The Best Garden Journal – 10 Best Reviewed

Getting organized when it comes to your garden can seem like a huge task to take on, but a gardening journal helps to make the whole process easy. We’ve picked out 10 of the best garden journals available on the current market and reviewed them for you so you can compare them side-by-side to see which one will work best for your needs.

Whether you’re after a very basic journal that you can record all of your garden observations over the year, or you’d want a week-by-week garden journal with growing and sowing tips, there is a garden journal in the list to meet your needs below.

Garden journals are very popular with both small and large-scale gardens, and they come in a huge range of styles and options to make it easy to customize your choices to your space.

Garden Journal, Planner, and Log Book – Top Pick

The first garden journal on the list comes from an experienced gardener who realized that she was having trouble remembering all of the small details about her crops. It has a range of logs that allow you to keep track of individual plants, including vines, perennials, annuals, bulbs, vegetables, fruit, trees, shrubs, herbs, and even hardscaping. It also has forms that you can use to record harvest and bloom times, the weather, propagation and cultivation, and any disease or pest issues you encounter with treatments you try.

In addition to this host of logs, this garden journal also contains pages with helpful tips and guidance on plant propagation, weather, pest and disease prevention, pruning, and soil testing and amendments. There is plenty of graph paper too, and you can use it to create scaled drawings and design to plot out your next garden layout.

This garden journal measures 8.5 by 11-inches, and it opens to give you 250 pages. It also lies flat when open, and this is an important feature when you’re working at your garden table packed with seed packets. Because of the sheer amount of logs in this book, it’s a nice pick for people who are more experienced and who would like a record of their gardening adventures.

PROS

• Has very detailed logs
• Helps you track harvest and bloom times
• Features tricks and guidance
• Very detail-oriented
• Lies flat when open
• Has graph paper for scale drawings
• Compact design

CONS

• Can be overwhelming at first glance
•  Not great for novices

Moleskine Passions Gardening Journal – Step-up Pick

Our step-up garden journal pick comes from Moleskine, and it’s a very familiar sight for people who like this stationary brand. You can use it for multi-year gardening and planning. This journal comes outfitted with tabbed sections to make it easy to organize, an expandable double inner pocket, high-quality paper, and an elastic closure to ensure you don’t lose anything as you move around your yard, garden, or flower beds.

This journal features 10 sections with five themed sections and five blank ones for you to use however you wish. The first section is all about keeping individual plant records, including sun and water requirements, hardiness zones, and months of interest. You can list 49 different plants. There is a section to keep records for tools you have and purchases, one for sketching designs with grid paper, a section about growing conditions like rainfall and temperatures, and a section for inspirational garden visits.

The five blank sections come with templates that you can use to create a planner, sketch plants, take notes, or paste in photos. The blank pages have gridlines bordering them, ruled pages for journaling, and pages divided into five horizontal spaces and blank pages. You get sticks with names and blank ones, and the back of the garden journal comes with pre-printed page numbers with an index. The beginning of the book has a small guide section that includes worldwide hardiness information too.

PROS

• Has several customizable sections
• Easy to fill in
• Elastic closure
• Comes with a storage pouch
• Multi-year garden planning capabilities
• Has templates
• Easy to use

CONS

• Not a lot of room to write
•  Doesn’t lay flat

Gardener’s Log Book: A 5-Year Planner – Mid-end Budget Pick

This mid-end budget pick is a great multi-year garden journal if you’re someone who wants the flexibility to create your own structure inside of the journal. It’s also a nice choice for people who want seasonal reminders throughout the year. This planner comes outfitted with to-do lists in a chart form that allows you to check things off as you move through the seasons. These tasks include things pertaining to ornamentals, perennials, trees, shrubs, houseplants, and annual vegetables. You can compare them side by side over a five-year span.

For your design and planning sessions, this garden journal offers plenty of pages with graph paper and lined pages for note taking. It has appendices packed with information on growing in containers, composting, pests, pruning, and diseases, and there is also a plant hardiness map for the United States. It’s a more compact journal at 5.3 by 7.6 inches, and it has 240 pages with an elastic closure. This is useful for putting spare seed packets or slips of paper inside and not having to worry about losing them.

PROS

• Very flexible design
• To-do lists in chart form
• 240 pages
• Has an elastic closure
• Packed with guides
• Easy to take with
• Multi-year garden journal design

CONS

• Difficult to organize
•  Not a lot of room for notes

Garden Planner And Log Book – Bargain Budget Pick

If you pick out this garden journal, you can use it to organize and plan your yearly goals, design your garden, and track both the garden as a whole and individual crops. It works well for planting flowers, vegetables, fruits, or herbs. You can use it to keep a record of all of your garden crops, how they went, what worked, what didn’t work, and you can plan ahead for next year’s garden.

It also lists all of your gardening suppliers. You can plan out a larger garden by turning it horizontally and sketching your plans out. There is a scheduler page that lets you keep a detailed maintenance schedule, plan for harvest activities, and keep an eye on bloom times. You can also use it to track weather, hardscaping, formulas, diseases, pests, propagation, and cultivation activities. There is space to write a shopping list, plant log, seasonal to-do list, pest and disease treatments, weather log, and dotted graph pages. The year-at-a-glance allows you to look back and see how your garden did too.

PROS

• Many blank pages you can customize
• Allows you to track your suppliers
• Can have many types of crops listed
• Sets plans for yearly goals
• Detailed maintenance schedule
• Shopping list space
• Comes with grid paper for planning

CONS

• Has smaller spaces to write
•  Can’t plan out huge gardens

The Family Garden Planner – Best for Large Gardens

This garden journal starts out with a chart to help you figure out roughly how much food your family eats in a year, and then it will help you break down how much food you need to grow to meet it. It’s actually very easy to fill in. The first 21 pages of this garden journal are nothing but worksheets and charts that are designed to help you determine how much to grow, what to grow, where to grow, when to grow, and more.

The rest of this planner then gives you weekly and monthly pages to track and plan what you need to do in your garden, what you’ve already done, and what is happening on any given day. There are budget pages too so you can see how much money you’re saving by growing your own produce, herbs, or fruits. The last section you get in this book is also very handy. This is where you’ll get the month-by-month guidelines that outline exactly what you should do in your garden, all separated by growing zones.

PROS

• 21 pages of worksheets
• Includes a budget sheet
• Weekly and monthly pages
• Easy to guesstimate harvest sizes
• Lots of guidance pages
• Compact design
• Easy to track plants

CONS

• Not a lot of blank pages
•  Charts are very small

A Year in the Garden: A Guided Journal – Best for Hobby Gardeners

No one will argue with you if you say gardening is hard work. Getting things to successfully grow and reaping the benefits at harvest time take a lot of energy. It’s easy to get burned out, and this garden journal will help bring the joy back into this project. It’s a nice guided journal for your garden project. It has places to record information and plan things, but it comes packed with gardening-related journal prompts. The artwork is also very cheerful and makes you want to write and draw in the book. It’s laid out in weekly and monthly format for one year.

For each week, you’ll get two journaling prompts that let you take a few minutes and appreciate your garden and how it changes as the seasons do. There’s plenty of space set aside for drawing or writing on each page. So, if you’re someone who loved gardening but now views it as a chore, this garden journal can help. It’s a 100% different approach to tracking your garden, and you’ll get more information out of it as you use it.

PROS

• Helps refocus on the garden
• Has weekly and monthly format
• Features journaling prompts
• Space for writing and drawing
• Very cheerful and pretty drawings
• Space to record information
• Use for a full year

CONS

• Not a lot of practical writing space
•  Hard to track several plants at once

SmART bookx Garden Planner and Journal – Best for Small-Scale Gardens

This is a very affordable and flexible garden journal from smART bookx. This journal starts you out with a yearly planner where you can easily jot down your ideas and see an overview of what you can expect in the coming year. The journal then splits into monthly sections, and each section has pages that list big jobs, spaces to write notes, and areas to draw out visualizations. On a weekly basis, you get a short to-do list that splits into different categories like propagation, planting, or pruning.

Along with all of this, the garden journal has blank pages for recording wildlife, harvests, general highlights, and what’s in bloom. There are also to-do lists for pest control, pruning, and boxes that allow you to prioritize jobs. You can jot down any wildlife you see, harvesting volumes, weather, spending, and a small space for personal journal entries so you can write what is and what isn’t working. Each month has a title page and a blank page for images to help you build up visual keepsakes of your garden throughout the seasons. A monthly round-up gives you journal space too.

PROS

• Very affordable
• Monthly sections are clearly defined
• Get a short to-do list
• Easy to organize and follow
• Blank pages included
• Can sketch out  your garden
• Includes a monthly round-up space

CONS

• Softback design is more flimsy
•  Not a huge amount of space to plan

RHS A Gardener’s Five Year Record Book – Best for Multi-Year Garden Setups

This five-year garden journal from RHS is a great option if you plan on gardening in the same space for at least five years or more. Recording what happens throughout the seasons in your garden is a great way to form growing and sowing habits to maximize your harvest. This book comes with a week-by-week structure to it over five years, and this makes it flexible enough to put an emphasis on whatever you want to record.

You’ll get a section to jot down which plants you want to buy and grow, the suppliers you use, and addresses of your suppliers or any gardens you visit. There are pretty illustrations to go with it, and the larger design gives you more space to write and note your ideas.

PROS

• Big spaces to write
• Has pretty illustrations
• For a five-year garden plot
• Good for crop rotation setups
• Section to jot down supplier information
• Week-by-week structure
• Five defined sections

CONS

• Very basic design
•  Not much guidance or detail

CraftSaints Garden Journal – Best for Seed Saving

CraftSaint’s garden journal allows you to quickly organize and plan your garden activities. It comes with a one binder, 16 dividers, 30 letter-size plastic sleeves, 32 labels, and 20 4-pocket sleeves to put your seeds and an extra page for useful information. You get 11 downloadable templates and a gardening moon calendar too on the inner cover of the binder. All you have to do is print them and place them in your binder until you’re ready to use them. This is a larger garden journal at 11-inches by 11.5-inches, and it has a 2.4-inch interior spine with rings that fit regular US letter-sized paper. You can easily use it to take notes, log activities, store photos or info, plan gardening work, analyze plant history, store seeds, and more.

You can easily organize all of your seeds in one convenient place, and there are regular plastic sleeves to help protect your gardening information from yellowing or tears. Tab labels and dividers help make organizing your essential gardening information easy. The cover is laminated to offer spill and water protection, and it makes it easy to clean. The metal rings are gap-free and electroplated to help avoid rust, and it’s easy to open and close. The dividers are thick cardboard with an aqueous coating to make them hard to break.

PROS

• Great for novices and veteran gardeners
• Space to store seed packets
• 11 downloadable templates
• Gardening moon calendar
• Has a waterproof cover
• Easy to organize
• Comes with a lot of items to get organized

CONS

• Can be hard to find space for everything
•  Bulky design is hard to carry

My Guided Garden Planner – Best for Organizing Multiple Crops

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The final garden journal on the list is one that comes outfitted with a range of logbooks, worksheets, useful charts, and helpful tips. It will keep you very organized and on top of all of your tasks. It prevents you from making mistakes in your garden or having to look through messy paperwork piles. It has room for four or more years of gardening, and there is a free digital copy included to print out more pages as you need them. You can easily take notes on what works, what doesn’t work, design your garden, and plan ahead. You’ll get a plant factbook for guidance, and there are personalized maps too.

When you order this garden journal, you get a garden timeline tracker, plant factbook, plat data log, hardiness zone maps, chore planner, sun tracking charts and maps, goals, bulb with seed and root inventory, food needs calculator, watering tracker, lined paper for notes, square foot planner, and helpful tips. It’s 7 by 10 inches with 178 pages with a digital version for printing copies. Finally, there are very pretty illustrations too.

PROS

• Several log books included
• Works for four or more years
• Compact size
• Digital copy included
• Plant factbook
• Has a chore planner
• Packed with tips

CONS

• Digital copy can be hard to get
•  Slightly bulky

Garden Journal Buying Guide

Picking out your garden journal can be a process, but there are a few important things you want to consider when you shop. Doing so will help ensure that you get the perfect garden journal for your needs.

Advice and Tips

Some garden journals are very bare and don’t offer a lot in the way of tips or advice, and this can be bad for novice gardeners. If you’re brand new to gardening, you want a journal that offers advice and tips to ensure that you can maximize your harvest and get the most out of your garden. Look and see if the option you’re offering has things like hardiness zone maps, tips for planting or maintaining your garden, seed growing guides, or advice on the local climate. If it does, this can help ensure you don’t have any accidents with your plants as they grow.

Design

Do you want a garden journal that offers a simple design with a lot of blank space to write or do you want something that is more detailed and structured? There are dozens of designs available, and some of them will walk you through each part of the gardening process while others give you much more flexibility. Decide which design you want at the start and you’ll have an easier time narrowing down your perfect garden journal when you start to shop.

Durability

Gardening can be dirty work, and if you take your garden journal outside with you, you may end up with a soggy book at the end if you’re not careful. Many journals come outfitted with a water-resistant or waterproof cover. This makes it very easy to wipe off dirt, debris, and any stray water that happens to fall onto it while you’re out working while keeping the interior dry and safe. The binding should also be durable enough to take outside without adding a lot of bulk.

Size

Garden journals can vary greatly when it comes to the size of it. They can be small enough to slip into your pocket or bag, or they can be big enough that you have to carry them around by themselves. Generally speaking, the larger garden journals usually have space for various seed packets, papers, charts, and much more that you can’t necessarily fit into the smaller ones. Double-check the size and decide how large you want your journal to be and how large is too large to comfortably take with you out to the garden or greenhouse.

Bottom Line

Garden journals are a great way to organize this large project and ensure you don’t miss anything vital when you shop for your items. Once you get your journal, you can use it to plan out your upcoming garden and make note of what works so you can improve your yields year after year.