I like to try new things every year with gardening and animals such
I’m not going to lie here, I am not good at keeping a classic journal, I never have been. That’s not to say I won’t be ambitious for a while and write everything down for a couple of weeks, but like most people, I’m busy and things have a tendency to slide. Record keeping for me is one thing that slides. I’m not trying to run a business on my homestead, because if I was, and I was not keeping track of costs and what plant breeds or animals that were most productive, I would be in some serious trouble. Even on a ‘casual’ homestead like my own, if I really want to make a go at it, raising food for my family as efficiently and cheaply as possible, without sacrificing the health of the animals of course, then I need to keep track of these things better than I have been.
My Current Homesteading Journals:
Currently, I have three different types of homestead ‘journals’. A software program called Kintraks helps me keep track of my animals. Kintraks works pretty well, so far I’m fairly happy with it, it’s affordable and user-friendly. With Kintraks I’m able to keep track of my breeding dates, the number of young born, expenses, income, and family trees or relatedness. I’m
For gardening, I use an old-fashioned gardening journal, where I to keep track of expenses (mostly just seeds), types of different vegetables and fruit raised and how well the different strains have produced, when I planted, when I harvested, etc. As pleasant as this can be to keep an old-fashioned journal, I’m still always behind in updating it. Lastly, I use an excel spreadsheet to keep track of the number of eggs my chickens have laid.
Although by themselves the ‘journals’ I keep work fairly well, it’s just too inefficient to have three different methods of record-keeping, so I did some sleuthing on the internet to see what my other options are. Preferably I’d like to have one method for keeping track of all my information for animals and gardening in one location. I’d also like it to be affordable. I don’t need agricultural software aimed at big agricultural corporations, I can’t afford it and it’s not necessary at least at this point in my life. So with those parameters in mind, these are some options for an updated journal, that I found on the internet.
Future Homesteading Journal Options:
The first thing I found that I liked was an old-fashioned three-ring binder method of keeping track of everything. I’m biased towards that because that is what I grew up within school. It makes sense, easy to organize, and would be great for printing out a yearly calendar or treating it like a scrapbook, pasting my empty seed packets in it. I found a great blog post with printouts, about it from Reformations Acres.  I think the biggest disadvantage of it would be keeping track of income and expenses. I’d probably have to do that on the computer.
Then I started running across a whole lot of phone apps. I’m not going to go over all the phone apps there are although there’s a nice blog post from My Homestead Life that discusses some of them. But I am going to highlight some of my favorite finds. This little beauty ‘Count My Eggs‘, I really liked. Although it is limited to egg production if that’s the only thing you want to keep track of it’s perfect. I think my favorite app I’ve come across so far, and I think I might try next, is an app called SmartSteader. It will let you record information on dairy production, meat production for various animals, gardening, and layer chickens. It also looks like they are coming out soon with ways to keep track of beekeeping, incubation records, individual animal records, and keeping a yearly calendar.
