Last year's blog was a success. I love the book that I printed, and I used it quite a bit when planning out this year's garden. I love that I'll have that book forever also, as a nice snapshot in time.
The problem with the blog from the beginning, was that everything was manual. I saw value in keep track of the number of days from the time I planted something, until the time it sprouted, was transplanted, first produced a harvest, etc. But it quickly got way to complicated to track in blog format. I had to do the calculations each time a new milestone was met, for each veggie. Also, I found it hard to record all of the detail, without making the blog a big pile of uninteresting metrics.
This is where Folia comes in. You enter the date in which you sowed the seeds (indoor or outdoor), and then you enter your milestones as they come. The site sets the counter for each crop and will do all of the calculations for you.
Speaking of new tools, the other site that I have been using is http://gardenplanner.southernexposure.com/, which is really a re-branded version of :http://www.growveg.com/gardenplanner/gardenplanner.html
This site serves a separate but very important purpose for me. It let's you lay out your garden plan, month by month, and it has been a huge help in terms of planning my garden for the whole summer.
Here is my attempt at converting the month by month diagrams into a youtube video. The video is pretty bad, but you can get the point.
So all of this brings me to my main question. With these two new tools, do I still need to keep a blog? For a while I thought no, but now that things are picking up, I am re-considering. I might use this blog to make general observations, reflections, and updates, while keeping all of the up to the minute updates in Folia.
I also thought about expanding the blog to include other stuff like my woodworking projects, but I was never 100% behind it. As with last year's blog, only time will tell.
