Welcome to the cobbled together Home-Gardenbook Member Journal.

We are very much in the 'beta stage'. I can not guarantee that your entered info will survive if and when we go to a better application but I will try to tell you in advance. Therefore please do not stop keeping your personal garden journals.

I encourage you to fill in your profile info as it helps others find folks in their region and with similar gardening interests. So let's take an overviews

Introduction tohomegardenbook.com

Welcome to the Home Garden Book

The Home Garden Book site is the marriage of a garden journal with a social network.

You can post garden journal entries online on your own journal and choose to share them with certain people or the entire internet.

You can peruse or search in particular for the garden journal entries of other folks and compare, contrast, learn and teach.

You can create groups or join groups dedicated to your specific kind of gardening or to folks gardening in your USDA Zone or geographical location.

You can send private messages to other gardeners or post in a Twitteresque venue called ‘The Wire’

You can create your own web pages and furthermore you can collaborate with other gardeners on pages (imagine a page on Purple Cherokee Tomatoes) or papers (imagine a paper on the advantages and disadvantages of Epsom Salts) and those pages can be shared on any social network site you like.

You can write articles on, or stories about gardening and have them posted in our main blog section and then share them on social networks.

You can list excess crops or seedling or seeds or equipment you would like to SWAP with other gardener in our Crop Swap Meet.

You can enter important planting dates not only on your journal but also on an online calendar. You can also share important dates on group and sitewide calendars.

You can post your favorite garden to table recipes.

The Homegarden-Book is meant to be a record keeping resource as well as a place to share gardening knowledge and encourage fellow home gardeners.

There is no right way or wrong way to use Home-Gardenbook. Unlike more sophisticated online applications, Home-Gardenbooks is meant to be more general tool for the home gardener. The heart of the site is the ability to write simple journal aka blog posts about your garden and choose with whom, if anyone, you want to share them. In polling online we discovered that despite the tremendous, voluminous amount of technical information on gardening from planting dates to fertilizing suggestions to garden pest mitigation that long term gardeners found their own garden journals to be the most useful resource. Those notes they scribbled either on scarps of paper and tucked away or in nice neat bound garden journals held valuable information about what worked for them. Even though Universities and agricultural departments do amazing work compiling tables and planting guides and cultural recommendations, they still were often secondary to the hard learned lessons from previous seasons.

The problem with previous season journals is only that unless you can physically lend them to others they can’t learn from your experiences nor you from theirs. Online gardening groups and forums are wonderful for sharing info but often a gardener doesn’t even know what question to ask the group. The Home-Gardenbook allows you to designate portions of your journal as visible to others and you can see the portions they designate as sharable. You can restrict viewing to folks you friend or to folks in a group you join or to anyone you is signed in.

There are no real fields to fill out to do your Home-Gardenbook journal. While form driven input has some great uses in prompting folks as to what they might want to record and in keeping folks using the same terms it also tends to stifle record keeping as well. Sometimes folks have important observations to record  and well, no form prompts them.

In Home-Gardenbook you simply go to the Journal menu, click and then when your journal screen is in front of you choose to add post. You can embed images or link to pages. When you finish you journal post you can choose to keep it private, share it with the public, share it with friends or share it with anyone who is logged in to Home-Gardenbook.com.

Similarly you can view only your journal posts by using the 'Mine' tab or view all the journal posts by choosing the 'All' tab or view just your friend's posts by choosing 'Friends'.