What and Why

Every gardening magazine and every gardening programme on TV and radio say the same thing - to be better gardeners we need to keep a diary of what we did and what happened.

Maybe you've managed to do this with a nice notebook, or some exercise books or even an actual desk diary. But the nice notebook gets scruffy and the diary doesn't have enough space for the busy times and too much empty space for the quiet times.

It's nice to read through what you did last year but that's all you can do, read it through. You can't search for specific things.

Maybe you used a simple computer program, maybe just a simple text editor like Notebook (that's where I started) or perhaps you co-opted a spreadsheet. Usable but not really quite what you wanted.

That was my position, so I decided to write a dedicated application to do the things I wanted to do. I wanted to keep a record of what I did, seeds sown, time to germination and harvest. I wanted to be able to make notes on the different sorts of plants - was this tomato worth growing? And, most importantly, be able to look things up quickly - what happened with the cucumbers last year? Where did I buy those seeds?

This application is not going to tell you what to do or when to do it - there are thousands of books written by much better gardeners than me for that. This is for you to record what you did.

Here are a few screen shots of my Garden Notebook application. These are real data I've recorded over the years.

Here are some of the options to select what the Diary tab shows