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

I keep a photo-journal. I'm a Mac-addict so all the pics are in iPhoto along with brief descriptions. I like keeping things simple so with just a couple of clicks of the mouse I can find anything I need along with a visual. This is a great way to keep track of growth and seasonal changes in a plant. I have a web page too that I try to keep updated. I also have a small photo album with plastic photo sleeves in which I keep plant tags and seed packets until I take pics of the plants/seedlings and put them into iPhoto. I really lucked out with this album. I found it years ago at Michael's - it is about 8"x10" with two-sectioned plastic sleeves inside for the pics and the outside is covered in pretty flowers & butterflies with a small green check background - there's no mistaking it's for the garden. And the sectioned sleeves inside are the perfect size for tags and seed packets. As for plants I find interesting and may want to purchase at a later date, I usually find a website with info on it and bookmark it. These bookmarks are kept in a gardening "folder" so again just a click of the mouse to find it. I'm all about the KISS principle when it comes to gardening, which is one reason why I love cottage gardening. : )

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

I keep an excel spreadsheet with the cultivar name, date, place purchased and price. Also update it occasionally if it dies or seems to have any other problems. I also made a little map with excel for each bed and area. In the past I have used the cheap plastic markers and sharpie but they need to be renewed at least every year. I also have several painted stones but they get moved around easily. This year I am trying something different with physical labels. I've got some nice flat stones, painted the hosta name on them (not a very good artist), drilled a hole and screwed them to a 3/8" dowel. Only going to do a few and see how they survive the winter.