By Jim McCausland, Sunset Magazine

I used to blame crows, mostly, for gaps in my garden database. They would steal plant labels before I recorded plant names elsewhere and I’d find myself with an interesting but unknown rose, sedge, or patch of tulips in the garden.

No more.

Now I keep track of things with a simple, home-made system anybody can use. It’s in two parts: a garden journal and some supplemental files on the computer.

 1) Three-ring binder with tabbed plastic pockets, one for each year. Whenever I scatter seeds or set out new plants, the label or empty packet goes into the current year’s plastic pocket, and a duplicate label (usually a name penciled onto a metal tag) goes into the garden for the crows to play with. When new plants come with an instruction sheet for planting or pruning, I put that in the binder too.

In addition, I make a few garden maps on lined paper each year. These aren’t as much work as it might seem. 

The first maps show each bed’s permanent plants. In most beds, this map doesn’t change much from year to year, and when changes are needed, they’re usually minor.

The second maps show the planting plan for vegetable beds. There’s a version for spring crops, one for warm-season crops, and one for fall/winter crops. These vegetable maps are especially important in helping me plan crop rotations.

The process of updating the tabs and maps at the end of each year gives me a chance to reflect on the general direction of the garden, its successes and failures, and motivates me to plan the coming year’s garden—perfect timing, since garden catalogs are coming in now.

2) Computer records. I love lists enough to creat my own. The most valuable of these are monthly notes about what’s going on in the garden. I use a FileMaker database for this, but any word processing software would work nearly as well. 

I make one record per month, January through December, divided into first, middle, and last thirds of the month. Throughout the year I enter first and peak bloom, leaf-out, harvest, and first fall color—whatever strikes me as significant, always tagged with the year I made the note. Over time it gives me a sense for whether events like bloom and harvest are early, late, or right on schedule. 

And because I love critters, I have a second set of monthly records for whatever flaps, runs, wiggles, or flutters through my garden. In it I record everything from the arrival of the season’s first swallows to periodic infestations of scale on the dogwood or webworms on the apple. This is truly a big-picture tool. It gave me my first hint that honeybees were in trouble when they vanished from my garden for two years (they’ve since returned); it charted a disease-related decline of pine siskins; and showed that west Nile virus probably wasn’t as virulent here as feared when crow numbers remained steady year after year (crows are said to be especially vulnerable to this disease). If you have naturalist leanings, this is indispensable.

Your own garden journal can be more or less complicated, but whatever form it takes, it will be a vast improvement over no journal at all—and label-stealing crows will never again leave you wondering about the name of that great heuchera in the perennial bed.