Garden Notes

[ibetiny]

Garden Notes

Hello everyone. I have finally got myself a place with space enough to garden. It will have to be square foot gardening but after 15 years without a garden I'll take what I can get.
Here's the question. I want to keep notes on each type of plant that I plant in my garden. I have come up with the following items to include;

type of plant
growing season
when to start seed
when to transplant
expected harvest dates
when to pull
how to plant
size\squares
sun
soil type
fertilizer type\times
water
loves\hates
comments

Is there anything that all of you experienced gardeners see missing from my notes? Something to add or get rid of? On the web I found some templates to use but they were either full of useless (to me) information, or wanted me to pay for them. I plan to have one for each kind of plant in my garden. (i.e. one for roma tomatoes, one for beefsteak tomatoes....)

Thanks in advance for your advice.
Tiny

[Matt In Oklahoma]

looks good, insects and disease might be added along with the cure

[Karen]

Absolutely, info about insects and diseases as well as the cures. The dates that you should plant are good to know, but you might also write down that actual planting date as well as the actual harvest date, yield of harvest, notes on the weather during the growing season, first frost and hard freeze dates, last frost and hard freeze dates, and any fertilizers or pest controls used.
To collect better data, you might consider having at least three of each plant. If one plant becomes diseased or gets trampled, you would still have two more plants to learn from.
Notes about unusual growing habits would be helpful too. The first time I grew luffa gourds, i thought something was wrong with my plants. They grew to a height of about 6 inches and then stopped growing. They didn't start growing again for about a month. They ended up producing lots of luffas :-)
Also, notes about companion planting. What plants do well when grown next to each other. (Marigolds tend to be a natural insect deterrent)

[BioG8r]

Karen b thinkin'!!! She has the plan. I see you have water, we add Any weather event especially when and how much rain we get. It wasn't mentioned in the original post but we also keep drawings (maps) of each patch and what was in it for rotation to prevent disease and control insects.
I made a spreadsheet using some of the other templates and suggestions from extension documents.

[MustangGal]

Watermelons. I don't know what square foot gardening says about watermelons, but ours grew out of the 4x8 bed and into the beds on either side, plus at least ten feet out the end of the bed and into the yard. Watermelons take LOTS of space.

[SeldomSeenSlim]

You might be interested in this http://gardenplanner.territorialseed.com/ It's a pay for application, but there's a trial period so you can see if you like it before you buy and it's not expensive. I don't use it myself, but I played with it for the trial period and found it to be full of good features. It has a mode specifically for square foot gardening. It has all of the plant varieties and information for the seeds sold by Territorial Seed, but you can add in your own. I don't see that as a bad thing since I think they're a good company with good products. I think it would do all of the tracking that you are looking for in a way that would be very easy to manage compared to writing things in a notebook.

[ibetiny]

Thanks to everyone for their help. Nice to know people still help one another. If everything goes well I will try to get some pics of the garden.