Surprising Health Benefits From Keeping a Garden Journal (and DIY Tips to Make Yours Great)

Where your focus goes, energy flows

If you already LOVE writing and LOVE gardening, then keeping a garden journal may be a no-brainer.  For others though, the idea of recording things each day or week seems like just another trend that you enthusiastically embrace and then ditch a month later.

But what if I told you that keeping a garden journal can unlock some surprising mental health benefits AND help you achieve the garden of your dreams in less time and energy.  Click-bait?  Nope.

Let’s take a look at garden journaling and why it’s a powerful tool for your overall wellbeing.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

What is a garden journal?

A garden journal is a physical book, planner, calendar or virtual space in which you record your gardening plans and actions taken on a regular basis, usually daily, weekly or monthly.  It contains space for your garden design, pictures or sketches of the areas you want to plant, records of what seeds you are using and how many seeds or transplants you grew or purchased.  It usually includes spaces for notes about the weather, pests or beneficials you encounter, and what kind of harvest you obtain.

There are all kinds of physical gardening journals, planners and diaries on the market.   If you are looking for something ready-made and easy to follow, then these might be for you.  Many are extremely beautiful, filled with gardening tips, and have calendar systems to help you walk through the garden seasons.  

I’ve tried all kinds of commercial garden journals over the years.  I enthusiastically start filling in the sections, only to become frustrated with their formats or limited space. Even when I have found ones that I love, the physical format journals simply run out, and then you need another one.

This is what lead me to create my own digital garden journal. Canva has a wonderful array of garden journal template pages all ready for you to customize. The beauty of this approach is that you can design the pages you want and make as many copies as you like, and then save it to your computer or print it for use. Love it!

Here’s a sneak peak inside Canva Pro’s Garden Planner Templates (Source: Canva Pro)

But in the end, my favorite garden journal is nothing more than an Excel workbook. One tab holds my garden design template - just a spreadsheet modified into squares with boxes to indicate the difference between my rows and paths. Each square represents one square foot in my garden row so that I can plan out my annual vegetables and flowers, and compare it to previous years for crop rotations.

Then I have another spreadsheet (one for each year) in which I simply record the date and my notes. There is no worries about running out of space. I can throw in pictures, screenshots and sketches whenever I want. My annual spreadsheet starts by recording the timing of heavy snows in the winter, and then observations of when trees, shrubs, and spring bulbs start to green up.

Here is a snapshot of my 2024 Garden Notes spreadsheet - plain and simple

It’s a design that suits me perfectly.

My point is you do you.  A garden journal can be whatever you want it to be.  It’s what’s inside that counts.

What do you put in  your Garden Journal?

If you are new to the concept, here are the key things you might want to include in your garden journal:

A Calendar: it is often handy to have a calendar for reference. Some journals are set up to record activities in each month to help you stay on track with the gardening seasons.

Your Garden Design:  having a space to record the size and dimensions of your garden can really help you plan out the best planting scheme, and can help you remember where you planted, what, and when.

Plant List:  recording the names and details of the plants you are going from the seed package or the nursery stock tag can be a lifesaver later on when you either want to buy that same type again, or never buy it again. If you are worried about costs, you can track that as well. (One of the reasons I became a seed saver was the high cost of nursery transplants that was limiting my ability to grow as many types of food as I wanted)

Seasonal Actions:  When did you start your seeds (inside or outside)?  When did you transplant from pots to the garden?  Did you weed?  Mulch?  When did your plants start to bloom or when did the first tiny zucchini or tomato start showing on the plant?  When did you harvest?   These are the mainstays of your garden journal that will help you hone your skills and timing.

Weather:  You don’t need to write down the daily temperatures, but it can be extremely helpful to write down weather events like a sudden late frost, an unusually extreme downpour, hail, heatwave, or sharp temperature drop.  These events can help you understand why your harvest is sub-par. You may also find a link between certain weather events and insect problems (e.g. deepening drought can bring the grasshoppers into your garden).

Birds or other visitors:  I use my garden journal to keep track of when the migratory birds move through or the resident birds return to activity after winter.  For example, early this morning, I heard the first screech owl of the season - oh what a sound! And I made a note in my garden journal when I got out of bed.  I also write down the first time I see a honeybee, bumblebee, and butterfly because each of these insects tells me something about how fast the spring is warming up.

Bloom times:  I’ve written before about the importance of bloom time tracking.  Recording when flowers bloom, in particular the perennials like fruit trees, flowering bushes, and various bulbs, can help you understand seasonal shifts and climate change impacts in your area. 

Read about Bloom Time Tracking (and a free link to your own tracker)

Harvest Records:  If you are trying to produce more of your own food, then keeping track of how much you harvested is a must have set of notes.  This can help you plan out your garden expansion to meet your food needs.  It can help you compare yield between different varieties or different vegetables, letting you see what gives you the most bang for your buck. It can also help you celebrate the wins, especially when you grow something new or risky and it pays off.

Pictures:  A picture can record a TON of information in a split second.  You can use garden photos to record key things you want to remember without having to write it all down. Since most phones record the date and time in the photo file name, you have a built in tracker too.

Health Benefits of a Garden Journal

Okay, so how does a garden journal improve your wellbeing?  It’s simple really.

Where your focus goes, Energy flows

– Tony Robbins

It can take just minutes in your day to open your garden journal or jump into your spreadsheet (or garden apps) and jot something down about your garden.  Just minutes.

But the magic comes in the fact that you have trained yourself to be observant about your garden and what is happening in the world outside!

Think about that for a minute. 

If not for the idea that you need to write this down, would you pay attention to the dip in temperature, the bumblebee, the time it took for your seeds to sprout or the amount of tomato sauce you just made?  

You might pay attention in the moment but it’s a fleeting thought. 

However, when you grab that thought and write it down, now it is record .. . .it is a piece of data . . . it is a moment in time you can return to later.

As your garden journal grows each season, you can easily look back at the spring or summer conditions.  You start to ask questions about your OUTSIDE world.  Why is this spring so different from last? Did the daffodils really start blooming this early last year? You have your own observations to explore this. You have records.

Garden journals transform gardening from once a season activities to multi-annual events. You start to become attached to the outcome.  You become aware that all is not okay in our ever-heating world outside! And you can truly start to appreciate just how tenuous our food supply really is.

Gardening transforms your relationship with food, because it provides you with regular actions and steps needed to go from seed to food on your plate. Day after day, month after month and year after year, you get to connect to food the way it was meant to be - whole, unprocessed, and fresh from the garden.

Read more about transformations

There are numerous studies that focus on the health impacts of gardening. A 2023 Australian study of 4,919 participants found that those who gardened for 2.5 hours per week or more had significantly higher mental wellbeing and life satisfaction scores than non-gardeners (read it here – Journal of Environmental Psychology).

Another study in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science (2022) focused on our experience of “awe” and how activities like gardening, or spending time in nature create awe experiences that improve our wellbeing (read more here).

According to this study, experiencing awe can:

Mental health: increase your wellbeing while decreasing specific indicators of stress, anxiety, depression and PTSD

Physical health: increase your cardiovascular health and longevity while decreasing physical signs of stress, pain, and the expression of some autoimmune diseases.

Garden journaling works because it creates a system

Writing down notes about your garden allows you to re-live moments of joy and awe. You experience life in your garden. Then you write about it. Later in the season, you look back at these notes and remember, and re-live them.

This practice sharpens your observation skills. Was that really the first flower, the first bee? Can you be sure? It trains you to look for changes in your plants and your environment.  It takes you outside of your own head and connects you back to the sky, and the sunshine, and the soil, and your food. 

And it can lead to new discoveries. For example, each year I write down when I see Mule deer fawns in my hay field. Often I am not just seeing them there, they are being born right there in the field, under the big blue sky. It’s a wonderous site to wake up to. By writing down these births, I came to realize that year after year they were happening between June 10 and 12. That is a crazy narrow time frame for babies to be born, and yet - there it is recorded each year in my notebook. Awesome.

Make it your own

There is no right or wrong way to start a garden journal. You can throw out everything you just read and do it your way. Perhaps your journal is one of garden stories rather than food production. Maybe it’s a journal of your mental journey as your grow plants and connect to nature. Let your own creativity and needs be your guide.

However you choose to record your experiences, you will be amplifying the already amazing positive mental health benefits of gardening and further unlocking your relationship with food.

Try it this spring and see where it takes you.

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