Good morning SMGB regulars and newcomers alike and welcome to the new year of Saturday Morning Garden Blogging!
Along with resolutions, starting a new journal or planner at the beginning of the calendar year is pretty popular if not traditional. While there’s not much happening out in the garden it is the perfect time to tend to the planning and dreaming. While I’ve had attempts at keeping a garden journal here and there over the years I only recently managed to keep it up for over a year.
What really got me started was receiving this beautiful garden journal as a gift.
I love journals and have far too many pretty partially filled ones in a drawer as well as a few I actually filled. This is the first specific journal for gardening I’ve had though.
I had a page that had fallen out of an old flower field guide and I got creative and taped it in with some of the first spring violets.
One of my fondest memories of my Great-Aunt is how she had stacks and stacks of steno notebooks tucked away in her desk that were daily weather observations going back years. I remember how she would have her current one sitting on her side table with a pen, the Old Farmer’s Almanac, and a copy of Llewellyn’s Moon Sign book for the year. Every day she would note the temperature, humidity, wind, etc. in her steno notebooks. It was a fascinating glimpse into a lifetime of observations of the local climate. Even though we have apps and technology to track those little daily details now I wanted to start my own “almanac” so to speak. I love how stopping and taking a moment to physically write and observe is a reminder to pay attention to the world right outside our window.
Simple daily (well, almost😉) notes of weather observations. I do use my weather app to pull up the current data from a nearby weather station.
The AQI (air quality index) is something my Great-Aunt would not recognize. The numbers I recorded during the really smoky summer months of 2018 were frightening. In the image above the AQI is as low as 16. Below you can see the AQI was in the “Hazardous” range at 316. That’s smoke from one of the bad fires northwest of Medford that summer.
I have found myself going back and looking for important things such as the first frost or freeze that I observed:
So I filled my garden journal this past fall. I had also started a bullet journal and did a mix of an art/collage journal in an undated weekly planner for the past year so I decided that this year I wanted to get a blank dot-grid journal. This allows me to set up pages and “spreads” for whatever I want including gardening.
There are lots of good ideas and inspiring pictures out there on Pinterest and Instagram. While I was looking for ideas specific to bullet journaling there are certainly no lack of beautiful garden journals for any type of gardener.
Here is one site that had some good basic setup info and inspiring pictures:
How to Set Up a Garden Journal
This one has some bullet journal basics and talks about incorporating garden stuff:
Using a Bullet Journal for Gardening
Both of these are just a sampling of stuff I found on Pinterest.
As I start my new journal for the year I have been looking for some inspirational passages that I might take note of on a fresh blank page.
“There are no green thumbs or black thumbs. There are only gardeners and non-gardeners. Gardeners are the ones who ruin after ruin get on with the high defiance of nature herself, creating, in the very face of her chaos and tornado, the bower of roses and the pride of irises. It sounds very well to garden a “natural way.” You may see the natural way in any desert, any swamp, any leech-filled laurel hell. Defiance, on the other hand, is what makes gardeners.”
-Henry Mitchell
from The Essential Earthman, 1981
(all emphasis mine)
“A garden, then, is a finite place, in which a gardener (or several gardeners) has created, working with or against nature, a plot whose intention it is to provide pleasure; possibly in the form of beauty, possibly in the form of cabbages -and possibly, beautiful cabbages.
And nature? Nature is what wins in the end.”
-Abby Adams
from The Gardener’s Gripe Book, 1995
(all emphasis mine)
“It is not a garden without shadow, for darkness is part of life as well as dawn and bright midday. It is not a garden without weeds, for chaos is an omnipresent force in life and in the garden.”
-Patricia Monaghan
from Magical Gardens, 1997
“Clearly, nature calls to something very deep in us. Biophilia, the love of nature and living things, is an essential part of the human condition. Hortophilia, the desire to interact with, manage, and tend nature, is also deeply instilled in us.”
-Oliver Sacks from “Why We Need Gardens,” found in Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales
(all emphasis mine)
I know there is a lot more to garden journaling, especially if you have the space for growing from seed. With my little space I often use apps on my phone to keep a digital garden journal. Evernote (a note-taking app) is decent for that because I can use it on both my phone and my computer. Last year I used it to make entries where I could easily insert pics from my phone camera. If I organize it better this year I plan to do the same but then transfer some of the info into my bullet journal during my weekly/monthly review process. This will be handy for tracking things like watering and feeding.
As far as garden planning I think I may set up a page to create a want/need list. I can easily note plants from catalogs and note things that I need to buy early or things to look for at the local growers market. The new spring catalogs (better known as “garden p0rn”) are just trickling in!
I love looking through catalogs for ideas and useful information too. I usually end up getting most of my plants locally as opposed to ordering them but there are many temptations in the Territorial catalog. Maybe this spring I can make a trip up to their actual store in Cottage Grove.
As the seasons change I can set up pages in my journal to track transplants and cuttings and all that good stuff. I know many here have mentioned their garden journals in comments before so please feel free to share your ideas and plans for the new year!
As always, tell us what’s going on in your garden? Or as the case may be, your garden journal?
And, HAPPY NEW YEAR SMGB’ers!