Keeping track

[3rdragon]

How do you track what you have planted where, and what you want to plant where, and what you planted there last season?

As a kid I just did popsicle sticks with the name written on, but nowadays I have ambitions for crop rotation and record-keeping, and little sticks just aren't cutting it. We have a map, and a Google spreadsheet with when we planted stuff and how long it took to germinate*, but neither is an easy way to know if I should plant lettuce in this particular spot, or if kale would be a better choice this year.

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*I didn't make it -- a friend of mine gave me a copy of hers, and I just put stuff in boxes.

Comments

[bridgetmkennitt]

I admit, mine is easy because I have my garden in my apartment so they're all in containers. I have little tags I made from materials from Michaels that are on the plant stands to designate what is what.

Ooo, your method is fancy! I like how organized it is.

[3rdragon]

Yeah, containers tend to be pretty straightforward, unless you start getting really intense.

The spreadsheet *is* really nice. My friend set it up so that you put in when you want to plant things outside, and how many days old they should be when you plant them (0 if you seed them outside), and it auto-calculates when they should be seeded, so then you can sort by either "What should I be planting around now" or "What should I be getting ready to move outside now." It's also a good place for notes like "This tomato was terrible and we shouldn't plant it again" or "Use row cover so that everything doesn't get eaten by bugs." I hadn't previously had a garden so big that I couldn't keep all that stuff in my head, but now that I do, it's a lifesaver.

[bridgetmkennitt]

I admit, I mostly have the tags for the prettiness. I pretty much know what's being grown just by looking at it.

Hot dang, that's a super spreadsheet! The best I can do when making a spreadsheet is...uh, not much. XD Your friend is a good friend. How big is your garden?

[zesty_pinto]

Maybe you could try using stakes and stringing off the sections, add a label along the way as well? I've seen it done, although it was usually to cordone off areas where the crop wasn't ripe enough yet...

[3rdragon]

We do actually make little stake-and-string trellises for some of our plants, and I'm generally pretty pleased with my methods for tracking what's currently growing -- it's looking back in time that I don't have a good solution for yet. (Because you're supposed to move things around for nutrient and pest reasons, and also stuff like not planting lettuce where you had onions last year, etc.)

[tielan]

I am contemplating a full-blown whiteboard/pinboard for it. Because my garden is small but intense, and while I keep a diary, it's a bit of a mess. (A bit.)

And yes, I'd kind of like an app that could at least tell me what I've grown and who I bought the seeds from, and how they grew in my area and where in the garden I planted them...but I think that my ambitions highly outstrip the capabilities of any app that could be created (unless i made it specifically for myself).

[bridgetmkennitt]

A whiteboard/pinboard would be pretty and visual cues would be helpful, I think.

I'd love that sort of app! I bet a lot of gardeners would too.

[vorindi]

There is an app for iOS/MacOS, at least, called Garden Tracker . . . unfortunately it's not been updated* for recent versions of the operating system and presumably correspondingly lacks support. I got a warning when I downloaded it that it could slow down my phone, but I haven't noticed any problems**.

It lets you plot out your garden as a grid of squares, record what you've planted in each one, access that history, record watering/fertilizing/harvest dates, record free-form notes per square, probably a lot of other stuff that I haven't explored. My main complaints are that the garden size I have is just barely too big to fit on my screen without scrolling, some of the icons are not super intuitive, and the list of plants available by default is somewhat limited and I haven't gone through and added all the ones we're growing that aren't available. I guess also that actually keeping track of all the things is more bookkeeping than I can conveniently fit into "while I'm planting seeds" or whatever, but that's more my problem than the app's.


*I just looked on the app store to confirm the name; the desktop version has been updated as of this week. Mobile was updated last December. Please ignore all crossed-out text

**note that I don't use my phone for anything particularly intense, so if there are issues I might just not have noticed.

[cesy]

Growstuff does the tracking side, but won't show particular locations in that level of detail yet. It's useful to share the data of how long things take to grow, though, to help other small farmers and hobbyists worldwide.

[3rdragon]

I hadn't heard of Growstuff -- I'll take a look at it!