As a first-year vegetable gardener, blogging has been great for me in documenting my gardening efforts, keeping track of my harvests, and connecting with other gardeners. The last part has been really key for me, as: 1)I have lots of newbie questions that other helpful gardener/blog readers answer for me in my comments, and 2)I learn so much from reading other people's garden blogs and interacting with them. I also experiment a lot, with growing supermarket melon from seed, growing green onions from stubs (after buying and using full-sized green onions from the store), growing various vegetables in our homemade indoor grow box, etc, and it's been fun to document the progress of these experiments and share with others. I'm not familiar with different blogging platforms, but I use Blogger and I've been pretty happy with it. I use the Label feature to tag my posts with different labels, so that if I want to pull up all my posts on "harvests" for example, I can do that and look at my weekly harvests all in one place. I also have separate labels for different crops and garden-related topics like pests, composting, etc. Someone mentioned tagging individual pictures. I'm not sure if you can do that in Blogger, but you can do this in Picasa, which is the free software from Google that I use to organize and tag all my pictures. I use a small section of my blog sidebar to show my To Date harvest, but I keep the real data on a separate spreadsheet. I keep a master spreadsheet with separate worksheets to keep track of my harvests by crop, harvest value (yes, I'm one of those OCD people), harvest yield/ft2 (really super-OCD, I know, I know), planting dates, expected harvest date based on days to maturity, first actual harvest date, etc. camp10, let me know if you start your own blog sometime! I love reading good gardening blogs and connecting with other gardeners out there. Here is a link that might be useful: Thyme To Garden Now

The simpler the record keeping, the more likely it will be kept up. After several trials, I determined this to be my best plan: Make a folder under 'Documents' on my computer. Put Files made in a word processor into this Folder, each named for a flower bed or garden area. ADD a recent photo of the area in each file. Write a few lines about what I hope to accomplish in this bed and how it looks right now. Be sure to DATE the notes. Make a table with four columns and as many rows as there are plants in the bed. Label the columns: Cultivar - Planted - Outcome - Comments Save the File, return to it as I make changes or remove plants or need to record new ideas. Add pics as the bed changes. Sometimes I make little sketches using 'Paint' just to record where I hid bulbs so I won't forget. All you need is a bunch of little circles and squares. Label them the way that is easiest. Save as a .gif file and insert it the way you add a pic. Everything is in one place for a particular garden area, for reference. Nell For a more elaborate record: Use a Spreadsheet if you're following a budget and keeping up with expenditures, or keeping up with how many hundreds of daffodils and lilies. Use a separate Database if you want to keep up with a large number of different cultivars, i.e. naming all your different tulips and muscari, or planting a dozen different heucheras and dozens of different hostas. The simpler the record keeping, the more likely it will be continued.

Very interesting thread. Over the past 10 years I have tried all of the methods above plus some others and have settled on the method below. I have learned that the most important information is "who is the seedling and where is it in my garden" Controlling the identity of seedlings from two named plants is quite simple. However, when you start crossing their silblings, your own seedlings, the identy of the cross becomes more complicated depending on how much history of the seedling you want to keep. Crossing two of your own seedlings involves at least four named daylilies. When you cross two of their siblings together you have to double that again. It's like creating your own family tree, how far back do you want to go? How long will your ID code get? I have not answered that question yet but would appreciate your thoughts on this matter. The history of some of my 2009 seedlings is close to a page long and I have a few thousand seedings. Maintaining this history is very time consuming and using it for future crosses is complicated to say the least. I guess my message is that when you consider a numbering system you might want to think ahead a few years. If you are like me you will be crossing your own seedlings and creating a new family tree for each of your crosses. It becomes next impossilbe to keep ID information on signs in the garden. The only way to maintain this information is on your computer and/or on paper. Many of you mentioned the year as part of your ID code. It is interesting information but after you have several years of seedlings in your garden, do you realy want this information? After digging and linning out several years of seedlings it just didn't matter to me when I started the seedling. What mattered was knowing Who and Where. Back to the IMPORTANT INFORMATION - WHO AND WHERE. My method: 1)Collect seeds and place each cross in a zip lock bag and label Pod x Pollen parents for named plants. For seedling crosses I record the garden locations of pod and pollen plants. I already have the parents names on my garden index. I also include the number of seeds in each pack. 2)After all seeds collected place seeds from named plants in alpha order (Pod Parent) and seeds from seedlings in numeric order by location of the Pod Parent. This makes it easier to find a specific cross in the bags,in the pots and later in your garden. 3)Number the zip lock bags from one to the end. 4)Record this information (cross #, number/name of P X P parents),(number seeds) on your computer and print a copy for daily use. example 001 PxP 8 seeds. This record will become your garden index by adding the garden location, after you plant your seedlings. Garden#,Row# and Plant numbers within the row for each cross. example 001 P x P 1-1-1 to 5 001 (cross #1) PXP (pod and Pollen) 1(garden 1)1(row 1) 1 to 5 (plants 1 to 5) 5)If I have 100 crosses I buy 100 white plastic knives and number them front and back,(1-100 )so they are visilbe from all directions. 6)Plant the seeds in numeric order, cups or boxes and insert the plastic knives to identity the cross. No need to write anything on the container. If I plant in boxes I put the knife at the beginning of the cross being planted which save alot of wasted space. In boxes I divide the rows with a piece of plastic cut to fit into the box. The divider makes it easier to remove seedlings for planting. 7) As the seeds germinate I count and record/update the number of new seedlings daily on the paper index next to the number of seeds planted for each cross. Ok I lied, 3 or 4 times a day. 8)When/if a cross germinates 100% I colour the top part of it's knife with a fat red marker so I do not have to recount it every day. 9)Plant the seedlings into your garden and record their garden locations on your paper/computer index. Now you know who and where. I put the plastic knife in the garden at the beginning of each cross. When I finish planting I do a double check of my paper record and remove the knives at this point. No need for signs in the garden, use your paper index. 10)I have several thousand pictures of my plants filed on my computer by the garden location code. PROBLEM WITH MY SYSTEM: 1) Removing the duds to the compost creates alot of wasted space in the garden not to mention a weeding problem. This is a problem with any system. 2)Digging, disgarding duds, dividing and lining out the keepers requires massive updates to both the garden index and the location codes of all the pictures. It's not a perfect system, but I have several thousand plants and I do know "who and where" they are. Any and all comments would be welcome.

Thanks Les, Nance & Steve :) The photos are a mix of my own photographs and some off the internet. If I buy a bigger plant, I will use my own photo, but if it is a very young plant, I'll use one off the internet. No particular source, I look at several sites and pick my favorite photo. As far as learning Excel, I'm kind of self taught. Several years ago, when I had never used Excel before, my boss forwarded me an email with an Excel attachment. The document was a series of statistical pie charts & line charts. She said "you're doing these from now on" and that was all the direction I was given. So I basically dissected that spreadsheet and played with it until I could figure out how she created those charts. It was a great learning experience. Now I use Excel for everything! One of my most important Excel documents is not garden-related. I'm 49 and my memory isn't always reliable ("didn't we just buy that refrigerator?"), so I created a spreadsheet "Important Events & Purchases". I keep a tab for each year, and document all of our major purchases, like appliances, cars, etc. along with purchase price. Other columns include home improvement projects, vacations, health issues , and events (such as weddings, deaths, new jobs, etc). Yeah, I love Excel, lol. Wendy