As a highly trained data analyst, I perform a lot of what’s referred to as “After Action Reviews” at my day job. As tedious as it can be to go through the details, there’s something to be said for these sorts of reviews. Performing an annual review on your garden can help you (and your garden) to perform better next year, overcome mistakes, and imagine new possibilities for the future. But how do you even start with such a review? There’s a few steps that I go through in my annual garden year in review that help plan my next gardening year.

Helpful Resources During an Annual Garden Review

Memory is fallible, and details are difficult to remember. You don’t have to walk the garden with a notebook in hand every single day, making note of every detail of your garden to have something to look back on when you perform your annual garden Year in Review. (Though, if you want to, go ahead!) But even if you don’t take copious garden notes, it does help to have a few resources to jog your memory when you’re performing your annual review. Here’s a few of my favorites.

Photographic Evidence

The saying goes, “Pics or it didn’t happen.” Taking pictures of your garden throughout the season is the easiest way to jog your memory of what happened when, and in what order. It’s especially easy to take pictures these days when all our cell phones have cameras. You don’t have to be any expert photographer either. Just taking pics of your garden a few times a month can be a nice way to review the past year.

Noteworthy

A few notes taken here and there can help to jog your memory. Even if you just note what varieties you planted where, that’s enough to get a feel for how the garden season went. But if you take detailed notes, you can get a feel for how fast certain varieties germinated, which ones brought more produce to the table, and which ones were more susceptible to diseases and pests. If you didn’t take notes like these this year, it’s ok! But if you’re interested, you might try it next year.

I keep both a written log and a Microsoft OneNote document of each of my plants to look back on. In OneNote, I can store both pictures and text there with ease. Plus, it’s super easy to search if I’m looking for a specific topic. OneNote can search images as well as text for key phrases. Other options include Evernote, or even emailing yourself with pertinent information to document details and dates.

Spring Garden Plan

If you made a garden plan in the spring, now’s the time to pull it out again. It can help to remember how you started the year. Hindsight is 20/20 they say. And no plan survives contact with reality. Think of your spring garden plan as your baseline. Recalling how you imagined the year would go, and comparing it to how the year actually went can help you make better plans for next year’s garden.

[Plus, check out our 2024 Spring Garden Plan for more inspiration!]

Questions to Ask During an Annual Garden Review

There’s a lot that goes into a garden. If you review your garden from all angles, you can make note of a ton of lessons you’ve learned this year. Here’s a few of the topics I lean on when performing my annual garden year in review.

Location, Location, Location

Review the location of various plants in your garden. Did the soil perform as well as you expected in the spring? Were there issues that came up like Blossom End Rot on your fruit or purple leaves that indicate your soil lacked key nutrients? How did the sunlight in various parts of your garden affect your plants? How did your companion planting work out? Did some plants do better when others were planted next to them? Worse? Location is a big part of a garden’s success.

Timing is Everything

Review when you started your garden this year. Did you start indoors? Did you direct sow? Maybe you started some plants at different times of the year? How long did it take for the different types of plants to germinate? Taking detailed notes during the gardening season can help here, but don’t worry if you didn’t. (Maybe that’s another thing you can try next year!) Your gut feeling about how things went is usually sufficient enough to offer you some insights into how you timed your garden this year.

Garden Variety

Review the kinds of plant varieties you had in your garden this year. Did you try any experiments this year? How successful were they? Did some varieties perform better than others? Did you try anything new this year? How did it work out? Experimenting with things you’ve never tried before is one of the most fun and rewarding things about gardening. Think about how it went and what you learned.

Some Like it Hot, Some Like it Cold

Review the weather you had in your garden this year. Was it abnormally hot? Cold? Wet? Dry? Did the weather change drastically during the season and cause you to deal with it differently. How much water did you have this year? Environmental aspects are a big part of how your gardening year went, so it’s important to reflect on that when performing your Year In Review.

Problems & Solutions

Review the problems your garden had. Did you have issues with pests like insects, birds, or mammals? How did you handle those problems? Were your solutions successful? Did your solutions harm your plants more than they helped them? Think about all that you learned this year in your garden. Lessons learned are as much a successful produce of your garden as the harvest.

Garden Review: Wins and Sins

No gardening year goes perfectly. There are always losses of some sort. There are always garden experiments that didn’t work out quite right or products that didn’t live up to the reviews online. I’ve heard gardening is 90% failure and 10% boasting about your successes, and that seems about right to me.

No gardening year is without its successes though, however minor they may seem when compared to the failures. Even failures can be successes too! If you came out on the other side armed with knowledge for next time, that’s a win in my book … even if you harvest a little less produce than hoped.

Not everything will be in just one column either. More than likely things are a combination of wins and sins. That’s completely okay! For example, I had a huge win with keeping spiders away from my back door this year by growing a mint plant next to the back porch light. But I’d moved the mint away from the Portuguese kale, so cabbage moths immediately ate the leafy vegetable in one night. Wins and sins, both.

Garden Review: Lessons Learned

Here’s where you take all the facts that you’ve gathered and put your thinking cap on. To be honest, this is my favorite part of an annual garden year in review. This is your opportunity to dream about next year, put a few plans in place, and maybe even take advantage of end of season seed and plant sales and save a few dollars on next year’s garden.

If you tried seed trays last year, but they didn’t perform as well as you hoped, maybe you try another brand? Or maybe you try soil blocking next year instead of seed trays? Possibilities are endless here. Feel free to get imaginative!

Conclusion

Give these steps a try and see how it works for you. If you’re interested in my own annual garden review, you can find it right here: 2023 Garden Year In Review!