Expressing Creativity {Garden Journaling}

Will you join me today in welcoming Kathie from Homespun Seasonal Living to Reformation Acres? She’s visiting today and sharing how you can use your homestead & gardening journal as a outlet for your creativity!

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Record-keeping on the homestead can be of vital importance.  It can guide our days, record history, track meals, document harvests, and much more.  While it can be a formal process, it doesn’t have to be. It can also be a very creative pursuit.  Allow those journals and records to not only be a reflection of the facts of homestead life but also of the creative spirits living on the homestead.

Here are 4 ways to make record-keeping useful and creative.

Use Several Journals

Everything doesn’t have to be kept in one book. While it sure can be, it isn’t a rule.  Some folks like to keep to-do lists combined with harvest records. If that’s you, there’s nothing wrong with that.  However, if that feels confining and perhaps overwhelming use several different journals to keep things separate. Feel free to keep a binder where meal plans are filled, a spiral notebook where recipes and their variations are recorded, and a journal to record garden work and harvests.

Break Out the Craft Supplies

Cut the photos from seed packets and glue them inside pages of a journal. Tape the recipe from the newspaper that seemed appealing into a notebook and record changes and tweaks as it’s made. Allow record-keeping to free-form and be creative. Some days the only time available may be a quick listing of what was moved from the greenhouse to the garden. Other days maybe there is time for some collage making or drawing with colored pencils and markers.  It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, my own journals are a giant mix of simple bullet point lists mixed with pages of glued bits and pieces.

Mix Up the Mediums

There’s no reason a homestead journal can’t also be an art journal. Break out the Gesso and turn thrift books into garden journals. Draw pictures of wildflowers on the pages of old dictionaries, record the weather on funky yard sale calendars. Use blank books and spiral bound school notebooks if desired, but if that doesn’t speak to your creative heart, forget it and do something that does.  Recording the facts and the methods of the day doesn’t mean sterile board meeting minutes.

Use Technology

Maybe writing things down on a page isn’t how your creativity flows.  That’s okay too.  Maybe it’s Instagram, Tumblr, or a personal blog.  That’s great too.  In the end, record-keeping is supposed to be a way keep track, a way to refer back so we can move forward either in a way that works or make the appropriate changes.  Technology in some ways makes that easier than pen and paper because it’s easier to search and for some of us, like me, a photograph is much more accurate than a drawing.

As you sit down to keep track of the day’s events, note changes to recipes, record harvest tallies, and more. Remember to allow the records to reflect your creative spirit too.

Fiercely D.I.Y.

Keeping accurate records, and creative ones at that, are one of the many ways to build a courageous home and live fiercely D.I.Y.

Creative and functional record-keeping is one of weekly projects in this summer’s Fiercely D.I.Y. e-course being offered by Homespun Seasonal Living. The E-course is designed to inspire and encourage you to live a life by own your hands, on your own terms, and in your own pace. You can learn more, download a sampler, and register for the course over at Homespun Seasonal Living.

About Kathie N. Lapcevic

Kathie is a freelance writer, teacher, and blogger living in northwest Montana with her soulmate Jeff. She lives a fiercely D.I.Y. lifestyle in harmony with the natural rhythms of nature. You can follow her blog at Homespun Seasonal Living.

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