Digital Garden Diaries

Fall is an ideal time to capture the garden on your digital camera and start a digital garden diary. Since the digital camera hit the popular market a few years ago, the ‘art’ of photography has been brought to everyone. No longer do you have to wait to finish the film; no longer do you have to make sure that the light is just right and the kids/plants looking their best lest we waste a shot. With digital, the not so great image can be erased and there is no loss of film in the process, so more images can be tried. So making a digital garden diary is a fun fall project that can last through the winter.

In days of old, the diary was written carefully with descriptions of the plants and the occasional line drawing, plus a photograph when available. Now we can take the camera into the garden, take a few shots, download them and add some narrative to create a garden diary in no time.

Take photographs of your garden beds and how they look in the fall. See if they need more color in them, or if one plant is overwhelming another one, such that its color cannot be seen. Also make a note of which shrubs need to be trimmed back in the late winter because they are overlarge right now. Take care though to identify if the shrub will bloom on new wood or old wood before you prune it.Take pictures of things that you cannot identify. Although this is not essential to the enjoyment of a shrub or plant, it is a terrific occupation for a winter project, particularly if you are in a new home that came with an existing garden. For accurate identification you will need to see the leaf structure and how they are arranged on the stem, as well as seeds or flowers and the general shape of the plant or shrub.

Place all the photographs in a file on your computer and copy them onto a disk for safekeeping. Make electronic notes about the landscape or plant so that you can remember what you thought when next spring comes around. One way to do this is to have a blog. These are frequently in the public domain, but private blogs or online diaries are also available.

Digital diaries are a fun way to remember the garden over the winter months, and a fun project. They will help you make decisions for next year too and show the progress that you have made in the garden over the months or years that you keep the diary.