The Family Garden Planner

Exactly what I was looking for in a gardening journal! Tasks broken down by month and week with plenty of space to record everything. I love that the back of the book has each zone and the tasks needed for each month within that zone. Very detailed but not complicated. I’d say this is a great gift for a seasoned gardener or a noob.

I’m new to gardening, and this book has been a gem. It’s really helped me grasp exactly what I need to do to have a successful garden, what I need to plant in order to provide for my family, based on what we eat the most, and what will be able to can most. All in all great resource.

It’s great. I love the idea of having a record to keep from each year so that you can look back and see what you did, when you did it, and what did or didn’t work that year. It helps with figuring out how much to plant for my family, and breaks tasks down by month, week, and day. I feel much less overwhelmed and ready to tackle gardening season.

This book has helpful charts and lots of room for notes. I was able to lend the book that it is based on - The Family Garden- to my daughter and still use this for the charts that I want to refer to constantly.

Buy it. You know you want it.Lol seriously though, this book is a must have in addition to Melissa's other book The Family Garden plan. I love the amount of space for my own personal notes over months or years. Take your knowledge and turn it into action.With the first book, you learn about WHAT to grow for food, HOW MUCH to grow and HOW to grow it.This planner gives you ample room to write down your plans, your process and anything you learn during the gardening process. (With helpful tips along the way) I went from using any notebook I could find at the moment to moving it all in one organized space.This book is keeping my sanity.So if your gardening, get this book.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE Melissa K. Norris. She is an incredible educator and very relatable to the everyday person. She is down to earth and easy to understand. This book is Awesome! it gives me worksheets and plans that I would have never thought of. Great companion book and extremely helpful!

I've tried to organize this same information in a regular notebook to no avail. This planner/recorder has it all laid out for me - almost!If there is ever a Second Edition, I would suggest an additional section in Part 1 to take a monthly inventory of my pantry and freezer. It would help to know how much we have, consumed, or added on a monthly basis. It kind of ties in to the "Food Needs for a Year" section and you can watch various staples from your food pantry grow and diminish throughout the year.This is a well thought out planner/journal and I would recommend to anyone with a garden that is also attempting to preserve their harvests.5-STAR

Author Melissa K. Norris has a very good YouTube channel, and I guess podcast, on homesteading that has some very good information and advice on gardening, but is perhaps a bit more focused on homesteading - being somewhat or fully self-sufficient in growing one’s family’s foods. This book is much more designed for the beginning homesteader who wants to micro-journal the entire growing season than the backyard, hobbyist gardener. As I am in the latter category, this book didn’t work for me and I returned it.I have been growing hot peppers, tomatoes, herbs, and various salad greens in four raised beds and several dozen grow bags and containers in my backyard for the past five years. Last year I grew more than 40 varieties of hot peppers and over 20 varieties of tomatoes. My goal over the next few years is to try to limit my plantings to maybe a dozen varieties of hot peppers and 6-8 varieties of tomatoes with trials of a few new varieties of each every year. So I am looking for a garden planner that will help me keep track of what I’ve planted, where I planted it in my garden , how it germinated, how it grew, how well it produced, and how good its produce tasted and how all-around useful it was. In other words, a garden planner that will let me keep track of whether I should I plant those seeds again or avoid them in future seasons. This book has very few pages that will help me with that goal.I have posted a number of photos of pages out of the book that show most of its contents. It contains quite a few pages of information on what to plant and when to plant it, plus a detailed calendar of suggested activities each month for gardeners in several different growing zones. That information would be very useful to beginning gardeners but I already know when and how to plant seeds, when to transplant, and generally, what to expect for harvesting.There are a number of page sections devoted to keeping track of costs and expenses, which certainly would be useful to some people. However, I know that my gardening is not cost-effective compared to buying straight from the grocery store. Gardening for me is a hobby and probably won’t ever be a cost-effective source of food unless and until I can settle on some regular seeds to plant, save most of my own seeds, and avoid large yearly purchases in seeds (but seed-shopping is too fun and addictive)..Over 160 pages of this book contains detailed monthly and weekly planners. For each week of the gardening season, you are able to record what you did or what happened in every hour of daylight for each day. You can also record weather, and a variety of other bits and pieces of information about what you did or what happened in the garden that day. I do not need any of that, so most of the pages of this garden journal had no value for me. In fact, unless you are attempting to be a fully self-sufficient homesteader AND have OCD – level attention to details and minutiae, you will not need to journal each hour of each growing day during the season.I would have liked to have seen several dozen pages for recording information about seeds planted rather than the two pages for vegetables and two pages for fruits and orchards. I would’ve also like to have seen six or eight pages of graph paper for diagramming specific beds or portions of gardening beds with what has been planted, but there was only a single page at the very end of the book.This book is designed for individuals interested in self-sufficiency who want to keep extremely detailed journals of their gardening. I did not find it was designed for a hobbyist gardener at all, so I am returning it and purchasing several other ones in the hope of finding something that meets my needs more closely**.——————** Some suggestions for other Amazon reviewers: please avoid the too terse and useless style of many thousands of Amazon review writers who write little more than “It met/did not meet my needs.“ If you do not tell us what your needs are and explain how the product either met those needs or did not meet those needs, your review has no usefulness whatsoever for anyone else. We cannot read your mind and know what characteristics and properties you wanted in a product of that type. Please take the time to write enough details that it will tell people both whether this would be a good product for them or whether it will not be a good product for them. Don’t write a review unless and until you have actually used a product and can fairly evaluate it. And please provide more details that will be useful to others than “MY HUBBY/GRANDBABIES ARE GOING TO LOVE THIS!!!!” That’s not a consumer product review - that’s just internet graffiti. Thank you.