The Final Harvest: Taking Notes

Are you a notetaker? I hope so, because I need you to take notes.

On your phone. In a journal. Even just make sure you’re taking pictures. Ideally, you’d do all and any of the above whenever something strikes you, then on a snowy or rainy late fall or early winter day, you’d sit with it all and let it marinate and reveal the lessons of the year.

I have a really strong visual memory which is a blessing and a curse because my brain is full of visual stimuli that are hard to turn off. And even though I will probably visually remember each season, I still like to write things down. There’s something in the writing things down that solidifies the memory for me. I think this is a well-studied fact, too, hence why note-taking is a thing. And, well, I fully admit to revising my garden history from time to time, so having a record keeps me honest and helps to bring those wandering stories back into focus.

I love love love my google spreadsheet. One tab is for my indoor sowing trays and the other for direct seeding. I highly encourage you to consider using an online spreadsheet for documenting because then it’s in the palm of your hand whenever your phone’s with you. I also use it to take notes on what to do different next time and to document what failed.

The biggest mental garden task I do every autumn is inventorying the season. Here are the big things I try to actually document — not just keep rolling around in my head all winter — for my early January garden planning:

1. What goals did I set? How close did we come to achieving them?
2. Did my allocated square footage of vegetables yield the right amount of food? If not, how much do I adjust for 2023?
3. Are there vegetables I missed growing this summer, and do I need to source seed?
4. Are there vegetables we won’t grow next year? Who’s not worth the space?
5. How did my flower beds work out? How will I adjust them for 2023?
6. Which beds MUST I crop rotate around next year and what might I put in those key beds next summer? (Hint: Nightshades are my biggest crop rotation must-do.)
7. What surprised me most this year?
8. Favorite flower + veggie pairings from 2022? Least favorite?
9. Biggest disappointment in the annual, perennial, and flower gardens?
10. What are my top 3 goals for 2023?

A large part of this end of season reflection is creating the space to just be. It’s a fine line for me, as I imagine it may be for you too. I am on my technology too much, and it’s “part of my job”. I often feel I’m losing the intrinsic skill of listening, of slowing down, when I don’t actively work to put the phone away for hours at a time. As I write this, I can feel it nestled next to my leg in my seat, nagging me to check my messages. There’s so much knowledge that comes in due time when we rest just like our gardens do now, and more than ever we need to create that space because it’s a space that’s truly in danger culturally.

It requires stillness, something technology does not value and fights against minute by minute, pinging, alerting and enticing us to keep staring so they can profit off our attention.