A garden journalbeds, varieties, sowing dates and what happened

Method

1. 1

   Hand your assistant the packets and the beds

   Connect your assistant to know.sh once, following the support page. Then give it what you have: photos of the seed packets (Claude and ChatGPT read images), your sketch of the beds, last year’s notes. Ask it to make a shelf, The back garden, with three documents. Beds gets a finding per bed, such as “Bed 1 — north fence, full sun”, with size, depth, soil and a History list of what grew there each year. Varieties gets a finding per packet, titled crop first — “Tomato, Cherokee Purple”, “Bean, Provider (bush)” — with days to maturity, spacing, seed company and year bought. Season log 2026 starts empty.

   Put the facts every season depends on in the shelf’s notes yourself: zone 7b, and the average last spring frost and first autumn frost from your county’s cooperative extension office.

2. 2

   Check it against the packets in the editor

   Open Varieties, press Edit, and read each finding against its packet. Photographed packets are easy to misread: 58 days becomes 85, a bush bean becomes a pole bean. Add a heading, Verdict, to each for the end of the season. Mark the varieties you would grow again Key; they are next year’s seed order. A variety you are trying for the first time can be a Question until it has earned a verdict.

   In Beds, check sizes (4 × 8 ft, 1.2 × 2.4 m) and the history lists. That history is your rotation: tomatoes and peppers should not follow each other in the same bed year after year. With the crop first in every variety title, the tomatoes sit together in Look up; the index lists capitalised names such as Cherokee and Provider.

3. 3

   Have your assistant research what to try

   When you are choosing what to grow, ask your assistant to research a specific question on the web — which slicing tomatoes hold up to early blight and septoria leaf spot in a humid zone 7b summer — from university extension publications and variety trial reports, and to file what it finds as a new document on the shelf, one finding per point, each with its source links. This needs an assistant with web search: Claude and ChatGPT have it; many local set-ups do not.

   Treat the result as a reading list. Open the extension pages it cites, check that each says what the finding says, and move the varieties you choose into Varieties in your own words. Where a claim traces back only to a seed catalogue, change the finding to a Question.

4. 4

   Hand over the week on Sunday

   In the garden, jot one line per event in your phone’s notes: “28 Apr, Provider beans, Bed 3, three rows, soil 62°F (17°C).” On Sunday, paste the week into your assistant and ask it to add one finding per line to Season log 2026, titled with what, which variety and where: “Sowed Provider beans, Bed 3”, “Transplanted Cherokee Purple, Bed 2”, “First harvest, Sugar Ann peas, Bed 4”, with the date on the first line.

   Sowings, transplants and harvests are Observation. What went wrong is a Problem — “Squash vine borer in Bed 5” — and what you will change is a Decision. Skim the new findings in the editor: an assistant will guess which peas you meant. Because every title carries the variety and the bed, the index gathers each variety’s findings under its name.

5. 5

   Take the journal to the bed

   The iOS app, in TestFlight beta, opens the same library in the garden. Standing at Bed 2, open its finding in Beds to see what grew there last year, or the variety’s page to check its spacing. If something the assistant filed is wrong, fix it there and then with Edit.

   Photos stay in your phone’s photo library. Keep an album per season, and in each finding say which pictures go with it: “Photos: 2026 garden album, 18 June, three of the borer damage.”

6. 6

   Put the busy weeks in Focus

   Spring has two or three weeks when everything wants to go in at once. Ask your assistant to turn Varieties and Beds into a short document, Sowing plan, spring 2026 — which variety, which bed, which week — then correct it and press Focus. It rises to the top of the title page for seven days, and when the week ends Revisit says so: your cue to check what has not been sown.

   Focus is not an alarm: know.sh sends nothing. Do it again in late July for the autumn sowings.

7. 7

   Close the season, and write the verdicts yourself

   In November, open the Index to this shelf. Each variety’s name, such as Cherokee, lists the findings whose titles or first lines carry it — its packet page, its sowings, its harvests — and bold numbers mark the ones you highlighted. For plain words the index does not hold, such as blight or frost, search with Look up.

   Ask your assistant for a season-at-a-glance finding with every variety’s dates, then write each Verdict yourself: only you tasted the tomatoes. Start Season log 2027 when the first seeds go in, and leave 2026 as it is.