Kitchen Garden Forum

Hi Everyone,

This may be of interest to those of you who keep records of there home grown produce

https://sites.google.com/a/sheffield.ac.uk/myharvest/


Regards

Arnie

I've just been thinking how I would go about recording my crops if I wanted to, as I usually just walk round the garden and pick what is ready in the amount I want to cook that day. I suppose I could keep a note of the weight where a lot is ready at one picking before I freeze or make jam or whatever, but it would be a lot of faffing about as most crops are harvested over a few weeks.

The idea behind the Sheffield University study is good when you think what is happening to farming today and we really should know how self sufficient we are as a country in regard to food security, but I'm afraid I would rather be outside gardening than weighing and measuring everything. I'm only indoors now because its raining.

Once over I did weigh all sorts of things, particularly soft fruit, but do very little now. The "crop all at once" things do get recorded, things like top fruit and second early Potatoes, but not much else. Often weigh the yield from each root of early Potatoes but don't record it. Weighed the strings of Onions this year then looked back and found I hadn't done it previously.

What I do record is sowing and planting times and places.

It starts with a spreadsheet of seed stocks from which we place the orders. Seeds are filed alphabetically in old shoe boxes in a series of groups; salads, herbs, greenhouse etc. I buy a cheap diary every year and during the Winter pencil in all the sowings I expect to make by going through the seed stocks, based on what the packets/catalogues say and looking at previous diaries. Through the year I record what I do in pen (with odd comments about weather, birds, even sometimes errors and reminders for the next year). I feel I should somehow make the plan part of this permanent as I seem to do more and more the same each year, tried using Outlook Calendar one year but gave up.

The places part I do with IT. I have Publisher document that is a plan of my plots. I print a blank off and pencil in what I intend to do based on rotations etc. then about this time of year I enter what I have actually done and save as a new page, I have pages back to 1996. I also keep a couple of pages which I call Potato History and Lime History. I confess I actually work from prints of these pages as when I am writing the plan I flick backwards and forwards too often to do it on screen.

So I can tell you what variety of Runner Bean I have grown for the last 17 years, when I sowed them, when I planted them out and where I grew them but not the yield.

I do have yearly veg diaries which always start off full of detail and gradually tail off as the season progresses. Try to record when the first and lask picks of everything.

Nice heavy rain here so found time to write in. We didn’t think able to grow enough stuff in this lttle suburban garden to warrant keeping much of a record. Besides the Runner Beans against a fence and French ones on temporary net against the bungalow wall, only have two 10'x3' raised bed cloches. Tried the Sqft idea with reasonable success in one of them though and have about 30 different herbs & veg in the squares, so will keep some sort of record from now on.