1. Evernote Daily Journal Template
2. Evernote Garden Journals
3. Evernote Garden Journal Login
4. Bullet Journal Evernote

Or, you can make your gardening diary like a nature journal or scrapbook. That means you would find creative ways to illustrate your plants and garden maps, take pictures and organize them beautifully on a page with handwritten observations about what you see, enjoy or experience. You might include inspirational poems or quotes. Evernote is an all-in-one online ‘filing system’. This free product allows you to keep everything in the one place and share your ideas across any device. Jot down a reminder, save photos, documents or notes in any format and organize them however you like.

If your garden is anything like my own, there is always a lot going on in your garden (and in your life) so the likelihood that you will remember how your plants grew or what made your tomatoes really flourish the year before is slim to none. And that’s why keeping a garden journal is just a good idea. Plus you can not only use it to remember what you’ve already done, but also to help you plan a schedule for maintenance, harvesting, canning & processing, seasonal planting and much more.

If you have been maintaining a garden but have not thought of keeping a journal, there is never a wrong time to start. But great times to start include the beginning of a season, the end of the season once you’ve wound everything done or whenever you are planning to revamp your garden. Whenever you are looking to get organized and want to make smart choices before you plant, a garden journal will come in handy. Plus it’s usual for crop rotation and companion planting too. Ultimately, your garden journal holds each and every plan that you have for your garden, with sketches of your garden plots and the delineation of which plant goes where.

There are other things that you can put in your garden journal. This includes things that you find useful for you and your garden. Some gardeners keep records of the following in their journal:

• Temperatures and rainfall – You can write down daily information regarding the weather and take note of unusual weather phenomena like very hot or cold spells and even including moments of very high rainfall or during drought. Then you can note down on the things you have done to protect your garden during extreme weathers and what plants survived and withered during those times.
• Planting and seasonal tasks – Journals can be used to remind you of the things that need to be done around the garden and when to do them. Planting seeds, pruning, watering schedules, fertilizing, weeding and the time for adding of organic materials can all be placed in that journal – or even added to a calendar in your journal or online. Anything that can be planned out ahead of time helps to ensure better garden results because you don’t have to think on the fly and constantly look up information about when to do what.
• Success and failures – Keeping a garden journal allows you to evaluate what grew well, which seed varieties to grow again, which of your seeds are no longer viable and much more, which will allow you to have a more successful and productive garden going forward.

There is no absolute rule on what your journal should look like. It is merely a personal tool to help you organize things in your garden but it’s a very helpful one. You can even put your own drawings of your plants and flowers or photos of them in it because keeping a journal can be fun!

Evernote Daily Journal Template

I have personally used a few different methods which included a notebook, a looseleaf binder and earlier this year I started using a garden planning software (which was awesome for square foot gardening and crop rotation) plus Evernote to try out what I liked best. What’s important is to keep using the journal and not abandon it (which is the tricky part). I’m great about recording sprouting and growth of seedlings, and then after that I start to taper off, usually because I just get busy with other things (and we all know how that goes!) But no matter what, I create some sort of journal every year and stick to it as long as I can!

Do you use a garden journal? How do you keep yourself motivated to write in it all during the growing season?

Featured Posts from Last Week’s Natural Life Linky

From the submissions lately, you can sure tell it’s tomato season and everyone is trying to use the up in creative and delicious ways! Like with this oven-roasted tomato recipe from Amanda at Living on Grace — which didn’t go quite according to plan.

Or if you’re looking for something different, how about a Spinach, Butternut Squash Ravioli and Leek Lasagna?

Want to join in the fun and link to your own blog? You can share about anything related to natural living, from gardening to recipes to home remedies to anything else related to natural living.

Here’s how this works:

PLEASE READ THESE GUIDELINES, especially if you have never linked up before!

Posts you might want to link up could include:

• Green & natural living
• Real Food recipes
• Repurposing & upcycling ideas and projects
• Home remedies & aromatherapy
• Gardening goodness
• Sustainable smartness
• And other things related to living a more natural life

Here’s how this works:

1. You are free to join the Natural Living link up at any time. You can also skip a few weeks and then come back. It’s entirely up to you.
2. Please do not share more than 2 links per Link-up. If you do, I will delete the “extras.”
3. Please link directly to the specific post on your blog that relates to green living — not your main blog URL.
4. Please only link to your own blog or photos hosted online.
5. Link back to No Ordinary Homestead or the Natural Living link up post in your blog post. This way, if someone else wants to join the fun, they can. You can either link with text or using the Natural Living badge. Below is a code for the badge above – feel free to resize it as you need. Just copy and paste this code into your post or save and upload the image to your blog: <a href=”https://www.noordinaryhomestead.com/category/natural-living/natural-living-link-up/“><img title=”natural living link up″ src=”https://www.noordinaryhomestead.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/noh-natural-living-linky.jpg” alt=”natural living link up” width=”300″ /></a>
6. I highly encourage you to visit other participants and leave comments. This is a great way to meet new friends and become inspired about your garden! I try to visit all the blogs participating as well every week

That’s it! Share your green ideas with us by linking up at the bottom of this week’s Natural Living post!

One of the best things you can do to clear your head and to improve your level of self-awareness is to journal. There is nothing quite like being able to empty out your thoughts in a place that is for you and you alone. Journaling allows you to reflect and then adjust your plan for tomorrow and beyond.

At first glance, you may think it takes too much time to journal. Sure, if you decide to journal on paper that can be a valid point (The Five Minute Journal makes it easier as do several other books designed specifically for journaling). The good news is you also have the option to use technology to create a journal entry in just a matter of seconds.

While there are dedicated applications for journaling available, there is one app that many people already use that can be adapted for journaling quickly and easily.

Evernote Garden Journals

And that app is Evernote.

Why Evernote?

Evernote has several built-in features that help simplify journaling. Here are a few reasons why it is my journaling app of choice.

First off, Evernote is accessible from a variety of devices. This means you can begin your entry at the office for work tracking and then at home you can add to that entry to discuss other home and life matters, all without skipping a beat.

Second, Evernote has location awareness built in. So if you’re traveling, you’ll get to see where you were when writing entries and what time of year you were there.

Evernote Garden Journal Login

Third, you don’t just need to do written entries in Evernote. You can also do audio entries or use an image to represent (or go along with) a written entry. This versatility makes it a real journaling powerhouse.

Finally, Evernote has incredible search options. So if you want to look back at entries when you decided to try to become a morning person to see if it’s worthwhile for you (Hint: it often doesn’t make a difference to your productivity), then you could use tags for entries or simply search the text in notes based on “morning person” or “early riser”. You can also search images that have words in it, thanks to Evernote’s amazing OCR (optical character recognition) technology. If you want a journaling app that can find whatever you’ve written with just a few keystrokes, Evernote has got you covered.

How to Start

If you’ve been looking to start the journaling habit, it is important to start simple so you can build momentum and see your progress. Let’s go through what you need to do to set up an ongoing journaling setup in Evernote.

Step 1: Create a Notebook for the Current Year

Creating a notebook in Evernote is pretty basic stuff, so all you need to do is create a notebook that you’ll use exclusively for journaling. Ideally, you should name your notebook with the year of the journal first (as numbers sort higher in Evernote than letters), but you can always place an asterisk or an underscore in front of the notebook name if you don’t want to go that route.

If you want to create separate notebooks for each month, you can do that as well. But I must warn you that can get pretty unwieldy and you can only have a limited number of notebooks in Evernote. I recommend you go with one notebook per journal year and just take it from there.

Step 2: Use Separate Notes for Each Entry

Each journal entry should have its own note. If you want to have multiple entries per day, just edit the note you used earlier in the day. This keeps it simple and clean, so that the notebook doesn’t get too overwhelming.

I recommend using the date to name each entry as this keeps the notebook cleaner. If you would like to title them differently, then you’ll still know when each entry was created thanks to Evernote’s “Note Created” field. You can always edit that field if you want (as you can see in the image below) but I think it’s best to leave it be. The “Note Updated” field is another nice feature in that it tells you when you last edited the note. This is particularly useful if you add to that entry throughout the day.

Don’t forget that you can use your voice to take notes into your Evernote app if you want to speed up the process – at least on the Mac and iOS. Speech to text on both of these operating systems works quite well in Evernote. Just be sure to go back and re-read what was transcribed so that nothing gets lost in the translation.

Step 3: Create a Reminder Note

If you’re new to this whole journaling thing, then you’ll want to keep yourself on top of the ritual. That means finding a way to trigger when to do your next entry. If you’re not using features in a task management application or calendar to act as a daily reminder, then Evernote can help you out on this front.

No password for mac user. As you can see in the image above, Evernote allows you to set a single reminder in a note but it won’t make it repeating. That means that when you create a note to act as reminder to do your journal entry, you’ll only be able to set the reminder for one date.

So what I do is set it for the next day (after all, I’m already in Evernote and ready to go with today’s entry) and set the ideal time for me to be reminded. I like to journal before bed as part of my evening routine, so my time is set to 11:00 PM. Then every time I go into Evernote to write a new entry, I simply go into this reminder note and set a reminder for the next day.

Again, it’s not the most elegant of solutions, but it works. There are plenty of other ways to create this reminder. But if you want to get used to the idea of going into Evernote daily to write in your journal, this will definitely help you do that.

Step 4: Write on

The last step is both the simplest and the hardest: write in your Evernote journal notebook every day. No matter what. Build that habit. Your future self will thank you for it.

(As an added bonus, you’ll also get better at using Evernote!)

Bullet Journal Evernote

This is just the beginning of using Evernote for your journaling habit. Once you’ve got this process down, you’ll be able to find new ways to make your Evernote journal even better. Here are just a few of those enhancements:

1. Create a menu Shortcut to make finding your journal faster.
2. Create appropriate tags so that you can highlight milestones in your journal.
3. Create a Journaling Notebook Stack so that you can combine yearly journal into one convenient location.
4. Create automation routines in IFTTT so that some journal entries pretty much write themselves!

I’ll dive deeper into these topics and other ways to make Evernote an even better journaling tool in a future post. Until then, start with the basics and keep writing in your journal every day.

And start doing that today!

One of the key components of TimeCrafting is completing a Daily Log, which is basically a fancy name for journaling. You can learn more about other components of the productivity method that I’ve created and we teach at Productivityist by clicking here.

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