Armchair Gardening

It's pretty cold and windy here today, with temperatures in the 40's.  I suppose I shouldn't complain, as so much of the country is buried in snow at the moment, but it still feels darned cold to me, and the wind just goes right through you.

So any gardening done today will be of the armchair variety.

This month's Garden How-To magazine shared some great links for gardeners, two of which I was especially interested in. 

Gardener's Supply Co. is one of my favorite catalogs, but I didn't realize, until I read about it in Garden How-To magazine, that they have a Kitchen Garden Planner.  

You can either choose one of their pre-planned vegetable gardens or you can create your own using their online tool.  

It's pretty neat -- you drag the vegetable or herb you want on to the garden plan and it spaces them out appropriately, so you know how many you can plant in your bed.  You can save your plans and print them out.  The site also provides all sorts of tips and information about planting and growing vegetables and more.

For the past few years in addition to blogging about my garden, I have kept a garden journal, with the specifics of what I plant, when I plant it, how it does etc. etc.

Well, that's always the plan anyway....  But it seems like every year I'm gung ho for a couple of months, then I slow down a bit and finally, but the dog days of summer, I have abandoned my garden journal entirely.

What starts out as a great idea ends up being barely legible because of my increasingly bad handwriting, and also not user friendly, as it's not easy to find information if I want to look up something I wrote about, but can't remember when.  In addition, at the end of the year, my dear husband kindly offers to scan every page for me, so I don't have to keep stacks of paper lying around.

So when I read in Garden How-To magazine about GreenThumbJournal.com,  I had to take a peek.   

The site allows you to keep a journal with as much or as little information as you want.  It's online, it's searchable and it's FREE.

You can log the weather, your observations, gardening activities etc.   You can also browse other people's journals, share photos of your garden etc.

I'm really going to try and keep up with this.  Even if I just do short "observation" posts, such as making a note of when something starts leafing out, I think it will give me a great record of the progress of the garden.  And it's a record I'll be able to access, not one that will get stacked up in the attic and not looked at again.

Do you have any favorite tools for planning and keeping up with your garden -- either digital or otherwise? 

Words and photographs by Jayne Wilson, Green and Serene, Jayne's Country Garden.