About Gardening Journal

The short version: Gardening Journal is a simple tool that turns the photos on your phone into a useful record of your gardening year—so next season, you actually remember what worked.

The Problem: Too Much Lettuce

I’ve always enjoyed gardening, and a few years ago I wanted to become better at it. The problem that pushed me over the edge to actually do something was a small one—I had planted way too much lettuce for my wife and me, and it all came ready to harvest at once, and we ended up having to compost some of it.

The Experiment: Take a Ton of Photos

I decided to try using my phone camera as a simple way to keep track of what I did and when I did it. Basically, just take a ton of photos. Don’t care about composition, cropping, art, whatever. Just record what I did and when I did it.

Since your phone automatically records the date and time you take them, the second part is done for you.

What Photos to Take

The key insight I had was that photos last longer than notes. A year from now, you won’t remember what you scribbled down, but a photo tells the whole story instantly. So it matters what you point the camera at.

For example, when planting seeds, the obvious photo is the front of the packet. But flip it over—the back has the technical details you’ll actually want next year: expected germination time, spacing, planting depth, and sometimes even germination rates. Photograph both sides.

Same idea applies everywhere: photograph the plant tag when you buy a seedling, the bed before and after you plant, the first sprout, the first harvest. None of these need to be good photos. They just need to exist.

The Result: It Worked!

I had pictures of the seed packets I had used, how many plants I had put in, when I put them in, and when they were ready to harvest.

The next year, I started seeds indoors, planted fewer plants, and put in new lettuce starts every two weeks. Because I was paying more attention, I also realized I could do a fall planting and tried that for the first time ever.

This worked much better, and the photos helped me decide how many lettuce plants to put in (five), and to start them inside from seed so I could put them out much earlier (April 16, in Massachusetts). And I took a bunch of photos of what worked well, so now I was pretty locked in on how to grow lettuce successfully. FYI, it turns out that cucumbers are very productive so for two people you really only need one or two plants. So, we had more room for things like flowers, which further improved our garden.

Why I’m Sharing It

Then I thought: other people probably run into the same thing I did. They’re already taking photos. They just need a simple way to look back through them and actually learn from one season to the next. I also wanted to learn more about AWS and modern web tools, and building this seemed like a great way to do both.

What You Get

Upload a batch of photos from your phone, add a few notes, and next year you’ll have an organized record of what you did, when you did it, and how it turned out. A place to drop your garden photos and remember what you did. Notes to capture your thoughts. A calendar view of your gardening year.

Your garden is also part of a USDA hardiness zone community, so you can see what other gardeners near you are growing and learn from their successes and failures—and they can learn from yours.

About the Pricing

You’ll notice the pricing here is genuinely unusual. There’s a one-time membership fee—just $9.99 for lifetime access. Then your actual usage costs less than three dollars a year, depending on how many photos you store.

This isn’t how most websites work, I know. But it’s how this one works because it reflects reality: storing your photos doesn’t cost me very much, so it shouldn’t cost you very much either. You’re not paying for a subscription treadmill. You’re paying for actual value delivered.

Head over to the pricing page if you want the details, but the short version is this: we are both better off if you pay based on what you actually use.

Contact Us

Questions? Ideas? We’d love to hear from you at hello@gardening-journal.com.