I know this sounds like a stupid question but maybe there are others that would like to know too. Do you keep a drawn plan or diagram of where your plants are located? What about record of where the plants may have been purchased, donated by friends or family or grown from seeds? In my hand drawn spreadsheet of my wintersowing efforts, I try to notate where the seeds came from. If commercial seeds(what company)or if traded with gardening friends or the wintersowing swap. Example: If I rec'd seeds in a trade, if the username is on the label, and I might have wanted to see if that person had some more to trade or maybe that gardener can offer some useful tips about growing that specific flowerseed or vegetable.

At 98 degrees, wintersowing is far from everybody's mind I'm sure but I want to be more organized come January if that is possible for me to do. My beds are pretty full with perennials that can be divided to make more plants, so I may not ever wintersow in 2013..A Woman can change her mind, right?

I think it is so interesting.

I was thinking about this yesterday. I grow a different vegetable garden twice a year and I'm thinking about using the Plant Lists feature for tracking what I grow each time.

One can create a category called something like "Garden Spring 2012" and then add all the varieties grown during that season. Then a new category for fall.

I just keep a scrawl journal of everything I do in the garden.
I write the common name, latin name, source and where I planted or seeded.
I also note special conditions such as shade or drainage etc.

I do a lot of photographing of the gardens and keep a weekly journal on paper
I also have made a cubit work as a photo journal .
I keep a clip board in the potting shed to make notes while working outside , because by the time I get inside I have forgotten

I track my plants w/ Paint (MS program) Once set up it's easy to make daily changes; at year's end, I erase all the containers and annuals and re-enter them where placed the next year.
I also track my lily collection hereon (goes back 6 years in the illustration) as well as columns for bulbs, annuals, self-seeders, perennials, vines, sightings for butterflies, Hummingbird Moths, and Hummingbirds and tomatoes.

Excel spreadsheet and pictures.

I use Excel and create circles to name the locations of my plants. Hardscape items like the plow in this example I put in green, red circle around my daylilies, lines for walkways. I have 13 maps with section names like the one below called "West of Windmill" and I don't worry too much about scale. The maps are sized so that they print on 8-1/2 x 11 paper. When I want to check a section, I just print it, put it on a clipboard and start walking to check that everything is still where I think it is.

This year has been easy. With the drought, I haven't moved or purchased many things. I guess that's really not a good thing.

Vickie, what does the H. in front of the names of some plants mean? I don't have Excell but your idea how you have done yours gives me an idea how I can do one for myself. I could never draw anything to scale on graph paper. Never understood about graphs in school and still don't and never will.

Ha! I'm betting that "H" stands for Hemerocallis.

Yes, the H stands for Hemerocallis (good call, Woofie! ) The "H" is so I didn't have to take up space say "daylily" lol!

My maps aren't exactly to scale, but at least I have an idea where things are in case something happens to them. Graph paper and a pencil would work just as well as Excel and would probably be faster.

I also use Excel to record the details of my daylily purchases (where, how much, when). I have kept all the tags from my other plants and have them just in a list form, but without any details about where I got them, how much I paid or when I got them.

There is a free program called OpenOffice that has an application that is very similar to Excel called "calc". If you are interested, here is the link: http://download.openoffice.fm/...

My husband loaded this on our other computer because it didn't have Microsoft Office on it and we weren't going to buy it since we wouldn't be using it that much on that computer. OpenOffice works pretty good for what we need it for.

Oh, yes! OpenOffice is great! I was waaaaay to cheap to spring for the MS program, and I hate the changes they've made to it anyway! And the great thing about OpenOffice is that you can open just about any MS Office program in it and save the file in any number of formats, including the Microsoft ones.

can use the Publisher equivalent, if they have one, to make a map with photos of the plants in their locations, too.

Oooooh! That's a cool idea. I didn't think about using Publisher and adding the pics.

And it is nice that we can create a document on our computer that has MS Office and then copy it to the other computer with OO if we want. My husband has done that with his movie list.

Although I am sloppy with my document creations, they work well enough for me. For example, I did this one in early Spring. Virtually all the plants were similar in color (reds and purples) and all were new to me this year. The experiment was to see which ones I liked and which ones fared decently here. Used a separate handdrawn shape, numbered the positions, and made a side list of each name by corresponding location. Then, created the Publisher document with the photos (except the Suspended in Time). Now that I have gifted the ones I didn't care for so much, will be redoing the page. This one will have each bloom numbered in the document and the names list on the side.

Vickie, I think I have OpenOffice loaded on my system but only use the word processing part to type a letter. Told you I was computer illiterate or computer challenged..In the Fall I'm going to be looking for somebody to come to my house and teach me how to work some of these programs I have on my computer.

Dave, how about a forum or maybe a FAQ page for mapping gardens? I keep spreadsheets on google, but I have not found a program for mapping that is easy enough. If someone could put together a step by step tutorial with screenshots, it would be so helpful. I'm trying to lay out some sort of irrigation system, and before I can do that, I need to figure out how to map all the various areas. Google maps are incredibly detailed now, so I'm using those as a starting place.

That sounds like an excellent idea and we have a place for that kind of thing: Gardening Ideas! We just need something to put the tutorial together.

Can that include other ways to map garden w/ computer?

Certainly.