As my kids are moving out and I am getting older, I am trying to develop a flexible visual system for planting and harvesting. My memory isn’t very good, so I depend a lot on reminders. We are in the hottest part of California, so we grow food all year round. The goal is to produce at least 90% of the food we need, with enough left to sell at the farmers market, or trade for what we can’t produce.
Currently we have 21 large raised beds and a 3300 square foot food forest garden.
Visual reminders works best for me, due to my memory issues, since I see it constantly. To do this I am using a whiteboard, a binder with my own plant catalog and spreadsheets on my computer.
The whiteboard centers around a round calendar divided into our three growing seasons (cold, warm and hot) and surrounded by the plants. It also has my todo lists and deliveries. When my kids are here, they check the board and usually take care of some of the things on the todo list. Plant names are on magnets, that also works on the metal plant markers I use in the garden, so I don’t forget what I planted.
The binder contains:
a catalog of the plants we grow, but isn’t finished, since I am constantly using different varieties of annuals.
It has a calendar that shows our fruit and berry harvest times. My goal is to have fruit and or berries available fresh year round. It has a plant catalog of what we grow, but only a short line on when to grow with a few notes. Last it has a list of medicinal uses and plants I want to try in the future and notes on companion planting.
My spreadsheets keeps track of our production, income/savings and expenses. The spreadsheets keep my husband from freaking out when I add more plants.
Right now I really need some input, especially on the whiteboard. What can I do to better organize it? Should I color code pr season, type, in an entirely different way or not at all?
Should I keep my plant catalog as lists of plants or make it bigger to include subspecies, varieties, notes on use, growing instructions and experiences with it?
I appreciate that you need to be organised, but I'm very impressed! I barely manage to write down what I do and I sometimes have to refer back to photos or my permies threads to remind me of sowing dates etc.
I guess the only suggestion I might make is whether there is any way to have a visual of where you have planted the various seasonal things? I see you have three areas with lists of the plants for the three seasons. I have a very simple four bed rotation at the moment, so it would be easy for me to do a visual of what goes where (and its so easy I don't bother except for the roots bed where I'm tracking seeds from different sources to try and make sure I save some of each strain). It might be your planting plan is so complex this would get too messy on this scale for you however.
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