A Gardening Diary / About
A seed habit that outgrew its shoebox.
The spreadsheet that became a database
I am Jennie — zone 5b, twelve raised beds, and a seed habit that outgrew three storage boxes. A Gardening Diary started as the spreadsheet I kept opening in February and became the garden tracker I wished someone had already made.
A Gardening Diary is that spreadsheet, rebuilt as an actual database. Every seed is a record. Every record knows how many weeks of growth it needs before it goes outside. And because the record also knows your frost-free date — not an average for the whole Midwest — it can tell you the two-week window when that particular seed should be sown.
Why it is different
Built for the way a season actually runs.
Your frost date, not a regional average
Everything counts back from the two dates on your profile. Change them and the whole stash re-dates itself in one pass.
Records are editable forever
Add, modify, archive or delete any entry. Archiving keeps the history of a seed you have run out of without cluttering the list you work from.
A planting is its own record
Start one from a seed and it copies the whole record. This year in Bed 3 can differ from the packet without rewriting the packet.
The point of writing it down
A Gardening Diary exists so that a good year is not luck you cannot reproduce. Write down what you sowed, when, and what happened. The database keeps it until you need it again.