Preserved Menu Planning: Documenting the Garden

Our Gardening Learning Curve

Take note of this year's garden for a better one next.

Admittedly, I am more than finicky when it comes to making lists, so it's possible that I'm over-exaggerating this point. But, that said, with our first garden, we made no records of what we grew, how much we planted, or when we planted it so that when it came time to plan our second garden, we had to rely on memory alone. Obviously, there are limits to memory, and for novice gardeners like us, almost everything is trial and error. So, when something works, it's important to know what it was and it's perhaps even more important with the miserable failures you swear you'll never do again.

Last year - Garden #3 - is when I got fed up enough with not remembering the details that I started  to consider  doing some serious documentation (thanks in large part to my father-in-law's meticulous example). I guess I realized how much darn work gardening is and figured that, if were going to keep it up, we might as well do it right.

The document was simple, a Google Docs spreadsheet called Garden Plants 2010. As you can see by clicking the link, many of the variables it tracked didn't quite pan out (I so quickly got behind on weighing harvest yields that I totally gave up about 5 tomatoes in). However, for the most part, Garden Plants 2010 has been terribly useful in creating the new and improved Garden Plants 2011, my planning document extraordinaire for Garden #4 which, I'm convinced, will be our best garden yet.

The beauty of garden documentation - both record keeping and pre-planning on paper - is its cyclical nature. Taking notes on the current season enables better choices for the coming one. And, pre-planning using mistakes from the past helps identify new experiments in improved methods whose results you can record to in turn inform future gardens.

Garden Documentation Cycle

For us, one example of this is tomato blight, a disease the turns plant leaves yellow and sickly. Research suggests that one factor in preventing blight in making sure tomatoes have enough space between them. Last year, our records show about 2 square feet per plant. This year, my pre-plan is to give each plant about 3 square feet. During the season, I know to take note of the blight we get (or hopefully don't get), and we'll know better for planning next year's garden. (Ahh, the beauty of closed cycles...)

Sounds logical, right? But wait! You're not getting the whole picture. You see, there is one more set of instrumental recording/planning documents in the process. How do you know how much of each type of plant to grow for preserving? Well friends, I will share that method tomorrow....