# A garden journal — beds, varieties, sowing dates and what happened Recipe No. 47, Hobbies and play. From The know.sh Cookbook: https://know.sh/cookbook/garden-journal - For: a vegetable gardener with six raised beds in USDA zone 7b - You bring: seed packets, last year’s notes if you kept any, a sketch of the beds, the phone in your pocket, and the AI assistant you already use - You get: a garden journal in three documents — the beds, the varieties and the 2026 season — with every sowing, transplant and harvest recorded, and an index of variety names - Time: an evening in late winter to set up, then five minutes a week to hand your assistant the week’s notes - Keep it: private; never on a public link Every gardener means to write it down. Which tomato split in the August rain, when the beans went in, whether the kale in the shady bed was ever worth the space. By February it has become "I think it was the far bed", and the seed order is a guess. This journal has three documents. *Beds* holds a finding for each of your six raised beds: its size, its soil, its sun and what grew in it each year. *Varieties* holds a finding for each variety you grow, with the packet's numbers and your verdict. *Season log 2026* holds the year, one short finding for each sowing, transplant and harvest, titled with the variety and the bed. Whichever assistant you use — Claude, ChatGPT or a local model — does the typing: it reads the packets, files the week's notes, and researches what to grow next. You check it in the editor and write the verdicts. Because every title names the variety and the bed, Look up finds every date a variety was touched. The garden itself stays outside. know.sh holds no photos and no weather: the pictures stay in your phone's library, and your frost dates come from the county extension office. ## What you will use - **Your AI assistant**: Reads the seed packets into *Varieties*, files each week's sowings and harvests into the season log, and researches varieties from extension publications if it can search the web. - **Shelf**: One shelf, *The back garden*, whose notes hold the zone, the frost dates from your extension office and the bed plan in words. - **Research document**: *Beds*, *Varieties* and *Season log 2026*; each new year gets a log of its own. - **Finding**: One per bed, per variety and per garden event; failures filed as *Problem*, changes for next year as *Decision*. - **The editor**: Where you check the packet numbers, fix the titles, set types and **Key**, and write each variety's verdict yourself. - **The iOS app**: The variety page and the bed's history in your hand at the bed, and quick corrections in **Edit**. - **Star and Focus**: Focus the spring sowing plan for its busiest week; *Revisit* says when the week is up. - **The A–Z index**: Capitalised variety names (*Cherokee*, *Provider*) gathered from titles; Look up finds the rest. ## Method ### 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. ## Prompts to try Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Search the web for which slicing tomato varieties hold up to early blight and septoria leaf spot in humid zone 7b summers, using university cooperative extension publications and variety trial reports. Then, using know.sh, file what you find as a new document on my The back garden shelf, one finding per variety, each with its source links. Say plainly where sources disagree or where a claim comes only from a seed catalogue. Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Using know.sh, read Season log 2026 and Varieties on my The back garden shelf, and list every variety with its sowing or transplant date, its first harvest date and any Problem findings about it, in the order they were sown. Add the list as a new finding in Varieties called ‘The 2026 season at a glance’, and cite the log finding for each date. Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model): > Using know.sh, read Beds and Season log 2026 on my The back garden shelf, and suggest where each crop family should go in 2027 so that no bed grows the same family two years running. Put the plan in a new document called ‘Bed plan 2027’ on the same shelf, one finding per bed, and flag any bed where a repeat could not be avoided. ## Variations - Save your own seed? Add a document, *Seed library*, with a finding per saved variety: the year, how many plants it came from, and whether anything nearby could have crossed with it. - Keep fruit trees, bees or hens as well: give each a document beside *Beds*, and log their year in the same season document. - Grow your own hops or brewing herbs? Link each harvest to the batch it went into in a [homebrew log](/cookbook/brew-log). - Treat the garden as part of the house: the irrigation timer, the rain barrels and the shed can go in a [house manual](/cookbook/house-manual). ## Where it falls short - No photos. There is no image upload, so pictures of the beds, the pests and the harvests stay in your photo library, and the findings say which album. - No offline mode. The iOS app needs a connection, so a garden out of signal means a note on your phone, filed later. - No reminders and no weather. Focus and Revisit bring a document back to the top of the title page; they send nothing, and frost warnings come from your weather app. - Research needs an assistant that can search the web, and smaller local models call tools less reliably. Check what any assistant filed; Revisions shows every change it made. ## A note on sources, sprays and the harvest AI assistants make mistakes, and garden advice online is full of confident guesses. Check every variety claim and every pest remedy against your state's cooperative extension service, which publishes regional guidance based on trials. If you use any pesticide, organic ones included, follow the product label. In the US the label is the legal instruction for how much, when, and how long to wait before harvest. Do not take a rate or a mixture from an assistant. If the harvest goes into jars, use only tested recipes from the USDA or the National Center for Home Food Preservation. The journal can record what you canned and when; it is not the place to invent a canning recipe. Indexed under: Garden journals, Raised beds, Vegetable varieties, Crop rotation, Sowing dates, Extension services, USDA zones.