I’m hiring someone else to do it. Just kidding! Nope, this year I decided to plan my time. (I was a project manager, you would think this would have occurred to me sooner.)
I have a spreadsheet where I’ve been sort of tracking our plants for years. I say “sort of” because it’s never been completely up-to-date. It’s partly a wish list of plants and partly information on the plants we have, things like height and width, flower color and blooming time, foliage color, light and soil needs, etc.
I thought I’d add maintenance info like how and when to prune, to fertilize and so on. Then I could sort and filter to figure out what I could be / should be doing in April, for example, without having to hunt down the information or try to remember. Nope, that didn’t work. I couldn’t get a list to come out the way I wanted it to.
Then I envisioned a database report with the same data. I thought reports would be more flexible. So I dusted off my database skills. It took a fair amount of work to get the data imported and to a point where I could even create a report. I fairly quickly — but not quickly enough — gave up on that. It was going to be too much work just to input all the data let alone design all the forms and reports I would need. Plus, there are things that aren’t plant-specific that need to be done at certain times, like buying and starting seeds, which would be difficult to track that way.
So I ended up with a series of five plain ol’ documents. (At least my data entry made it easier to create the documents.) Each one covers a phase of the gardening season:
- Winter (November – April)
- Late Winter – Early Spring (March – May)
- Spring (May – June)
- Summer (July – October)
- Autumn (October – November)
There is overlap because some things can be done over a longer period of time, seasons don’t map nicely to entire months, and things don’t happen at the same time every year. (Our last frost is usually in mid-May and summer often stretches to mid-October.)
Within each file is a section on plant-specific maintenance such as pruning, a section on general tasks to be done annually, and tasks related to any special projects for that year. This year, for example, is the year I finally finish the perennial garden redesign. (I hope!)
I’ll be able to print and annotate the files, leading to better information going into next year’s planning.
Will this work? Will I spend less time trying to figure out what things I should be doing and actually doing the things? We’ll see. I’ll update this after I try it out. At least now I feel like I have a better handle on it.