursery or gardening supply shop but if you are like me and like to save a few bucks when I can, it is not hard to come up with your own design.

You can be as organized as you wish. It can range from throwing little bits of paper into a shoe box to full spreadsheets of info. Some people prefer to use a computer to do this but I don't use a laptop and to haul my computer outside would be a pain in the butt so I just find it convenient to use a book.

The funny thing that happened to me was during my first season of gardening I didn't know what info I would need for the next season. So I saved all of my seed packs and transplant tags in a shoebox and kept them so I could remember what I planted. But then I started to have questions. I remembered in my second season asking myself what month I planted my tomatoes because I didn't get much of a yield from my plants in the first year so I wanted to plant them a little earlier. That was my first realization that I needed to find a better system.

When I put together a new book every year, I just use a binder and printed out chart that gives me all the basic info that I need. The chart is simple but effective. It lists out all the plants I have planted that year along the left side and various info that I feel is pertinent along the top. In mine I will record the planting date for each plant, the watering schedule, weeding schedule, yield of vegetables per plant in the year, and the amount of fertilizers that I use.