Comments on: Garden Record Keeping System

By: Northern Shade

Northern Shade — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:15:42 +0000

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.

By: Lleni

Lleni — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 02:53:38 +0000

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!

By: Northern Shade

Northern Shade — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 13:10:35 +0000

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.

By: Shirley

Shirley — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 12:22:41 +0000

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

By: Northern Shade

Northern Shade — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:19:37 +0000

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.

By: John

John — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:38:58 +0000

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!

By: Northern Shade

Northern Shade — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:22:01 +0000

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.

By: Ms. S

Ms. S — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:30:48 +0000

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?? :-)

By: Gail

Gail — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:10:57 +0000

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

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:29:25 +0000

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.