One of my projects this year: digitizing my garden maps! Here’s a photo of my herb garden in 2023, the first year I planted it. After moving in at the end of 2021, it took us a full year to excavate the invasive trees, shrubs, and thick layer of rocks that had completely filled this bed. I was so happy to finally get it planted!

In the 2 seasons since, I’ve added more and more culinary herbs, and I now keep about 300 varieties planted here. In the 2nd photo, you can see how it looks today at the tail end of winter. And in the 3rd photo is the ridiculous paper map that I’ve kept erasing and modifying as needed. And I have a ludicrous number of additional drawings I’ve done in the past few years to show new plantings when I didn’t feel like erasing this paper map. So I have to factor these in too. I need to get this thing digitized! I’ve done this digital mapping before at our previous house, but I’ve never had such irregularly-shaped gardens to contend with. And I’ve never crammed so many crops into each bed, so I really need to have an accurate map to fit everything in.

In the past few years, I’ve moved my in-garden paving stones around as needed, and I need to get these rendered in the digital version too. I try to maximize the number of plants I can fit in. So during the summer, I just hop from paver to paver to get around the garden. By August, I can’t even see the pavers, and I’m cursing and trying not to fall as I try to reach the next one, LOL. In the 4th photo of some of my basils from last year, you can see how nice and full the garden gets. And how the pavers just disappear!

I’m going to try to import this current map into Canva, and I’ve taken supplemental shots of the far end to stitch together to have an accurate and hopefully to-scale representation. And I’ll ask my artistically-gifted daughter Sophie to help me. So I need to factor these extra drawings into it too in order to get it right.

And I’ve also just taken photos of my other garden beds with my veggies, flowers, and berries, so I can do the same digital conversion with those too. Then I can maintain easy historical maps of what I’ve had planted where each year, in addition to my huge spreadsheets of all of the plants and seeds I’ve ordered. I’ll keep you guys posted as I get this digital garden process underway!