Wednesday, January 23, 2013

New Start 2013

I created this blog last year but never posted on it. I got caught up in the gardening and forgot to document it! I have my garden journal and some sketches as well as some pictures. But as with my fiber journey, I want to document in a more public manner. I'm not going to slap up a bunch of pictures from last year. Rather I'll use them as counterpoint to this year's garden. I am going to start with my Garden Journal make over.

Last year I started with a basic composition notebook. I had two of them and I used one for my Garden Journal and one for my Canning Log. I had seen a post somewhere, can't remember where, about a way to keep a quick and easy journal that compares one year to the next. They took a regular spiral bound notebook and opened it to the first two facing pages. Draw a line down the middle of each page to divide into two columns. Label each as Month/Year for 4 years, such as January 2013, January 2014 etc. Then on the next 4 pages label each as Notes Month/Year. You do that for the whole year. That gives you a 4 year journal. Some pages won't have much on it, like January. All I have is a list of what I want to plant. But even that is good to compare. I can see how that changes from year to year.

I used my Garden Journal to set this up. I still have the pages from 2012 but started the new format after that. Then I counted up how many pages I used. I used 72 pages. Then I counted how many pages were left in the journal and I have 85 pages left. So I can actually create another 4 years and have 8 years of data. I also found some scrapbook pages in my craft room that are cute and some black elastic. So I spruced up my journal by pasting those pages inside the covers and figured out how to use the elastic to make a closure for the journal.





On the Notes page I figured I can use it for garden sketches. I found it invaluable to make a sketch of my garden last year and update it as I planted stuff. By having a page for each month it can show the progression of Spring to Summer to Fall.

Dion enlarged my garden a little bit. Mostly just squared it up but it is a little bigger. I moved my strawberries and spread them out a bit. Now I have space to add more asparagus.

Our major addition to the garden this fall was a tiller. Dion found a huge deal on a used one for $85. We took my car to look at it and then proceeded to put it in the back! We use my car as a truck a lot...
So this is my garden blog, getting it started on one of the coldest days of the year. We had a low of 21° last night and a low of 16° the night before. The high yesterday was 32° and not supposed to be much higher today. That is after near 70° temps week before last. Oh well.....

Happy Gardening...