Using Google Calendar for Gardeners to Record Plants' Growth and Development

Sometimes keeping track of changes in all your plants can seem overwhelming.

Tracking Your Plants

This post is for those who are just getting started and are thinking about how they will monitor their plants, record when they emerged, and how they will remember to change the solution for different plantings. I don't claim to be an expert by any stretch, but I do have a system of documenting my plants' activities that I believe is very helpful to the home gardener (and maybe for commercial growing too).

Early on, I had a notebook that I wrote everything down in. For example, I wrote the date of when I started four tomato plants so I would know how many days it had been since planting them. Then when they emerged, I would write that date down. Once I started having many different plantings I would try and label them "Tomatoes 1" or something like that so I would know which planting of tomatoes I was referring to. If you're planting new a crop every two weeks or so and have many different vegetables growing, things can get confusing quick!

What I've done now is put everything on Google Calendar which has been working out very well so far. It's definitely not perfected so if anyone reading this has any ideas for tweaking things, please let me know!

A screenshot of my Google Calendar, month-view, of December 2013:

Note I only have a couple of things going on in this calendar.

How I Use Google Calendar

I use Google Calendar mostly as a way to look back and see what my plants did, what I did to my plants, and when it all happened. I use it more as an after-the-fact method of jotting down things that occurred (e.g. transplanted lettuces into hydroponic system, seedlings' roots poked through bottom of rockwool). Sometimes it has more of a planning function, informing me of future dates to start new crops, or when to change out a nutrient solution.

What I do is give each group of plantings a unique ID (name), like 'N1' on the calendar above. The IDs correspond to the month in which the seeds were started and the order in which they were started. For example, N1, means that that particular group of plants were the first seeds that I started in the month of November (N2 would be the second group of plants started in November). I then make sure to use that same N1 identification to refer to those plants in future updates.

I also made up special abbreviations for each month so they are never confused:

J = January
F = February
M = March
A = April
MY= May
J = June
JY = July
AG = August
S = September
O = October
N = November
D = December

Feel free to make up different abbreviations or do things however you'd like, this is just what I came up with.

Another thing I do is make different calendars for different types of plants (e.g. Hydroponic and Soil). This is nice because it allows you to turn on and off the different calendars as you look back at things (which can come in handy when your dealing with many different plantings). It allows you to be dealing with say N1, look back and say "Okay, these guys emerged 4 weeks ago, they should be ready to harvest in two more weeks." Each calendar also can have its own color, which is nice when displaying all events.

What would be cool is if you could attach pictures to each of those events, which I believe might be available in the Google Labs options for Calendar. I'll keep you posted.

Events to Record

For dealing with hydroponics, I will naturally record the date when I start the seeds first. If I start 3 lettuce plants in rockwool cubes on January 1st, that group of plants becomes J1. For the actual calendar entry, I will always start with the ID and then specify what kind of event occurred. I have abbreviations for the most common sorts of events. For a seed starting on January 1st my calendar entry would be something like "J1 SS."

Here are some abbreviations I began to use for common occurances:

SS = seeds started
SE = seeds emerged
TP = transplanted

You can really make up whatever works for you, or just write out exactly what you did for each event. This is just how I do things.

A screenshot of my event entry for changing nutrient solution:

Here is my entry for when I change the nutrient solution for my N1 plantings (note this is the N1 planting under the "hydroponic" calendar, so there is no confusion with possible outdoor lettuce crops). 

I'm sure there are plenty other methods out there

I hope you enjoyed reading about how I record my plants' progress. Doing things electronically like this has been working well for me, maybe since I use Google for my regular calendar needs anyway. Feel free to ask me more about my method.

If you have any tweaks, feedback or another system I could learn from please tell me. 

I wish you and your garden well!