How do you keep track of your plants?

Based on the original question I think there is a point when you have a more significant amount of plants or varieties or too large a planting/gardens to just leave it to your memory.

I don’t think  it matters how you keep track; map, spreadsheet or tags.  If you have a significant planting it is important that you do. I am cheap so I use wooden stakes and permanent marking ink.  I get my stakes at little or no cost from a lumber yard.  Sometimes I use paint stir sticks.

Marking has kept me from over planting and over buying. It makes my garden more beautiful.

I created an orchard layout using excel which can also be read by libreoffice which is free.  I cannot upload it here as an excel but if someone knows of a way it can be used and modified by anyone.  easy to use.

My feeling is it depends what you want the labels for. If it's to buy in more nursery stock of a good variety or propagate plants to sell, then some form of written labelling is needed, whether labelled on a map, or labelled on or near the plant itself.
If though it's to make sure you propagate the best tasting fruit, the biggest bearer, the one that survived the pests or the frosts or the heat best, purely for your own garden use or to give plants to friends, then maybe the variety name doesn't matter so much. I'd just tie a red string on the fig tree that gave the best tasting fruit, so I know which one to take cuttings from in spring. Plus, sometimes the best plants are the ones that just appear in the garden, self-seeded from who knows where.

Hello, old topic but I'm new here
I have a 3 acre parmaculture farm in Costa Rica.
I started to use a notepad and hand drawn maps, but I plant dozens of varieties of the same species and I often do all kinds of experiments, projects that I want to follow so I created an app to track my trees and to-dos on the farm:

More Info:
www.fruitforestapp.com
(for now it's iOS only but if there's interest I'll make an Android version too)

I'd like to invite you to try my app and give me some feedback.
Much appreciated
thanks

Hi Zoli - welcome to permies! Thanks for sharing your app info.
I'm still mostly using paper and pencil for my scheming, as I am yet to feel the need for a 'smart' phone. I do think I ought to make a more organised log for my future self (or heirs...) though.

One day, after a hard day of work in the garden, I realized that I spent more time that day keeping records than actually farming. I stopped record-keeping on that day.

Sure, life might feel easier if I kept a few more records than zero, but it feels pretty amazing without record-keeping. The plants know themselves.

For several years I have been using spreadsheets.  I then put out markers to confirm the spreadsheets.  When a marker becomes somehow broken, I have a spreadsheet to refer to.  Between the markers and spreadsheets I can keep track of things.  I keep details about various trees, when they bloom, when they fruit, etc.  I sometimes keep paper back ups in a binder, but they usually disappear over the years.  I know it sounds like a bit much to put everything in a spreadsheet but it has been really helpful.  I often have several different varieties of the same fruit tree and it's nice to compare the projected yield times for fruits vs.  what really happens.  I do the same thing for my vegetable gardens.  I especially enjoy keeping track of when I plant vegetables and then when I harvest them.  Different varieties have different projected days to harvest and it makes it nice to know how accurate that is in your particular area.  This is especially helpful when I plant my winter garden.  If I know when I planted in the fall and when I harvested in the spring it will help me nail down a good fall planting time.  Of course so much of this depends on weather but I find it to be helpful to take the time to use spreadsheets.