Your Garden is a Historical Journey of Learning

With Spring quickly upon us you’re probably beginning the process of garden and yard preparation. You might be faced with issues around irrigation which happens to rhyme with irritation for some odd reason. Among other things you might be more focused on the happier side of the gardening business. For instance, deciding what you’re going to plant in your garden space this year.

The point of this post is not to try and identify what you are planting in your garden.  The point is to offer you a helping hand in starting your journey into maintaining a historical record of your garden this year.  Using LogVine the micro-log service of course!

Track Your Surroundings

So how do you identify if something is worthy of tracking or observing in LogVine? The straight and narrow is this. Do you want to know when you did something historically the following year? If so, then you’ll want to track it. In its simplest form, would you like to know the first time you started spotting those Spring weeds that popped up in the yard?  This year, I took a note that they came in around February 1, 2015. Here is the log entry.  I even uploaded a photo of a particular location on my grounds.  I can’t tell you in 2014 when they first appeared because I didn’t have a logging system like LogVine at the time and I didn’t think to log this particular event.

Log When Things Are Planted

Mt. Hood Hops Bulb Planted and Logged using LogVine Micro-Log service.

If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you’ll know that I’ve used LogVine for beer making.  Well, when it comes down to making beer, a key ingredient is a plant that we call hops or Humulus lupus.  My garden this year was just upgraded by adding a perennial Mt. Hood hops (link to Burpee, if you want to get one!).  I wanted to track the inaugural planting event in LogVine so I could dig back in coming years to see when I started this plant.  I now have the date and time tracked of the little bulb beginning to sprout some green leaves.  The only thing I am missing is a trellis.  I’ll give this little plant some time before I move to that step.

Fertilizing?  Applying Compost?  Log It!

iOS Example of a flowering citrus and fertilizer LogVine entries

How amazing would it be in 2016 or 2017 for you to look back and see that in 2015 you applied fertilizer 1 month earlier than usual due to an earlier Spring?  I didn’t log last year, but I know that I didn’t apply natural organic fertilizer to my citrus trees until mid March.  This year, the flowers were blooming and the trees were ready for fertilizer in early February.  I also documented that the citrus blooms came in around February 20th on nearly all of my citrus trees.  I can safely say the local Honey Bees were happy and so was I because I now have a record of this behavior.

Log Anything and Everything You Grow

Today I just noticed something joyous.  My peach tree finally showed some signs of life by beginning to open its blooms.  Please ignore the weed that is growing next to it.  Rest-assured I pulled the weed and tossed it into the compost bin.  This tree is the last one to bloom in my yard this year and as small as it is, seeing blooms is a beautiful experience that I not only wanted to share with you here, but track in LogVine.  The reason is that next year, I’ll have a pretty good idea on how the tree has been performing year in and out.

Use LogVine micro-logs to log your life and gain insight into your gardening journey!  Happy growing folks and get ready, Spring is only a few days away!

-Chris

P.S. Yes, I did a little play in the title on the famous “Are You My Mother?” Book by P.D. Eastman.