Garden Record Keeping System
I like to keep track of my garden plants. Using a spreadsheet helps me organize the information so it’s easily accessible in a useful way. I add to it as I get new plants, updating the information as I learn more about the plants in my garden. I find it particularly helpful, because I can sort the information by a number of different factors, depending on what I want to know. I’ve attached a copy of my spreadsheet as a sample of what you can do. You can download it and modify it to organize your own garden records.
I use an open source program called OpenOffice.org calc for my spreadsheet, but I’ve saved a copy as an Excel document for anyone who’d like to see it in this format using Microsoft Office Excel. You have to highlight the whole chart before sorting, or it only sorts the one column which messes it up. Once the whole spreadsheet is highlighted, in Microsoft Office Excel 2007 you click “data”-> “sort”-> “sort by”. In the “sort by” drop down menu, you pick the name of the column you’d like to sort the information by.
Northern Shade Plant Spreadsheet, Microsoft Office Excel version
The 1st, 2nd and 3rd columns have the genus, species and cultivar or variety name of the plant. The 4th column has the common name. My default arrangement is in alphabetical order by genus name, but you can also rearrange by the 4th column to see them arranged in alphabetical order by common name. I started last year putting a Z in front of the genus name for plants that die or that I remove from the garden instead of deleting them from the spreadsheet. This effectively places them at the end of the list, since I have no zinnias.
The 5th and 6th columns contain the height and width measurements of the plants. I start off with the plant label measurements and change them as I see how it performs in the garden. Now this is where the spreadsheet format comes in handy. I can highlight the chart and reorder by the 5th column. With 3 clicks my plants are all rearranged in order by height. This is useful when looking for a back of the border plant or edging perennial. If I sort by the 6th column, I will have all my plants arranged from narrowest to broadest width.
The 7th column contains the flower colour. I can re-order the plants with 3 clicks into colour groupings and quickly find all of my blue or white plants, I put the main colour first and a modifier after it so you can sort by ‘blue light’ and ‘blue purple’ if you want or ‘yellow gold’ and ‘yellow purple’.
In the 8th column I put the best estimate I can find, from the tag or other source, of the coldest zone in which it is supposed to survive. Then I can easily re-sort by zone hardiness. All the plants that are supposed to be hardy to zone 4 will all be together. If I was more into coddling my plants, I might add protection for these plants before the winter, but mostly I let the trees lay down a layer of leaves for insulation and count on good snow cover for an extra fluffy insulation layer. However, it’s still good to know which plants might be more risky. In hotter climates where heat tolerance is a more limiting factor, the other end of the zone scale would be more useful.
Light exposure preferences are in the 9th column. I use a 1 for the sun lovers down to a 4 for the most shade tolerant. Then I can easily click and rearrange the plants by light preference, 1 is sun, 2 is part shade/sun, 3 is used for part shade, and 4 is part shade/shade.
The 10th column has bloom time information. I use the month number in order to make it sortable in a useful way. If it blooms mostly in May it gets a 5. If it blooms from May to July it gets a 5/6/7. This way the plants sort by the month they start blooming in and then each is arranged by how long it blooms for. To make the numbers sort correctly like this, I formatted the column for text.
I also use a separate line chart to keep track more precisely of when my plants bloom and for how long. You can read about how to keep track of plant bloom times in this post.
The 11th column labels the plants as perennial, bulb or shrub. Click, click, click and all of the bulbs are sorted together. I haven’t included my trees on the spreadsheet.
In the 12th column I put the year the plant was originally added to my garden. I can then reorganize by how long a plant has been in my garden. Plants that I brought from my old house or were already in the garden usually get a 2000, so they’ll sort at the top.
Now, to counterbalance all those spreadsheet rows, columns and obsessive quantifying, here’s an area of my garden from last year with more unruly abandon.
Now if only the rearranging in the garden was as quick as on my spreadsheet. Do you use a spreadsheet, or a different method of keeping track of your plants? If you use a spreadsheet, what columns do you find useful? Can you think of any other columns that would be helpful for recording and sorting plant information?
I’ve added a flash demo showing how the garden spreadsheet sorting works in the next post.
I’m so impressed, you are incredibly organised! I started my blog as a way to chronicle my plants and what has been done in the garden. I was thinking of starting a garden journal, but I wanted photos, then I realised a blog would be an easy way to do both.
Hooray for Open Office and open source software in general!!
I love your idea however I’m a visual person so would it be possible to chuck a screenshot up of your spreadsheet so that we can actually view it! Please?
It sounds like a great tool.
I’m impressed as I’m useless at maintaining records. I started a seed sowing register this year and have tried to record such things as when sowed, when germinated, what compost etc and was doing Ok until late March/early April when everything was germinating and I had more to sow and I sort of lost the plot abit. Never mind I will keep trying as I have already recognised that i sowed some too early
Amy, a blog is a great way to keep track of your garden over the seasons, not to mention that it’s a fun way of sharing it with others. I like using Open Office. In fact I don’t have a copy of Microsoft Office, so I had to get a relative to double check that the file opened fine with it.
Stuart, no problem, I’ll put up some pictures of it later today.
Helen, spring is such a busy time in the garden. All of a sudden everything wants to reach for the sun. Everyday there’s something new. It’s hard to keep up with all the new growth. The information you do have in the register will probably help you next year, and then you can just continue expanding it next year.
I have just started to keep track of plants with computer software. I have a Mac, running OSX 10.5 (Leopard), and I recently purchased Bento, a simple database program for the Mac. I also use Excel a lot, but the advantage of Bento is that you can add pictures. In addition to tracking plants in my own garden, I take pictures of plants that I see and like at public gardens. Often there is a label, so my second picture is a close-up of the label. I then google the plant on the Internet and copy relevant information into various fields in my Bento database.
As for sorting in Excel, you won’t have to highlight the entire sheet if you go to the Data menu and click on Filter, then choose “Autofilter”. In addition, you might want to keep some notes on a particular plant. You can do that in Excel by going to the Insert menu and choosing “Comment”. That will enable you to add a comment of several paragraphs to a particular cell; the comment only appears when you hover your mouse over the cell.
I keep all my plant tags and hope that helps! Thanks to your commenter Eric for the info on Bento…I will check that out! I am a mac user and Bento may be just the program to help me get a better handle on my plants!
Gail
I think this is brilliant! Thank you for sharing.
Thank you also to the commentors who provided additional tips. Have I said lately how much I love this blog?? :-)
Eric, thanks for the info and ideas. Bento sounds ideal with the addition of pictures. I like the idea of recording what you see at public gardens in an organized way.
Gail, the program sounds great for garden record keeping, especially for the Mac.
Ms. S, I’m glad it’s useful. I find with the garden covered in snow for half the year, I have a lot of time for planning.
I put a Flash demo showing the sorting into the next post.
Your record keeping is really impressive. I use a spreadsheet to keep track of vegetable output for each of my plants, but it’s not nearly as extensive as yours. Great job and great blog!
John, thanks. Keeping track of the vegetable output is a good idea. You could experiment with different procedures and maintenance, and then record the results and yield.
I also have garden spreadsheet. My additional columns include: height & width of plant, flower colour, foliage colour, theme (oriental, european, Australian native, planting position in my garden(west-bed, walk way, pool fence etc), pruning times, fertilising programs times and yes I use excel comments boxes. I have found it very very useful as a reference helps to learn and remember the botanical names my sheet has common names as well.
I have just set one up for my daughter who is starting her first garden and she loves it.
cheers and have fun
Shirley, you have some great ideas for more information to record and sort by. I’ve thought of adding foliage colour, because that is very handy when planning groupings. I like your idea for theme, too, keeping track of the native plants, etc. Adding their planting position would be good for remembering their location, and general site to record their progress too. It would help in figuring out how successful certain plants are with specific factors, like your dry shade bed, etc. Location would probably be the one I had to update most. : )
Thanks for the additional ideas.
Thank you so much for the wonderful spreadsheet. I was searching for ways to keep garden records. Mine is a horrible mish mash in a spiral notebook, often out of order. I’m certainly going to try this spreadsheet. Open Office has a data base also, btw. I’ve never read a real blog before. This is great!
Lleni, the spreadsheet is great for keeping track of your plants. Once you have the initial setup, it’s very easy to update, as you get new plants. If you’re entering the garden off-season now, it will give you something to do until you can get into the garden again. :) Let me know if you think of any refinements. There’s a link to a bloom chart, which is a very simple visual way of keeping track of your flowering times too. I have a lot of snowy months during which I can update my records and make new plans.
Hey Northern Shade, I actually came across your blog by searching “Zone 3 plant list” in google. You were at the top. I’ve been working hard lately, itching for spring, looking up and cataloging plants in my yard. I moved into my home 6 years ago not knowing anything about gardening but interestingly enough, purchased the property because it had been professionally landscaped. It’s taken me a long time and a lot of trial and error to piece together everything, or rather a fraction, of what’s happening out there. Your site is a great model for me as I try and organize all the information I am collecting. It can be daunting with so many factors to consider. Reading through your spreadsheet was very interesting, thanks for sharing it. I personally want to start collecting my own seed so I might add a field for seed readiness similar to your bloom field into the spreadsheet I will be creating.
Best of luck to you this coming spring. I will be looking forward to seeing your new developments.
PJL1281, I’ve been picturing spring under that deep pile of snow, too. In the midst of our recent deep freeze, I looked up the dates of the first blooming bulbs in my garden, and calculated how many days until the first flowers. :) I should upload my most recent gardening spreadsheet to the site, as I’ve added many new plants that are hardy in zone 3. Your addition of the seed readiness field is a great idea. If you read through the perennial category articles, you can see some detailed photo closeups to help you with plant identification. This is a good time to work on the garden records, before things get busy in spring. Good luck with cataloguing your plants.
What a wonderful blog! I found it when looking for info on Green Spice heuchara.
Cab you identify the plants in the above photo? Your garden is lovely!!
Liza, thanks. Heuchera ‘Green Spice’ has excellent foliage, very colourful and evergreen, so it looks good all season.
The photo above is in part shade, since these plants appreciate some sun to get more blossoms. In the back on the left is a group of Campanula glomerata (clustered bellflower). Their flowers are very pretty, but the plants don’t look as good once the flower show is over. In the middle at the back are some pink Dianthus caryophyllus ‘Grenadin’ (perennial carnation). They have nice blue green leaves as well those pretty pink flowers, plus a terrific scent. The large pink flowers are Paeonia lactiflora ‘Sarah Bernhardt’, a really nice pink peony with a divine perfume. In front is a border of annual light blue Lobelia. It blooms all summer, and makes a great edging in the shade.
There have been some more flowers added to this bed since I took this photo a few years back. There are some blue and purple iris, which look great with the colour scheme. I’ve also added some blue Campanula ‘Summertime Blues’ (bellflowers), which are a few feet tall, with large silvery blue bells. Another addition is some Phlox paniculata ‘David’(tall summer phlox) with tall white flowers, and ‘Davids Lavender’ with lavender coloured flowers for late summer and fall flowers. The more recent additions add to the cottage garden look. Planted in between the perennials are lots of crocus bulbs, to start the flowers blooming in early spring before the perennials are out. Also, at the back on the right there is now a Hydrangea paniculata ‘Little Lamb’ shrub that gets large white flowers in late summer and fall.