Hi Donna,

Very cool! You will find this very helpful next year :-)

~Angie

Don't you just love being able to do this, Donna!!! It was the "salvation of my hosta-mind"
this past Spring that I'd done that in the late Fall planting period of 2005. Early on
this Spring, I was bewildered, as to where was "what", especially of a couple of my hosta!
I worried and fretted about it and then
it dawned on me, that I'd taken those pics. and labled them!! Boy, am I glad that
I remembered to do that!!!!

BTW--love the setting of this bed!!! Do I see a "Magnolia" on the right? :o)

janice

Thanks Angie and Janice. I don't know why it never dawned on me to do this before. I had a pencil drawing last year, with my chicken scratch handwriting. I can print this on 11 x 17 paper in color and it is fantastic. One other bed has 43 plants in it and doing it this way is really handy, especially when you can reproduce it larger.

Janice that's actually a Russian Olive. I'm not fond of it, my sister plopped it in there as a screen to block the view of the neighbor's house. Its pretty scrawny looking if you don't keep it trimmed. So I do the best I can with what I have.

Thanks again,

Donna

I'm thinking of doing the photo thing but some of my beds are so crowded. And as usual I thought I was done for the year and then Hideko gave me a hosta for my birthday. She thought it might be a pcynophylla seedling but it could have been a longipes seedling. It's small, green leaves that are ruffled and the backs are white. Looks like a small version of Marilyn Monroe.

Don't have a picture - I left the plant there in the ground until later this week!

Donna,
I also put a lot of notations on my pictures. It puts my mind to rest. I do it especially when my hostas are young as I like to follow their evolution...numbers of eyes...size with respect to the previous year...etc.
I do start however with a map outlining my garden and making a circle locating each hosta. This is an example of a typical map which I've made with CorelDraw.
Papou
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Very nice Papou! What does your numbering scheme mean...you have Manhattan as "5-34". I know the 5 is the number of the garden bed, does 34 relate to the number it is in the bed? And the number inside of the circle, that's the number of eyes in the plant?

You got it. That's exactly what it is...and I copy the map year after year..change the year...and then update the eyes count.
This map is not to scale...and when I take a pic of my beds..or of any individual hosta...then I refer to the map and not to the markers in the ground...to identify the picture.
Papou

Donna and Papou,

You've both inspired me. I'd love to get my chicken scratches off the notebook paper and on the computer. The photo map is wonderful.

thanks for sharing.

Digital technology has made keeping track of names sooooooo much easier. Because I'm such a poor artist, I could never read by own handdrawn maps. I just did this map a few days ago while cutting back foliage. It seems I always have ideas in the Fall that are promtly forgotten by Spring.
Papou...great idea on adding eye counts to the names. It will save me from going to two different locations of files.
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