I use 2 ways to keep records. I keep the hard data in Excel spreadsheet and the thoughts and comments in a beautiful garden journal my daughter gave me several years ago. I find the data helpful in remembering what was successful and what was not but the journal reminds me of all the joy of gardening, and some of the distress, too. I record the variety planted, date planted, date transplanted for those not direct seeded, germination date, and first picking date. I haven't put the pricing into the spreadsheet but keep receipts. Believe it or not, I get far more back from the garden than I spend. Some things are carried long term, like the boards for a raised bed, but the annual expenses are usually recouped by early summer by the value of the produce I harvest. I keep track of rainfall for watering purposes but don't record it. General weather patterns usually make up some of the comments in the journal. Looking back over the journal and other records is pleasant in the winter. It helps plan next year's garden and is a warm reminder of summer days in a cold and dreary season. Sandy

Tishtosh -- I like to do the journal by hand, too. I also use spiral ring. Divided into 4 sections, each marked with one of those colorful stickies, which can move as I write my way through the notebook in each section. 1. work log, where I write weather conditions and what I did in the garden, so I know what chores were done when each year (and can get an idea if it was a good time to do them.) If I plant something, I draw an arrow in the margin, so plantings are easy to find, and above the arrow I write what ammendments I used when planting. 2. Notes. This section has random things I don't want to forget--anything from info on varieties to food storage methods, along with warnings, like: don't plant radishes in with mesc mix as you can't tell radish greens from arugula. 3. Harvests. Shows dates and amounts of harvests. At first this helped me know I was making a profit and let me know how much I could spend guilt free on next years inputs. Now (because I'm so far ahead $ wise) it's to let me know when things come on year to year. Or to calculate things like, I just figured out that whether I planted broccoli in early April or in late May, it always took 7 weeks to maturity, so I need to look ahead 7 weeks and make sure I won't be traveling when the broccoli comes on. 4. money spent. This only takes one page, but I like keeping track. I use a new notebook each year, and each one is labeled on the front so I can compare year to year, too. GREAT winter entertainment, and also a great way to learn what works and what doesn't. Enjoy your journaling! Elisa

Maybe the white round radish y'all are thinking of is the variety called Hailstone. (If ever there was an appropriate name for a radish in our state, Hailstone would be it.) And, just to show that whoever names varieties has a sense of humor, there's a long, pointy white radish named Icicle too. Alexis, Those poor tomato plants! Maybe it was all those changes over a few days that stressed them more so than the neem. When hardened-off plants go back indoors after already being outside for some time, they can lose some of their hardening-off. I know I had that happen with some pepper, flower and herb seedlings while they were hardening off. I think I already had most all the tomato plants in the ground by then. I battle spider mites every year. They are everywhere here in our rural area, and the hotter and drier it is, the worse they are. I started seeing them on some plants back in March. March! It used to be that they wouldn't reach high enough population levels for me to worry about them until July....and gradually it became May....and now that I am resigned to seeing them in May, they arrived in March. Here in this state, you never know with tomatoes. Sometimes we get periodic "cold fronts", which bring us slightly cooler weather, even in the middle of summer and we can get fruit set at that time. If a cold front is coming that will put temperatures back into the right range for fruit set, I'll buy some Super Bloom or another brand of a bloom-booster fertilizer and feed it to the plants about 5-7 days before the expected arrival of the cold front to ensure they are in bloom when the cold front arrives. When I have done that in some previous years, I got great fruitset even if that cold front only brought us temperatures in the right range for a couple of days. I saw something interesting at the Ardmore Wal-Mart a couple of days ago. The way retail usually works is that tomato plants in six-packs are common in March here, but as we move into April, the tomato plants are in increasingly larger containers, as people buying them later want larger plants to make up for the fact they are planting later, right? Right now, I am seeing half-grown tomato plants with almost full-sized fruit in roughly 3 gallon containers in stores....for about $20-25 per plant. A couple of days ago, though, the Ardmore Wal-mart had six-packs of tomato plants with plants that are maybe 4-5" tall. Irrationally, I wanted to buy some. Being rational most of the time, I didn't do it. I cannot imagine that anyone buying tomato plants that small and putting them in the ground now would get any fruit from them until fall.....and that would be strongly dependent on daytime and nighttime air temperatures at the time they finally got large enough to blossom. This is sort of an awkward time to plant tiny tomato plants---too late to consider them part of the spring planting but too early to plant them for fall. Still, I bet lots of people will buy them, especially if their spring-planted tomatoes have major issues. Some years I don't aim for keeping plants alive all summer. Some years I just keep them going as long as I can, and then I cry "uncle" and surrender to the summer and stop watering. You'd be amazed what might survive even after you cut off the water. In 2011, Piricicaba broccoli at the shady west end of the garden survived at least 6 weeks in July-August with no irrigation and probably no rainfall. I didn't even realize it was still alive until maybe October or November, and there it was producing! I had been gone to wildfires day and night and night and day all summer, and after I stopped watering in July, I really didn't step foot in the garden. When I went back into it after the wildfire activity dropped after rain returned in September, I found I had broccoli to harvest. It was just bizarre. Despite it seeming all wrong, we harvested broccoli from that Piricicaba until the plant froze in December. So, sometimes gardens just surprise us, and in the oddest of ways. I hope the forecasts of the return of El Nino come true. I almost always have a great garden in El Nino years because we get plentiful rainfall those years. Dawn

Marcy, It sounds like your early harvest is a great one! I hope the harvest remains that bountiful all year long. I have another one for you....overwintered peppers! A couple of years ago, I had ornamental peppers planted as understory plants in very large pots that contained 6-8' tall brugmansias. I overwintered them in the garage, dragging them outside for sunshine on warm days. The brugs did great and only 1 froze back so hard that it died (on an 18-degree night). Some of the brugs bloomed on and off all winter. The amazing thing, though, was the ornamental peppers! The ornamental peppers dropped their leaves and appeared dead after overnight lows dipped into the teens in December of that year. I figured that when spring arrived, I'd pull out the dead pepper plants and toss them on the compost pile. However, in January the plants began putting out new growth. They grew slowly, but steadily, and were in bloom by May. So, you just know I had try overwintering an edible pepper this past year.... I brought in a sweet pepper in a 3-gallon pot in December and kept it in the garage at night, and out on the patio during the day. It was a Red Beauty Sweet Bell Pepper and was about 20" tall after I pruned it back when I dug it and put it in the pot. This pepper stayed green all winter although it lost most of its leaves after the overnight low dipped down to 6 degrees one night, probably in late Dec. or early Jan. By late January, new leaves were coming out and it bloomed and set one pepper, which I left on the plant until it turned red. I just harvested that one red bell pepper recently. In the meantime, the plant is covered with flowers and small peppers right now! I'd always heard you could overwinter peppers indoors for earlier spring production, but never imagined it would be so easy. So, next fall, if you have space to overwinter one, why not dig up and pot up a pepper plant or two and see if they overwinter for you. It has been a fun experiment and and one I intend to repeat next year, but with more than one pepper plant. Dawn