I have been a fly by the seat of my pants gardener, winging it, going forward without a real plan. When my garden was small it wasn't as much of an issue, but when I decided to do a big garden, planning became much more important and my lack of planning more obvious and more consequential.
This time of year for many inspires resolutions, organization, reflecting on the past and planning for the future. I have not typically been one of those people but this year, disappointment in last year has led me to embrace the planning season and see if I can try to not repeat last year in 2020. Not all of last year can be blamed on things I could control. The weather was terrible for gardening and also for my farming neighbors. It was so wet. And that cold spring. But I did find that I always seemed to be playing catch up and that is something that is within my control.
This January I decided to try a bullet journal and set about putting one together. In the brainstorming I decided that an additional garden journal and a journal for meal planning might provide for a better to do list and a place for documentation.
So where am I at in my garden planning? Well, I am started. I start a lot of seeds indoors for transplanting out into my garden and sharing with other gardeners. Seed starting will be starting soon. I gathered together all of my extra seeds from previous year's gardens. I have ordered and received a storage container to hold my seeds. I have sorted those seeds into the separate boxes that fit into my storage container. Yet to be done is to label the boxes, inventory the seeds that I have. I need to make a list of crops that I want to grow and cross reference that to my seed inventory and prepare a seed order for the seeds that I do not already have. I want to order my seeds by end of the week.
Seed starting has a lot of moving parts. Some seeds are planted in the garden, some before the last spring frost and some after. Some seeds are started indoors under lights and transplanted into the garden, some before the last spring frost, some after the ground warms up, some in the summer for a fall crop. Some seeds are planted every couple of weeks for successive harvests. Lots of moving parts. It is not hard, just a lot to coordinate and keep track of. Other years I have scrambled to figure out what I needed to be doing when. I have lost count of how many times I have counted back on the calendar from that last frost date to figure out when to start a particular type of seed.
When I was working on my bullet journal I made three perpetual calendars. They are set up to be three months on a page so four pages for a year. Mine are arranged so the first half of the year are on two facing pages and the second half of the year on the following two pages. Each month is a column with the numbers down the left side of the column. The first calendar is for birthdays and anniversaries, things that are the same from year to year. The second calendar is where I track my dad's medical appointments and treatments. The third is my perpetual garden calendar where I have indicated the dates of the last frost in the spring and the first frost in the fall. I then counted backward and forward to get the weeks before and after.
Next I took the information from the perpetual calendar and started a spreadsheet. This will be a master calendar from which I can generate a To Do list. It is set up with a column for each week of the year. The dates of the week are at the top of the column. Below the dates row is a row counting the weeks before and after the last frost in the spring. And below that the next row counts the weeks before and after the first frost in the spring. The next section has a list of vegetables, listed alphabetically, one vegetable per row on the far left column. Across the columns of the spreadsheet I am entering codes for different activities involving that vegetable in the column when that activity should happen. I have a book that lists lots of vegetables and includes the information and I am using that as a starting point. I will add additional information as I glean it from seed packets, company websites and other resources. I am up to peas in my alphabetical list. Because I grow greens in my passive solar greenhouse in the winter I am going to list all of the greens together after the vegetables. I will do the same with herbs and flowers. My goal is to be able to look down the column for the week and know what needs to be done and add those tasks to my To Do list in my bullet journal.
I have chosen to use a smaller 3 ring binder for my garden journal. It has some dividers and loose leaf paper. I have several different growing areas, vegetable beds, a potager, perennial fruit, an herb garden and areas with flowers. I am not sure exactly how the journal will be arranged but I do know that I want to have maps of the different areas so that I can keep track of which perennial varieties are planted where. Right now I have scraps of paper that have my notes as to what is planted in some of the areas. My goal is to transfer all of the information on those scraps of paper to the journal, perhaps with a separate page for each area. I would like to have a list of vegetable varieties grown each year, where they were purchased and any notes about them. So far I have used it to make notes on pruning techniques, recipes for fruit tree sprays, trellising techniques and suggested varieties of English cucumbers. Having a ring binder instead of a bound book will allow me flexibility to take notes and then then organize them later. I imagine that I will rearrange it a few times until I find a method that works best for me. I have a 8.5x11 graph paper pad that I think I can punch holes across the top to fit my rings and if I turn it sideways I should be able to use that for maps. We will have to see.
