Making Memories

I guess it really doesn’t matter how long you plan to live at the house and the garden that you are a steward of now. Even if you jump from place to place every two or three years, it doesn’t hurt to keep records of what you’ve done in your garden. It’s nice to keep up with the weather trends, the frost dates, the cool temperatures in the spring time and the type plants that you’ve used and what kind of luck you had with them. It’s nice to keep up with where you bought those plants, how much they cost and whether or not you think they succeeded or failed because of the quality of the plants or some other reason. Mimi and I have enjoyed becoming more regular with certain plants and certain places in our yard that just work. We have tried and tested different plants in various areas of our yard only to find out that those that we like the best and that do the best in those certain areas are hard to beat.

When we take our evening walks through the garden, we talk about 10 to 15 things that need to be done. If we didn’t bring a notepad or at least a phone to leave some notes in we won’t remember any of the ideas by the time we get back to the house. that matters on a short term because we spend our weekdays getting supplies home and set in the areas that we’re going to be working on our day off. If we don’t have everything we need when we get a day off we either spend half a day running it down and getting caught up in some other stuff or we just don’t do it. On a bigger scale it’s nice to base our decisions that we make for plant material that we’re going to use on solid information coming from years and years of journaling in the garden. We have a pen and a notebook in our work bags while we’re gardening so we can keep up with thoughts and ideas and observations. We transpose those over to a formal journal when we get a chance. We have been terrible about skipping that step since we really don’t have a proper journal somewhere close to the door. There are some store-bought journals for gardening that are very nice. Some

of the journals that I’ve seen leave an entire page for information for just on one plant. It’s nice to have the common name and the scientific name and any other information you can have on that plant so there’s no question as to which one you’re going for. Some garden journals will have a whole section just on weather trends and patterns that have been

observed over the years. I wouldn’t dare bring that journal outside with us because it would become a muddy mess in no time at all. I can barely get the mail from the mailbox to our house without crumpling up something or dropping it in a puddle. I wish we would have started garden journaling 40 years ago when we started gardening together.

We started at our first place that I was renting at Mississippi State. I was the guy with a discarded toilet in the front yard planted with as many flowers as I could get in there. I worked at a garden center in Starkville so I had access to plants. The toilet garden led us to a small patch of ground that we turned into a vegetable garden that was pretty successful. We grew herbs and vegetables. We started learning right then and there. We improved some awful soil, mulched so we wouldn’t have to spend much time weeding and dealt with the common challenges that come along with tomatoes. We moved along to other yards as we rented our way through college. We bought a condominium together the night I proposed to Mimi on this side of the reservoir. It was there that we broke ground to start gardening with plants other than veggies and herbs. We moved from there to a cabin near Ratliff Ferry way up the Natchez Trace. We had 20 acres that we felt the need to transform, focusing on the 5 acres close to the cabin. The other 15 acres were wooded so we did some clearing and developed some trails throughout. We cut out a permanent base camp and parked our VW camper there before we bought the cabin. With a piece of land that big we had to buy our first tractor so we could bush hog and chain fallen trees and limbs out of our way. We bought a 1958 Ford 9-N tractor that ran great when it ran. It was there that we started raising chickens and had our first child, Mia. I wish I would have started keeping records of all the stuff we did out there. The things we did out there are things that we have repeated over the years just at different locations. I can’t remember the soils we used to break up the ground for our newly created beds, the plants that did well for us and under which conditions.

We moved from there to a neighborhood in Madison where we had our second child, Max. We had a newly built house so we had an empty palette to work with. I would love to be able to look back at what soils we used, the timing, the plants and the new ideas that were coming our way. By this time we had built the growing operation where we grew 100’s of

varieties of perennials, herbs and annuals for the wholesale market, we just grabbed whatever we wanted whenever we wanted. Kind of like we do still but now with a little more restraint as we have learned what we like and what does well for us. We moved on from there to a 50 acre property in Flora so we were able to experience gardening big. We learned so much at that property, we have lots of photos of what we did out there but no records of the details. I have kept up with the daily weather, temps and rainfall for the last 30 years but with no connection to what we were doing in the garden. The weather that I kept up with is in a ledger that I keep at Garden Works so I can look back to see why we had a great day or a lousy day business wise. We moved from there to where we are now in Ridgeland 16 years ago. I will regret not having journaled the path that we are on now at what we hope is our forever home. We started with a 5 acre yard that had nothing planted there, just some giant oak trees, a pond and some stately pine trees that gave us a great skyline. We would love to be able to peek back into a journal to see what we did right and what we did wrong along the way. Our photos tell a lot but not the details.

We have vague memories of how and when things happened but that is no way to keep up with trending weather patterns, first and last frost dates, what seeds we used and their sowing dates, what plants we loved and the plants that we can do without. I know there is a never a too late to start thing but we will regret not having journaled the wealth of information that comes from 40 years of trials and tribulations. Who knows? It may be that one day our kids find our old journals and are able to skip making some of the mistakes or learn about some of the winners that we have encountered along the way. I plan to start recording our moves that we make in our garden in a more serious way. Some of the things I need to keep up with are inspiration from other gardens that we visit both here in town and those botanical gardens we spend time with on our vacations. Plants that we used, their common and its botanical name, where we got it, where we planted it, when we planted it, if it was in a pot or in the ground, how we took care of it, when it bloomed and how we liked it.

I would keep up with frost dates and weather patterns so I can dial in my seeding process with more accuracy. Any big weather events, good ones and bad ones and the effects it had on the plants. I will keep up with gardening techniques that we have tried and those that I hear about or learn from a YouTube video so I will remember to try it the next year. I would keep up with fertilization practices, that is one that has changed so much for us over the years. I will keep up with my seeding practices and timing from year to year, hoping to get closer to good timing, and planting the right seeds for our seasonal needs. That subject will take up many pages. I would keep up with how to attract more birds into our space which will lead into detrimental and beneficial insects and how we handled that. By looking at that I can get a really good look at the patterns of insects I can get an idea if my general insect control philosophy is working or not. I would like to include any gardening milestones, dates that beds were built or raised beds were installed, when we put in trellises and all of the primary structures and all those important things that happen in a garden like big mulching projects. That would give me an idea about when things need to happen and how long things last so we can be prepared for change outs as structures age and degrade.

One section of my journal will be about any big successes and failures, things I will definitely do again and those that don’t need to be repeated. That is an important section because if I don’t write it down I will inevitably repeat a failure. That will lead to next years plan. I hope to include sketches of ideas and plant tags of some of my favorites that I just can’t remember the names of that will be kept on the plant pages. I hope to include before and after photos so we can check out progress and how those ideas could be implemented in the next area that we are itching to get our hands on.

I am excited to get this started even if I am about 40 yeas late getting started, there is no time like the present. One of the better store bought journals that I’m getting for myself and have available at Garden Works is The Garden Planner And Log Book. We looked at a bunch of garden planners and this seemed to be the one that will suit my needs. Hopefully it can help someone else keep up with their stuff in the garden. This one fits my style and hits on those subjects that are important to us since we have decided to historically record all this fun. I hope we will one day have decades of these books in our shelves for future family or friends to check out and skip some of our missteps. Right now I better get up and get gardening as I’m burning daylight, I’ve got some memories to make.