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Garden Journaling for Beginners: Journal Your Gardening Journey

Are you ready for the height of the gardening season? Summer is an excellent time to dig into making new roots and finding moments of peace and love wherever you call home. My favorite way of recording a garden journey is with garden journaling. 

So today, I’m inviting you to brew up a special cuppa, ease into your favorite patio chair, and get ready to dig into five ways you can add a journaling habit to your garden plans this year. 

As a bonus, I’m sharing two bonus pro tips and sharing my newest collection of journal designs. So let’s dig in!

What is Garden Journaling?

Garden journaling is a way to gather your gardening information in one spot. It’s a pace where you can record your current garden, plans for future gardening, and everything. 

While you can start a garden journal any time of the year, my favorite time to start is when I’m feeling anxious to dig into the dirt! This way, I can track progress right from the beginning. But if you’ve been elbow-deep in gardening, go ahead and get started with a gardening journal while it’s fresh on your mind.

Garden Journals to Shop For

Take some time to write down your gardening hopes and dreams in these uplifting hand-illustrated notebooks.

Each notebook features a hand-drawn illustration laminated on softcover or hardcover options. In addition, the front and back covers are completely customizable to add your name, favorite gardening quote, year, or another special sentiment. 

Choose from seven colors for the spiral and ten paper designs for 120 pages ready for gardening inspiration. 

And the best part? Save up to 70% off with daily Zazzle deals. But don’t wait! These savings can change daily. So snag a gardening journal for you and your best friend today.

5 Tips for Getting Started with Garden Journaling

Tip 1: Sketch Your Garden As-Is

Are you looking to grow a new garden journaling habit? One of my favorite ways to start is to begin where you are. This means to capture your garden as-is in your journal. Not into sketching? Try writing instead; Get your creative juices flowing with how you’re crafting what each plant and flower look like and where they’re located.

Tip 2: Organize New Garden Plans

Now is a great time to plan. Whether you’re envisioning adding hostas alongside your driveway or paver bricks and mulch around your trees, this is where you can get creative. First, add a bullet list of your top dreams, then mark the ones you can start working on this week.

Tip 3: Write Down What You'll Need to Get Started

Next, use your plans to build a list of what you’ll need to get started. Not sure what you have? Your next step may be opening the gardening shed and taking inventory. While you’re jotting down your items, snap a few photos of those areas you want to get started with. And if you may need your soil tested, don’t forget to gather a small bag of dirt to bring to the nursery.

Tip 4: Gather Your Tools & Plants

If you’re anything like me, you’ll head to the nursery and be tempted to bring those beautiful blooms home, even if they’re not quite what you were planning to plant right now. So take your journal with you, including your list of projects you’re planning for right now, and you’ll be more apt to stay on course. Bring along a pen, and you’ll be able to jot down details for those dream plants to quickly pick up once you’re ready to tackle those projects.

Tip 5: Journal Your Gardening Journey

Now that you’ve got everything ready to go, it’s easy to put down the journal and dig into your projects. But don’t forget to take breaks and jot down your progress. You’ll be amazed to find incredible details once you start focusing on new blooms popping up, species of butterflies visiting, and unfurling advancement of some long-awaited plants.

Notebook tabs

Bonus Tips From the Pros

Bonus Tip 1: Add a List of Successful Blooms and Those to Avoid in the Future

Create one page for flowers that have flourished. Add bullets and each flower variety, and include any information you don’t want to forget. This can include if the area has a drip water system shaded by trees or if they were planted in pots. On the flip side, you’ll also want to create a page for blooms to avoid in the future. This is a perfect spot to jot down flowers with more thorns than blooms, ground cover that turned out to be invasive, and greenery that dwindled no matter how much plant food it was given.

Bonus Tip 2: Dedicate Pages for Plant Sources

Did you transfer plants from one part of your yard to another? Did you purchase one fern from your local nursery and another from the national chain in the next town over? Add some pages to your journal to jot down where each plant came from. Having this information readily available may help you determine why one plant is thriving, and the other isn’t flourishing. And years down the road, this information can be essential for perennials, bushes, shrubs, and trees.

Organizing Your Gardening Journal

Now that you have your ideas and your garden journal, now is a great time to dig in and get started. 

But how are you going to keep all those sections listed above organized? I recommend using a packet of multicolor repositionable margin tabs from your local office store. 

Grab six tabs, flip to your second page, and label your sections as:

  • Garden as-is
  • Garden plans
  • Getting started
  • Successful/Avoid
  • Plant sources
  • Gardening journey

You’ll want to leave a large section for your gardening journey since this will be the section you’ll be referring back to as you regularly build out your gardening goals this season. In addition, you’ll want to leave a handful of pages for each of the other sections. 

You can use it as an index or a spot for writing your favorite inspirational gardening quote on your first page. 

Get Started

Are you inspired to create your gardening journal? Get started by customizing your journal and begin your garden journey today.

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