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.

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

Comments

[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.