My old garden journal from 2005 still holds up

I used to track everything by hand in a spiral notebook. Every planting date, every rainfall. Now I use a spreadsheet on my phone. Funny thing is I lost three years of data when my laptop died last summer. I went back to paper for my tomato beds. My cherry tomatoes did better that season too. Anyone else still prefer pen and paper over apps?

3 comments

3 Comments

brookepark29d ago

Okay I used to be all about the apps and thought paper people were being stubborn, but then I lost a whole season of squash data when my phone took a swim in a rain barrel. I grabbed a cheap composition book and honestly now I remember what I wrote down because I actually look at it every day. There's something about flipping back through the pages and seeing my handwriting change from year to year. That coffee stain on July 2018 tells me more about that heat wave than any digital chart could.

flores.tessa29d ago

Got it @brookepark. Feel the same way about my garden notebook. Dropped my phone in a bucket of soapy water last spring and lost three years of planting notes. Grabbed a five-dollar spiral notebook and never looked back. There's just something real about seeing that smudge on August 2021 where I spilled coffee while noting the first ripe tomato.

karent7529d ago

That coffee stain bit really gets me because it's exactly the kind of detail an app just can't capture. My 2009 entry has a dried ladybug pressed between the pages next to my pepper harvest notes, and every time I flip past it I remember that crazy hot summer. You can't replace that kind of accidental time capsule with a clean digital file.