Mom's old garden journal vs my plant app habit

My mom kept a spiral notebook for 30 years tracking her peonies and tomatoes. Hand wrote every frost date, every bloom. I started using Gardenize app last spring after losing my third notebook in a move. Lost some of that feel though, you know? Anybody else switch from paper to digital and miss it?

4 comments

4 Comments

fiona_west2127d agoTop Commenter

Hey miles_hall, I get what you're saying about scanning grandma's recipe book. But honestly, did you actually TRY to go back to the physical notebook for your garden stuff after you lost that third one? Like did you keep writing things down by hand for a while before giving up on the app? I'm curious because I see a lot of people complain about losing the feel but then they never admit whether they REALLY tried to keep up with paper or just jumped straight to digital and never looked back. My mom has 40 years of garden notes in those spiral notebooks and she swears she'd never switch, but she also hasnt lost a single one of them in 4 moves. The stakes are different when you've actually watched your records get thrown away.

rowan_thomas8427d ago

Noticed people do this all the time though, @miles_hall.

elizabethmason28d ago

Started scanning my old notebooks into Google Drive last winter, best of BOTH worlds. Still get that nostalgic feel flipping through my mom's handwriting while keeping the app for quick reminders.

miles_hall28d ago

Scanned about 80 pages from my grandmother's recipe book last year. Ended up never looking at the digital copies once. The whole thing just felt like busy work that took away from actually reading her notes and the little stains and marks on the paper. I get wanting to back stuff up for safety, but for me the real value is in the physical object itself, not just the words on the page. The app handles my grocery lists fine, that's where I keep the low stakes stuff.