Thursday, June 17, 2010

Garden Record-Keeping

A good journal or record of the garden will help prevent making the same mistake over and over. It also is a guide to the micro-environment of the individual garden. Day before yesterday (6/15/10) Charlotte had a good drenching from a thunderstorm. My yard did not get a drop. I wasn’t home so how do I know that? I have a rain gauge. A little notebook in the greenhouse records the rainfall and the temperature and the day’s harvest.

It also records the activities done on that day. There is also a garden map that tells what is planted where. Whenever a bed is fallow, a ph grid is made. The ph in the beds changes some from season to season. If the garden plan will require a certain ph for the next thing to be planted in a particular spot, the soil modification can begin at once. Sometimes the map is needed to identify what was actually planted. The patty-pan squash this year turned out not to be patty-pan squash. The garden map assured me that I had planted patty-pan squash in that bed. Squash seeds are unreliable.

The garden journal also helps with crop rotation and measures the success of certain things in certain places . If problems occur with certain crops year after year, we may just have to accept that those crops should not be grown in our garden.

David Segrest is an International REALTOR in Charlotte, NC. His email is david@segrestrealty.com , His webpage is http://www.segrestrealty.com , and his international real estate blog is http://dointernationalrealestate.blogspot.com/

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