My Favorite Gardening Journal: The Reflective Gardener Journals

Honestly, I have been a lifelong lover of all things gardening. As a child, I was able to have my own “gardens” – which were just areas my mom designated to me where she’d give me a couple of paperwhites and daylilies to see if I could keep them alive.

After the second year of having my garden, I especially remember the pride I felt knowing the plants were thriving. It gave me a purpose and it gave me a new solid, life-long obsession. My green thumb was immediately established as was my natural intuition for growing plants.

Not much has changed really. To this day I’m obsessed with creating the ultimate Eden – a place of refuge and sustenance. A pure oasis for the weary and joyful soul is my latest goal.

Last year, I ventured from botanical to veggie gardening. I gotta tell ya, it wasn’t easy. Everything I could’ve done wrong, I think perhaps I did do wrong. From not checking the soil, to sowing the seeds too early (it wasn’t my fault, we had a freak cold-snap in May), to watering the veggies at the wrong time of day, mold, fungus, etc., etc. I was not happy. As a matter of fact, I was pissed. I was so pissed that I set off to learn everything I could about veggie gardening during the cold months.

Armed with the Farmer’s Almanac and a ton of print-outs on all my seeds, I began journaling.

The Reflective Gardener: A Garden Journal and Planner for 2021 is the best journal I’ve found so far! Trust me, I’ve spent way too much time searching high and low for the perfect journal, and they’re either too complicated or way too simplified or lacking altogether. While the overly-complicated journals are incredibly informative, I don’t want to become overwhelmed and lose stamina, nor do I want to get lost in a sea of information I may already know. I’d rather have those pages for journaling or pictures! On the other hand, I definitely don’t want to be underwhelmed with the lack of information or pages offered for journaling.

The Reflective Gardener: A Garden Journal and Planner for 2021 has 300 pages of mostly logbook pages, journal entries, notes, garden plot design pages, and (my favorite!) plant identification pages. The plant ID pages alone are teaching me to slow down and record the important details about every single plant I’ll put in my garden.

The best part is, there’s space to log details of every day of the year. I LOVE this because I’m such a nostalgic person that I really (really really) want to remember the most important details of building and maintaining a garden with my little family! I daydream that one day, I’ll be going through all my gardening journals and will just smile in its sweet memory. It’s also incredibly important to me that I pass down these gardening know-hows to my sweet daughter.

You can tell I’m already beginning to use the journal a good bit based on how the corners of the cover are already bending. I don’t mind, though! This is why I got it! It’s January, yes, but I have no intention of slowing down my learning and journaling! You know what they say about idle hands…

Since the weather has turned cold and most people turn indoors, I’ve used this time to learn, learn, learn. Here are a few images of some of the pages I’m already filling out. (More to come as the weeks pass!)

One of the coolest features about this gardening journal is that it has a specific place to store your seed packets and information! I haven’t yet gotten into seed packet-saving aside from my journal, but I see there is a ton of enthusiasm around this practice in the seasoned gardening community. I’ve even seen some people keep separate binders for their seed packets with plastic sleeves for safe-keeping – brilliant!

Additionally, my obsession for gardening and now journaling has taken quite the turn and I can’t tell if it’s for the worse! I’ve bought about three times more seeds than I initially planned. But in all fairness, I was also only going to start with just fruits and veggies, but I’ve decided to go full-on with herbal and botanical as well.

That said, I have run out of space for all my plants. “The Reflective Gardener: A Garden Journal and Planner for 2021” only holds space for about 40 plants. But luckily there is another version! The other book is The Reflective Gardener’s Logbook, and allows enough room for over 100 plants! Because this one is a logbook only, it doesn’t have year-specific planner space and compensates for it by adding more logs for everything the original journal and planner offered.

Since I’ve run out of room in my current journal and planner, I have a list of the other seeds just waiting to be logged in the new one!

All-in-all, I am very excited about this year’s gardening ventures! Through trial and error and more research than I’d like to admit (or my husband wants to talk about), I have found THE perfect gardening journal and logbooks!

Link to author’s Amazon bio: https://www.amazon.com/~/e/B08SJBCT6T

One Reply to “My Favorite Gardening Journal: The Reflective Gardener Journals”

  1. I know a lot of people have these hobbies and I never thought it was that bad. But now, my obsession for gardening has taken quite the turn when I can’t tell if it’s for the worse! The first time around, all I wanted to do is plant fruits and vegetables but this year–I went full-on with herbal plants too. Nowadays there are about three times more seeds than originally planned because not only did they start selling out at Home Depot so quickly, which made me want them even more; sadly though every week after planting my seedlings die within two days tops without any warning or reason as to why?
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