On Record-Keeping
How logging what we see helps us notice more
One of the many joys of gardening is record-keeping. It is perhaps not surprising that I — who daylights as a journalist, was a devoted teen diarist, and kept a nature journal as a little kid — should love this aspect of garden life so much. But I’ve created a real practice of logging this year, in the garden and elsewhere, and found it immensely fulfilling.
In previous years, I kept a slapdash garden journal where I sketched out plans and made note of certain sprout dates or observation on different pests. Last year, I went digital and made a color-coded spreadsheet that in the end I found too technical to maintain. I knew I needed a better analogue tool this year. I use a bullet journal to keep track of my life in general, so at first I thought I’d integrate garden records there. But I was overwhelmed by all the data I could collect and the many different ways I could log it. Lists? Sketches? Calendars? Columns? Journal entries?
At the bookstore, I leafed through The Garden Journal: A Five Year Record of Your Home Garden by Linda Vater and decided to go with that. I needed a baseline to figure out what data was useful and what was not. I liked the layout of this journal: by season, with entry spaces for each day of the month over five years — kind of like a line-a-day journal. There’s a graph paper section to draw up garden plans; a place to inventory and review your seeds; space to list perennials and note when you planted, pruned, and fed them. There are a few pages I don’t need — such as those to list the garden-related events held each season and some data collection aspects that are aimed at folks with much larger gardens. Also, why the publishers decided that a book meant to be toted around the garden should have a white cover is beyond me. Mine became soil-stained immediately. Even so, I appreciate this journal for helping me get serious about logging my garden observations and tasks. It’s given me a very useful starting place from which I plan to build a future garden notebook that’s tailored to how I personally garden.
This is all to say: I’ve been thinking a lot about how to log and why it matters. For one thing, logs are useful because they help gardeners plan. For example, I made a note on Wednesday that I sowed honeynut squash indoors. That particular variety takes roughly 100 days to mature, so I’ll now know to expect my first squash to fruit sometime after July. Also, the general rule of thumb is to fertilize your edible plants about once a month — just long enough that you can easily forget when you last did it. I like to skip forward a month in my journal and note when I’ll next need to fertilize or do some other recurring task. That way I can open to the day’s page in the journal and have a pre-made list of jobs or a record of when I should expect a certain plant to be ready to harvest.
Outside of the garden, I’m an apprentice beekeeper. I help my bee mentor maintain his backyard hives. My mentor keeps very detailed logs of everything he and I do when we inspect or work on the hives. A hive is made up of several wooden boxes and each box contains about nine frames, which are the foundation on which bees draw comb that they fill will brood (eggs, larvae, pupae), capped honey (much of which we’ll harvest and jar), and resources (such as pollen, nectar, and bee bread, which is a blend of pollen and nectar and is bees’ primary food). Any time we move these frames around, my mentor logs what we do. That way, on our next inspection, we’ll know what effect our changes had on the health of the hive. Last weekend, for example, we added a brood frame to a hive that doesn’t have a queen. We hoped introducing brood would encourage the bees to start creating queen cells, larger egg chambers where queen bees are reared. Logging when and where we placed the brood will help us know whether our intervention was successful. In the end, bees, like cats, do whatever they want. But there’s a joy to tinkering around the edges to encourage the best possible outcomes. We learn what works by keeping track of what we’ve done in the past.
Logs also help us hone our observation skills. This winter I learned about eBird, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s citizen science data collection tool. You can submit your bird observations through eBird’s online portal or app. I like to bring a pocket-sized notebook on my walks through the woods and tally up how many each species of bird I see. Sometimes I notice something different, like bird the same size as a robin but with darker colored wings. I’ll make a note of this find and research at home whether I was looking at an immature robin or another species. (In this example, it was an Eastern Towhee!) Submitting these daily observations to eBird helps maintain a robust database for researchers tracking bird migration, behavior, and patterns. And it helps me notice the seasonal patterns in my own neck of the woods: when I spot my first Hermit Thrush or when I see a very long V of more than 30 migrating Canada geese flying north on one of the first warm mornings. Now on my walks through the woods, it feels almost like walking through a neighborhood: Here is the section where I always hear a Carolina Wren sing, there is the sycamore where Barred Owls nest. It’s these habits of careful observation that invite us into deeper relationship with the landscapes we move through.
Meanwhile, Back At The Plot…
The spring garden is coming along. We had a spate of unusually warm days last week followed by some gentle showers, so hopefully everything will be looking good when I head down there tomorrow.
We have had a very rainy few weeks here, so the slugs are having a field day. I’ve picked a few off my radishes and noticed they’ve enjoyed some of my rapini leaves. Somehow I managed to bring a few tiny slugs home with me after I took my tomato and pepper seedlings down to the plot to fertilize them. (I use an organic liquid fish fertilizer and I just can’t abide mixing it at home. If you think reheating fish is smelly, try using this stuff!!) For days, I couldn’t figure out why there were little holes in both my seedlings at home under the grow lights and the young plants in the ground at the plot. I should’ve realized earlier that it was a sign of slugs, but the fact that I saw the same pattern at home was confusing. Then, early one morning, when it was still dark, I turned on the grow lights to find a slug truly mid-chew on my Thai chili seedling. I thought they weren’t supposed to like spicy plants?! Well, these guys certainly did. So far I’ve pulled off four tiny slugs from my indoor seedlings. I tried to set beer traps indoor but they didn’t catch anything. I gave up on that strategy quickly because it made our kitchen smell like a frat house. I’ve had more success so far with the beer traps at my plot.* It’s been very frustrating and led to me having to restart my basil after the slugs chewed up the tender sprout. I think I’ve effectively quarantined the plants with slugs, though, so I’m hopeful I’m in the clear now. In gardening, there’s always something new!
On my list of garden jobs this weekend:
Direct sow bush beans and sunflowers
Refill the beer traps for slugs
While it is still too cold to move my tomatoes and peppers to my cold frame, it should be warm enough by Monday. Always a milestone!
That’s all for now. Happy spring, everyone. Get out there and track what you see!
*May I recommend The Vegetable Garden Problem Solver Handbook by Susan Mulvihill? It’s a wealth of organic solutions to common issues with edible plants.