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February 16, 2024 at 4:39 pm #1856Josh KlattParticipant
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 #1870Craig BickleParticipantI 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 #1889Josh WillisParticipantI’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 #1925Steve DaggerParticipantI 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 #1939Shay HohmannParticipantI 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!
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