How to track your garden in your planner

Every spring I spend a weekend perusing local greenhouses and the Lowe’s garden section for beautiful flowers to fill my balcony with tons of color.

But, I don’t exactly have a green thumb. By early summer, I’ve lost the care cards, forgot the names of the flowers and have no idea how to properly care for the plants. I wing it and a majority of the plants live through most of the summer.

It’s a system that works OK, but this year I decided to use my planner to find something that works even better. Here’s what I did:

1.  I always buy a new planner in the fall, which means I’ve usually got a few months of pages at the end that I don’t use.  So, I looked through the pages in December 2017 and picked one that worked well for this project’s needs.
   I used an end-of-the-week page, because I wanted to use the lined weekend boxes for notes. This was the last week in the planner, so the back of this page is a lined notes page.
2. I used washi tape to cover the days of the week and the winter-themed quote at the bottom of the page and labeled the page with the year.
3. I used the blank weekday boxes to track the specific details of each flower. I included the flowers name along with watering and sunlight needs.
4. The lined weekend column became one huge notes section. I’m using this for observations I make throughout the summer.  I plan to write down which plants thrive, which don’t do so well and details about any garden tips/tricks I try out and how successful they are.