rouge.... how coincidental....I've been doing this for the past 5 years...but I tell you what....I never get past June.... it all seems to end there and maybe I get so busy with summer and I don't seem to keep it up... apart from a Hemerocallis that I noted flowering into September.....

...I made a note of when a plant was showing in bud, when the first flower opened, when the full flush occurred...and the date of the last flower...

...this year I've given up as I just know it will fade out again... but it's fun to look back on one's notes... some of my plants appear to be about 2 weeks later this Spring...

.. no resolutions...I'd never stick to those...

Rouge - that's the book/calendar I use to record temperatures and rainfall for the garden. I originally (10 years or so ago!) intended to record key dates like flowering times etc. - didn't happen, other than sporadically! :-) When I go looking to see when something was in flower, I check the pictures on my Photoshop Organizer because I can look at them by date and year easily there. Mind you, I can't find them if I didn't take their picture! So I try to take lots of pictures :-)

Like Mariorens above, I'm not good at sticking to resolutions so I don't make them!

I do what Woody does - I use photos to check on when things are blooming if I want to know. I like the added reminder of how things were growing that year, and it gives me added incentive to take photos when I know I'll use them for record keeping.

My garden resolution is to not forget to water EVERYTHING that I planted when it gets hot.. I forget plants. Bad bad bad.. I have red surveyor flags on them this year,... or the important ones , at least.

My resolution is to reduce the deer buffet. I'm continuing to replace deer munchies with resistant plants since northern Virginia communities can't come to grips with the deer population and the situation isn't going to get better anytime soon.

I find planting diagrams, photographs and plant labels enough (though still a challenge), my only focus being on plant and cultivar identification.

Personally, I'm not big on "resolutions", which seem a bit tokenistic. However, I do intend/try to learn from my mistakes.

This growing season I intend to give up even attempting perennials that had repeatedly proven themselves to be short-lived in my gardens, e.g. the lupins and pasqueflowers that have been mentioned recently.

Penstemons present a bit of a problem; the large bulk of those I planted only survived a year or two, while a very few have proven long-lived. Perhaps, for me, it would be worth trying new cultivars, if they became available, of Penstemon digitalis, P. hirsutus, P. strictus P. pinifolius and maybe P. barbatus. All of these species, or their species (non-hybrid) cultivars, have done very well for me.

Throwing money at plants that haven't proven themselves (and are unlikely to do so), in my growing conditions, seems to be a mug's game.

Penstemons are a thorn in my side, I haven't managed to winter a single one, I think it's because of the wet winters :(. I gave up on resolutions a long time ago, just doesn't seem to work for me. I take lots of pictures, this is how I keep track of bloom time etc. I do keep a list of all the plants I have/had on the computer, when I bought or had been given them, where they came from and the year first planted and whether I still have them or when they were lost or given away. That's about it for me.
Annette

I gave up keeping tract. I just enjoy and pray I accidentally don't yank something out.

One of my resolutions is to water less, particularly in the hell strip bed that I planted last year with drought-tolerant natives. My goal would be to never water the whole strip, but only the small number of plants that went in later and haven't had a chance to get roots very far down. We'll see how it goes. Since it's only the second year it may not be possible if we have a really dry summer. I think that a lot of times I feel like I need to add water when I don't, because I'm used to how things were when it was all lawn.

I also use photos for documentation, but I'd like to do a better job of labeling them and organizing them for future reference -- maybe just adding some keywords so that they're searchable.

I use photos as a way of enjoyment and if it documents, then it is 2 birds with one stone.

One of these days I need to get a real camera with a macro lens, speaking of which. With my phone it's really hard to get pictures of small insects, and I want to learn a lot more about what's on my plants.

Most photo software programs have tagging functions. I have tags set up for all the key areas of the garden (e.g. front bed, driveway border, south alley, north alley, backyard). It just takes a second to tag each photo when I download them. At the beginning of each year I create a new set of the same tags with the current year added. Then I can do a fast search by tag, or use the somewhat slower calendar search that uses the date that is automatically applied by the camera. The calendar search doesn't sort by garden area, so it's definitely useful to use tags in addition to give you more search options.