Record keeping calendar system

  • February 16, 2024 at 4:39 pm #1856
    Josh Klatt
    Participant

    Has anyone found a digital calendar/product for farm record keeping that let’s you stack/compare multiple years at same time ? For example, you want to know what day a certain variety blooms every year, or when something got harvested, weather events, or when the propane tanks got filled, etc. etc. Everything being cyclical, it’d be useful for so many things, way beyond the orchard. What systems are you using to keep track of stuff ?

    March 5, 2024 at 5:19 pm #1870
    Craig Bickle
    Participant

    I use a calendar notebook: “Elite Series (year) Planner Weekly”. It has the drawback that the days of the week on which a particular task was done (e.g. Feb 28 “Pruned Upper Orchard”), don’t correspond with the date. But it’s a small annoyance to have to keep in mind 2/28 was on a Tuesday this year when last it was on a Friday.

    But I only started it in 2021. After about a decade, the space for recording tasks will start to run out and I’ll have to buy another paper notebook!

    March 21, 2024 at 4:01 pm #1889
    Josh Willis
    Participant

    I’ve used a spreadsheet (insert your brand of choice, I like Google Drive for its simplicity) for years to track soil test results, amendments, spray planning, etc. I’ve just started to record actual sprays (i.e., different than what was planned, of course!), and it is easy to put in bloom dates, weather, etc. It takes a bit of work to set up, but it is customizable to track whatever you want to track.

    There used to be a page on the forums that gave an example of what Michael used as a consultant to help orchardists track sprays and weather. If you could find that example, you could use that as a starting basis for designing your own system.

    May 1, 2024 at 2:36 pm #1925
    Steve Dagger
    Participant

    I have a large desk calendar on which I keep notes as needed then each winter transfer selected data/info to a spreadsheet set-up similar to what Josh describes. It isn’t too hard to customize rows and columns into useful categories by year if you don’t want a lot of detail. Of course, the more specific and comprehensive you get on what you are tracking the more time consuming it is to both set up and do data entry.

    The old way of just keeping a file of the desk calendars or journals to reference back to works fine too to bring back important details and recollections of past successes and failures.

    Pommes de Terre Acres
    Intermountain Regiion (Zone 4a/5b-ish)

    May 14, 2024 at 7:17 pm #1939
    Shay Hohmann
    Participant

    I would love to see your format for a Google spreadsheet. I use a 10 year “garden calendar” as well as a separate spray log to track timings, but I love the idea of a digital version vs paging through a 365 page perpetual calendar!

    October 15, 2025 at 10:34 am #1992
    Josh Willis
    Participant

    Just seeing your comment, Shay, this new website doesn’t seem to send me notifications. I lifted the pertinent spreadsheet tabs out of my huge spreadsheet, and with apologies for its messiness, here it is if you want to take a look. There are 2x tabs:

    -Spray Schedule, a sprawling spreadsheet with phenological dates tied to Michael’s spray template + what I’ve learned from other sources. It is a big reference doc for me, so it errs on the side of “too much information” so that if I need to remember something it is right there (hopefully). I’ve been meaning to clean it up to be more workable, but you get the idea. The notes have lots of text copied from Michael’s publications. Given we reference lots of his work here, I am guessing that is ok, but if somebody flags that as an issue for sharing in this public link, please let me know and I will clear those notes.

    -2023 Sprays, yep that being the most recent year that I’ve entered my sprays! This spreadsheet is sort of my ideal archive for sprays, and as such, it is the extra piece of note taking that I never seem to get to. My system is to, before spraying, I put in my spray amounts for the tank mix into an index card. This card I post where I am tank mixing, to reference. When I am done spraying, and if I remembered to take the index card out of my pants before I wash them (that seems to be 50-50), then I put in a stack on my desk. And then, in the winter months when I have oodles of time (in my mind), I enter that season’s sprays into the spreadsheet. It’s great when that happens. What is more likely there is a stack of index cards that are easy to shuffle through to find a particular spray. What doesn’t work with that is if multiple years get mixed together accidentally, or if (as truly happened this year) a bird flies in the house and poops over my spray cards, making them…less than appealing to work with. Anyways, it’s a work in progress.

    My spreadsheet has lots of other tabs that I use for tracking soil amendments, notes for spray amounts and compatibilities, trees that we planted, supply inventory, etc., which probably are more particular than you want.

    FWIW, there is some other forum post where somebody shared a template for spray tracking (perhaps Tim?), which I think I looked at when thinking about setting up my template.

    Here’s the link that should let you see what I work with.

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10smTK7yejulxCDd9JMX_2Zo8HGG0uSxpF42sok3Ne78/edit?usp=sharing

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