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Garden Challenge

Be inspired by your own garden, a flower garden, vegetable garden, city garden or park, or any nature location.

Ideas include creating an ABC book, a journal book, a collection of dates when flowers bloom or vegetables are ready to be picked, flowers during a travel trip, children and nature, photo walking, or a book of garden analogies. What you do with this challenge is up to you.

Scroll through the Garden Titles list for inspiration.

Follow the guide to complete the class of 20 challenges. However, below is miscellaneous inspiration for even more challenges.


INSPIRATION

Garden Analogy Book. This is something I enjoy doing and some day will have a complete book. I want to share my joys with you and encourage you to create a garden analogy book too!

Look at photos of your flowers and/or garden and find an analogy within. Scrap a page and journal how you feel about that analogy.

From dictionary.com
a·nal·o·gy
1.a similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based: the analogy between the heart and a pump.

5.Logic. a form of reasoning in which one thing is inferred to be similar to another thing in a certain respect, on the basis of the known similarity between the things in other respects.

—Synonyms 1. comparison, likeness, resemblance, similitude, affinity. 2. correspondence.

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Have you ever scrapped that photo of that perfect spot in nature on a vacation? Ever gotten that "wow" photo while hiking?
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Have you ever kept a garden journal?

I tried to last year and made it several months, but failed.

It was my goal to take photos and note when each flower in my yard bloomed for the first time.

I am hopeful that this year I can do better, even making layouts with the photos. I am thinking of one layout per month with all the flowers that bloomed that month and dates, but this could be expanded into a huge project.

Of course, there are other types of gardening journaling. Anyone have any ideas to share?

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I keep all the information that come with plants and keep index cards of where the plant is planted, who gave it to me, what year I got it, and how to care for the plant. If I happen upon any articles in gardening magazines about one of my plants, I staple that information to the index card and keep all the information in one box.

Before my plants start to come up, I review my cards and articles, and am ready for "color" to emerge in the yard and at my summer home garden. And "color" I have for every season (except winter.)

I also save seeds, mark them, and wait for the best time to plant them.

I take photos of the garden first thing in the Spring, all threw out the summer, and scrap them.

I like your idea -- maybe I'll give it a try!
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Wow, some great suggestions! I like the index card idea.

Now, you can also record this information on a layout. Try grabbing a photo of each this year and then making a layout of it with the information on your card.

I want to record when each flower blooms. I am wondering how to do that in layouts.

I am wondering how to do this...one layout per month? per week? Cause there's lots of flowers!
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Glad you liked some of my systems for keeping my plant information. What I do is when, say my Crocus blooms, I photograph it, and date my index when it blooms. Since I shoot with digital the camera dates the photo for me also. I frequently use my macro lens so you can really see the details of the flowers. I have a Balloon Plant that comes in purple and white that my sister let me dig out of her garden. She doesn't fertilize or have a watering system. I, on the other hand not only fertilize; but I make a tea from a recipe I got from an organic gardening magazine I used to subscribe to -- and fertilize my plants with that, as well. I also, use coffee grounds for plants that like acidic soil. Our watering system is set on a timer so if we are away, I can set it so my plants are watered. When I'm home, I turn them on manually in the morning.

Anyway, my sister had these same purple and while Balloon Plants growing in the same area in her garden for years. I planted a purple plant near a white plant and now I have this really cool Balloon Plant that cross pollinated and is purple and white stripes. It's so cool and one of my favorites. My Butterfly Bush is 7 ft. tall and about that wide.

All my plants are perennials and I don't plant annuals unless they re-seed themselves. There is a whole list of annuals that re-seed themselves and do come back next year!

When I have time, I'll upload some of my scrapped plants.

btw: I'm very glad I found your site!
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Quotes and Poems

“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils. Beside the lake
beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze." Author: William Wordsworth Source: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud


"Rejoice with the day lily for it is born for a day to live by the mailbox and glorify the roadside." Anne Sexton


A link to quotes and poems, about gardening

Flowers are love's truest language. Park Benjamin


The Earth Laughs in Flowers Ralph Waldo Emerson


Every good tree bears good fruit. Matthew 7:17


Everything is made out of Magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places. Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden


O the green things growing, the green things growing, The faint sweet smell of the green things growing! Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, Mulock's Poems New and Old


We are the leaves of one branch, the drops of one sea, the flowers of one garden. Jean Baptiste Henry Lacordaire


“An addiction to gardening is not all bad when you consider all the other choices in life.” Cora Lee Bell


“Man was lost and saved in a garden.” Pascal


"Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone." Author Unknown


 

Here are some of my garden analogy layouts.

 

Here are your miscellaneous garden digital scrapbooking layouts!

 

 

 

Copyright Cheryl Rutledge-Brennecke
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