New Year, New Pad

[GoDawgs]

Happy New Year to all! It's a chilly 29 this morning with heavy frost. Of course. It's January!

To start the new gardening year I am following the now-eight year tradition of starting a new garden notepad that I keep in my pocket when I'm out there. The old one is quite battered with front and back covers held on by paperclips.



I attribute the excess wear of last year's pad to the inferior brand whose bundle of five pads I bought at Walmart. The good old ones that I used to buy at Sam's were made by Mead. Sam's doesn't even carry pocket notepads anymore, probably because people use their phones now for everything. That won't work in the garden during use by dirty hands slowly tap-tap-tapping notes and the chance of exposure to water. Totally unacceptable. This year's pad was bought at Staples so we'll see how well it holds up.

I wonder what will fill that little notebook this year... hopefully more successes than failures!

May all of your gardening efforts this year be fruitful!

[Setec Astronomy]

That's a lot better idea than trying to remember notes and come inside and type them on the computer after washing up. Not that I know anyone that does that

[Paulf]

If anyone wonders where all the inane and anal information about my tomato gardening comes from, these are the notebooks dating to the first year we were in Nebraska trying to make things grow. While there are no pocket notebooks, these go with me into the garden to record whatever comes to mind. The big notebooks stay in the garage next to the scales for all the recording. During the winter planning and early spring seed sowing it is in the basement for all those details. I don't know why I had no notebooks for the previous thirty years of gardening, but I find them an essential tool for now the past twenty-two years.

[AKgardener]

Funny looks like we all got new notebooks and pocket size as well what a great way to start off the new year.

[GoDawgs]

That's a lot better idea than trying to remember notes and come inside and type them on the computer after washing up. Not that I know anyone that does that

That's why I started using the pocket notebooks. There's no way I could remember all the notes about the plants and also the "need to do" things like replace a side board on one of the beds, mark this or that, etc. And they also come in handy when I forget to enter something into the computer like date of planting out and first picking. I can usually find stuff like that in the pocket notebook to help fill in the blank.

That little pencil is a golf pencil for writing down shots on one's golf scorecard. Pickles, er, I mean Santa, gave me a box of 72(a lifetime supply) three Christmases ago and they're perfect for the pad. I think she got them at Staples.

[AKgardener]

My husband got me these notebooks he use to use when he was a diver. I hang them up with a string in my pop up greenhouse so I don’t loose it because anyone who knows me I’m always picking stuff up and putting it down somewhere else. I always ask him where’s my eyes haha.

[Setec Astronomy]

Dawgs, you've got a lot more to keep track of than I do, you have a real garden, I just have a pretend one.

AK--do you have to put those pads underwater to write on them?

[Tormahto]

Happy New Year to all! It's a chilly 29 this morning with heavy frost. Of course. It's January!

To start the new gardening year I am following the now-eight year tradition of starting a new garden notepad that I keep in my pocket when I'm out there. The old one is quite battered with front and back covers held on by paperclips.



I attribute the excess wear of last year's pad to the inferior brand whose bundle of five pads I bought at Walmart. The good old ones that I used to buy at Sam's were made by Mead. Sam's doesn't even carry pocket notepads anymore, probably because people use their phones now for everything. That won't work in the garden during use by dirty hands slowly tap-tap-tapping notes and the chance of exposure to water. Totally unacceptable. This year's pad was bought at Staples so we'll see how well it holds up.

I wonder what will fill that little notebook this year... hopefully more successes than failures!

May all of your gardening efforts this year be fruitful!

Gonna color coordinate it with a new t-shirt?

[AKgardener]

@Setec Astronomy no you do not.. there just waterproof.. very handy need to buy more husband keeps taking them from me haha..

[Setec Astronomy]

That little pencil is a golf pencil for writing down shots on one's golf scorecard. Pickles, er, I mean Santa, gave me a box of 72(a lifetime supply) three Christmases ago and they're perfect for the pad. I think she got them at Staples.

Those are pretty fancy, usually the golf pencils don't have erasers...or maybe those are just the miniature golf pencils that don't have erasers.

[GoDawgs]

That little pencil is a golf pencil for writing down shots on one's golf scorecard. Pickles, er, I mean Santa, gave me a box of 72(a lifetime supply) three Christmases ago and they're perfect for the pad. I think she got them at Staples.

Those are pretty fancy, usually the golf pencils don't have erasers...or maybe those are just the miniature golf pencils that don't have erasers.

Well, I can see where not having an eraser makes cheating harder. But if the wrong score was entered on purpose in the first place there would be no need for erasing!

[habitat-gardener]

My garden notebooks each last about 2 years. I usually take them to the garden with me unless it's raining.
For the past few years, I've been using 8.5x11-inch notebooks with graph paper. To make it easy to find stuff, I write the daily entries on the right-hand pages and use the left-hand pages for lists: seed-starting, watering schedules, harvest tallies, plants bought, etc. I use the first few pages of the notebook to draw my garden plans and/or add a table of contents so I can find, for instance, the garlic-variety planting list.