Keeping track of my planting

i Have a reletively small Garden right now.
I am using a form of square foot gardening.    
I have  2 Beds that are 8X4  and  1 Bed that is 18 x 8(It came with the house).  

I plan on adding a few more beds next year.  But  I am strugging with keeping track of the exact location where i planted each crop.
For Example.   In on of my 8x4 beds.  I know I planted  Spanish Radish and  Cherry Belle.  But I dont know if planted the Cherry Belle in the Top Right corner, or Spanis Radish.
 So was wondering if someone has an idea of how I can keep better track.
I am using a few online garden programs one being vegplotter and the other is the free version of seedtime.     I find that I can make the plans on the computer, but when I go outside I get confused as too what Garden bed is which,
like am I planting in Garden bed 1 or 2, and am i planting on the top half or the bottom Half.   ETC.  And this is me just having  3 beds.  

So perhaps others can give me some ideas.

Thank you
Marc

Hi Marc,

Welcome to Permies.

I can think of two approaches.   The first is to draw a map of your garden identifying where everything is.  The second is to use markers in your garden identifying the plant ….. such as wood sticks with the names on them.

Marc, welcome to the forum!

A lot of folks use "Plant Labels".

Here are some threads that might interest you or others:

https://permies.com/t/10241/plant-label-ideas

https://permies.com/t/138813/permaculture-upcycling/upcycle-durable-plant-labels

Once you get more familiar with the forum, you might want to make some for the PEP Badge Bits and you can see how others made their plant labels:

https://permies.com/wiki/168925/Pop-plant-labels-PEA-BB

https://permies.com/wiki/168927/Plant-labels-PEA-BB-metalworking

I can relate!

I have been planting on just one bed and got confused really fast. Then I just took a notebook, the basic kind of that has a grid on the pages, draw the bed on it and took it out with me every time I went to plant seeds in it.

It’s really ugly and no one else can probably figure out what it says but its enough for me!

Hi.

Our plants are always thirsty, so we put a dry stick next to seedlings so we can find them. Since we don't really care what variety they are, we don't label them.
If we ever get seeds, we label them as 'survivors'. If we were to label varieties, we'd use some wood labels attached to the sticks, I guess.

Hi Marc,
I have the same problem. I never liked any of the plant labels (though that is the easiest and probably most practical. What I did was modify a spreadsheet to make each cell into a square instead of a rectangle. Then I used the grid to draw a scale garden and just added color coding and labels for the various plants. I actually used a different sheet zoomed out where 1 square equaled 1 inch to figure out my spacing of the plants. Each year, I just create a copy of it with a new year and modify where my plants are. I can go back to previous years and see where I planted things before. If you don't have access to Excel there is LibreOffice Calc and Google Spreadsheets that are free.