Thank you for this! Still can’t find an app to fulfill all my needs so creating my own one. Could you maybe expand on how you structured your various tabs in excel? For example your diary tab. Would be a huge help! Thank you!

Thank you everyone for all your support! I love all of your ideas! I was a little worried that you'd think I was paranoid for just not trashing them. I am trying to find a local shredding company - no luck yet - they all seem to only deal with businesses. I've also been looking at shredders (the idea of putting a movie in and doing it makes it seem less painful) but the less expensive shredders (under $200 - and that's way more than I want to pay) all have a 10 minute on/40 minute off cycle (or similar.) I'd be there for years! I live in the coastal hills of California, right next to a state park, so burning them in my (unused for 3 years) fire pit is out of the question during this drought. People do have bonfires on the beach, and I am considering that. I'd like to keep it as personal as possible, and having a bonfire I'd need DH along as a minimum. Hauling all those boxes across the beach doesn't sound like much fun - but dancing around the bonfire does :-) It gets kind of crazy on the beach at the solstice. Another thought is to start tearing them up and putting them in the worm compost - those little guys go through paper fairly quickly. Thanks again - I'll keep you updated!

thyrkas, I have a collection of fountain pens, mostly inherited from my grandparents and great-grandparents. They are not the ones I use on a daily basis as they require a bottle of ink and need to be re-filled. While the process is fairly simple, with curious kids in the house, it's far more tidy to use a modern fountain pen with a cartridge. I've a Parker fountain pen that was quite reasonable in terms of price and the cartridge refills come five per package, if memory serves, and only cost a couple of dollars. Many types of daily use fountain pens and refills can be found at the big square office products stores like Staples. The beauty of a fountain pen is that it slows down my writing and in doing that, forces my brain to slow down as well. It's a lovely way to write and nothing else can really compare. If you try it, I will be interested in hearing about the experience! I like the idea of only writing on one side of the page. With a fountain pen, you sometimes get a blotch of ink that could soak through and writing on one side would keep it a bit more tidy. And there is that bonus of editing...although I may have some rather sparse pages here and there in relation to my earlier post...if you get my drift. PAM

I am using Excel, which seems to work alright. Definitely not the best solution and I am still trying to find something better / think of a better way to do it. Currently, I am keeping one line per plant with the following columns: Family Species Dormancy (best guess or confirmed) Date purchased Location purchased Flowering date (actual or best guess) Flower quantity Native habitat (soil/exposure) Growing notes (this is getting really long...) Additional notes (growing tips mostly, soil mix notes, etc.) Just a few pots are pups from parent, so they don't get their own line. The rest are all different species. Sadly there is no good place in Excel for photos. I am trying to keep a Windows folder of one good photo of each of my plants, preferably with it flowering. It's easier to show people and share these 'best' images. I try to add growing notes whenever anything changes with a plant as soon as it happens. This could be that it flowered, how long the flowers lasted, if I moved the plant, if it had any pests/damage, etc. Otherwise a general update happens every two months or so. Normally I take photos with my cell phone to document my plant changes as well. Then I can look up in my grower notes a date and find out where to look for the photo of what happened. At the least, I am photographing each plant when I buy it from all angles when I check for pests. Then I also take photos of the plant bare-root during repotting, in case I have any troubles later on and need to refer back. I have also saved a couple of site pages with very helpful info. But they all got stuffed into one folder and aren't named so nicely. It's a poorly organized collection of resources.