Thursday, March 12, 2015

Record Keeping in the Garden

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Reading one of Angie's previous posts on record keeping in the garden and her mention of Beth's Lesson Learned, I thought I would describe my own record keeping system for the garden. Describing that system might offer an opportunity to improve it, in other words to learn some lessons of my own.


Crocuses ( crop from last year)





The system

When I get a new plant, whether I buy it, am given it or have grown it from seed, I remove the original label and replace it with one of my own permanent labels. I have described in a previous post how I make these permanent labels.  To make a long story short, I recycle slats from discarded aluminum blinds, which I cut to appropriate length.


Plant labels made with recycled aluminum blinds


There are numerous reasons I do not use the original label that may have come with the plant.



  •   It is invariably made of plastic which, of course, means it has a rather short life in the garden, especially in the sun. My aluminum labels last much longer.
  • The original label often has a picture of the plant which might come in handy in the future. 
  •  If my own label gets lost in the garden, I can make a new one by referring to the information on the original label that came with the plant.
  • We have all had plants that were mislabeled. If you still have the original label, you can check if the picture on it corresponds to the plant you have actually growing in the garden. 


     The original plant labels I staple into a loose-leaf binder.


  • They are stapled chronologically. I find I often have an idea of the year I bought a plant. I can find the label I am looking for much faster if they are sorted by date.
  • If the plant was grown from seed, I staple the seed package in the binder.  Labels in a flat of seedlings are more easily knock off and lost than labels stuck in the ground. If,  like me, you start a lot of seedlings, when you lose the label for one set of plants, a quick look at the seed packages stapled in the binder might help identify what the mystery seedlings are. Even if you know what they are, the following year, you might want to be reminded where you had bought some seeds that did well.




  • For bulbs and the like that come in a package with a picture, it is that picture I staple in the binder.
  • I also list the plants that are given to me or that I get in plant swaps.This is one area where the system often fails. Somehow, I tend to forget more easily to include gifts and swaps in the binder (perhaps because usually they do not come with a label to start with).

On the binder page next to where I staple the original label or package, I write information like the date it was bought, where I bought it and the price as well as the place where I put the plant in the garden.




This is another area where I realize improvements are necessary. Quite a few of these indications of just where the plant is growing are vague or misleading. I might say "Next to the white tulips"  (where are these white tulips??). Over the years plants die or are moved, and sometimes the indications no longer make much sense. I need a definite identification for each area of the garden.



My main problem, though, is ignoring my own system. The times of the year when I am planting are often hectic. I usually have too many plants to put in (surprise!) and want to get them in as soon as possible. 

I tell myself: "Surely I don't need to write this one down, I will remember it". Of course a few months later, I realize I have forgotten what the plant or the cultivar is amd where it came from.  Of course, I have no information on that plant in my binder.
 
In the shed, I also have in a pot where I put labels of the "dear departed". Psychologically, it might not be a good idea to keep these labels.   They are a reminder of all the plants I have killed over the years, and they are getting to be more numerous than the plants still growing in the garden!

29 comments:

  1. I am so impressed with your system. I honestly don't know where you find the time to document the plants so beautifully. I have been wondering how I should deal with my own garden. At the moment it is new enough to adhere to my designs, so everything is listed and planned. I know that won't last forever. I will want to introduce newcomers and the garden is growing larger by the month as I hack my way through neglected areas.

    I have labels dating back to old gardens - all of them in a very large plastic box, they may or may not be dear departed, but they are certainly plants I want to remember.

    I like the way you note the price. I sometimes find a labelled plant pot with a price on from when I started my first garden many moons ago. I wish I could pay that for plants nowadays!

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    1. I am retired, so it helps finding the time to document things.

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  2. You are much more organised than me. I start with good intentions, and even built a database for the purpose on the computer, but then the rush to get things in the ground is on and the system falls by the wayside. I wish now I'd kept it updated, it would be so useful.

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  3. Very impressive! I wish I could say I have a system, but I don't. Many of the plants in my garden were in the ground when I moved in, so my blog has been a way to document them over time. I did purchase some decent plant stakes, but I need to get some weather-resistant permanent markers for writing the names on them. Thanks for joining in the "lessons learned." :)

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    1. Permanent markers are a pet peeve of mine - often time they are not permanent and by the time you realize it, you have been using it for a while and quite a few names on labels have simply vanished.

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  4. Boy, you are one well organized gardener!

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    1. Unfortunately, practice does not always follow theory!

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  5. I constantly think I will remember what is sown, planted or just dormant. Its good to get nice 'surprises' but I am really quite ashamed that I forget. Its not so bad when anything comes up but when it does not I never know whether to wait and hope or to chuck them out!

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    1. What took the cake for me was a whole clump of lilies that appeared last summer and I did not have a clue where they came from. The only thing I can think of is that I started them from seed and last year was the first time they bloomed.

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  6. You are far better organised than I am Alain, I'm impressed. I'd be embarrassed to show the boxes in which I dump plant labels, there are a bunch of dear departeds in there too. I never considered that keeping the receipts would be useful either.
    2015 is the year I am intent on proving bulb keeping records, as per my post, it's the ones I have most bother with.
    Great idea using the aluminium blind strips - now if only the ones I've just done away with were aluminium rather than wood!

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    1. Forgot to add, thanks for the mention :)

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    2. Bulbs are more of a problem as most of them disappear for quite a while.
      Over here you can get old aluminum blinds for very little in Habitat for Humanity stores (shops where they recycle building material).

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  7. Very thorough system Alain. Over the years I have adopted various methods but now find that the 'Plant Inventory' here on my blog is the one that I seem to follow through upon. New plant comes home, gets planted and the name is added to my inventory. May 24 weekend I go out and do a comparison inventory.

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    1. That sounds like a good system. The advantage of an on-line system is that you always have access to it. We are away part of the winter and I don't have access to this data then.

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  8. Oh Alain! You're so organized!
    And you have a pot with "dear departed" labels... I'm not :(( I have paper labels and often they are wet and unreadable...
    I have to learn your experience.

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    1. You probably have a much better memory than I do Nadezda!

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  9. Lots of our record keeping is through tagged photos which are searchable. We take photos of everything including labels. We take hundreds of photos. We keep a detailed record of sowing, germination, harvesting etc. in spreadsheets which are recreated on our website including a full list of seeds and plants bought. We use GrowVeg online which keeps earlier planting schemes.

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  10. this is an amazing system! I can only dream of being so organized!!

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    1. As I said above, it sounds better in theory than it is in practice.

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  11. Labeling plants in a garden is a tricky task as some birds (magpie and crow) tend to pull them out. Frost also lift them up, so there is a good probability for grand mess. I only have my sempervivums labeled as they are small and tightly planted. In other cases I use a method of skeching my bed's and borders, which is OK, but needs updating every year and eventually, drawing a new ones. Photographing helps too.
    And ofcourse, I keep all original labels for the record.

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  12. It is interesting to hear about how our experience with gardening is different in various places. I found it funny to read that magpies and crows pull out labels (I am sure it is not funny for the gardener). Here we do not have magpies and crows are too shy to come into the garden. Frost can lift labels here too and then they easily get lost.
    Your technique of using a plan of the garden insures that you know where things are. That is an advantage over my system.

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    1. Oh those magpies are famous for their stealing habit. Everything shiny goes - silver spoons and diamond rings, you name it! And those white labels attract them too. What else attracts crows and magpies are freshly sowed peas and beans. They observe you sowing and when you're gone, they are on site, eating all! Very smart birds!

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    2. Here crows are not very shy in cities, but in the country they don't get close to humans or to buildings. Probably because some farmers shoot them. There are magpies out West in Alberta. It is strange than we do not have them in the East.

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  13. Words fail me Alain, I can only admire the thoroughness of your record keeping. I know that records are very much part of "proper" horticulture but it something I have never come to terms with.

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  14. Alain, you have an amazing system, and I love the idea that you are using recycled blinds, too.

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  15. What a fantastic system! I must say I'm most impressed and may do the same....I just need to track down some blinds! I did laugh at the dearly departed pot, sadly, I think we all have far too many of them!xxx

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  16. Hello Alain, you're so much more organised I am when it comes to plants and labelling that it puts me to shame. I can see how keeping up with that level of record keeping can get very difficult during planting times. I tend to use my blog as a vague reference and tend to write about newly acquired plants or large changes in borders in blog posts so I can at least search through it, though it won't have the level of detail you have with your system.

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