Why You Should Keep a 10-Year Journal For Your Property

Journal purpose

On every page, there is a little spot for each day.

There are different spots for you to fill in, what day of the week it is, et cetera. 

I'm using this to note anything happening around the property. The weather, the temperatures, whether it's sunny or snowy, warm or cold, what the chickens are doing, how many eggs they're laying, or what I see the bees doing in the summer.

There'll be a little bit more to note along these lines: what's blooming, what we're harvesting, how things are growing, what's budding out when things flower, and so on.

I hope that over the years, when I flip open to, say, February 8 or whatever, I can look through and compare what happens on our particular little piece of land here over time.  

Journaling for locations

Because each place is unique, especially here in the mountains, we tend to have more microclimates than many areas, but many places have this. 

So I want to start a record of what happens here when chickens want to go broody when they hatch out, how many they hatch out, and so on. 

I know from experience and living in other places that, over time, each place has kind of signals for different things. Some people know that this particular fish will be biting in this place when this flower blooms or that when I first see the green leaves on this, this will happen, and so on. Those things are different for each location. 

Sometimes they're a little bit different from year to year. As an example, I found with my record keeping in the form of photos over the years, whenever the first hunting birds return to our area and the first bluebirds, they are something I often try to snap a photo of when I first see them for the year.

It is within a couple of days of the same date every year. Because we hope to be on the property here for a while, we can benefit from having that record for things here. 

How did the garden do? 

When did the buds start to swell? When did this apple tree bloom? When did the cherry tree start to bloom, and so on? This can be a valuable reference. 

10-year journal 

I hope to spend the rest of my life here. 

I hope to fill this one up and start more 10-year journals over time. 

If we did leave, I would think this would stay with a property because it's a record of this place. This also lets me go back and look up facts over time. I've only started this at the end of December; you could start at any time of year because each date is how this one's set up. 

You fill in whichever year you're writing on and go from there. It'll just keep circling through the book. To be able to go back through and see when things usually happen, to be able to flip through and be like, okay, so we're coming up on March.

What was usually going on about that time? Or to reference when we planted something too early, or things froze. Or when did we plant something, and it was too late? We wish we had planted it earlier, that kind of thing. 

We are very particular about our few little acres in this neat spot. 

I don't recall where I've heard of the 10-year journal idea, but I remember encountering the idea that old farms from centuries ago would sometimes do something like this.

It would be a farm book passed down from generation to generation so other people could go back there and be like, see, our lambs always came on this day when grandpa was young or that kind of thing, which I thought was neat. 

A homestead journal

So that's what we're creating here. Again, this isn't a personal feelings journal with thoughts or experiences. 

Back on January 29, I wrote that we got about three inches of snow overnight and through the day temps in the 20s, but dropping rapidly this evening to below zero. 

We got six more eggs, for a total of four dozen for the week and the project we were doing in the shop that day. 

You could use a plain notebook or plain sheets of paper. I hoped to have something easy to hang on to and not lose all my little papers because they tend to have little stacks of little papers on which I make notes. I thought having something bound together would be handy.

As I looked, this one seemed to fit exactly what I wanted. It's got three and a half lines for each day, plus a place to record the year, the weather, the day of the week, and so on. It's been very handy so far; hopefully, I'll still be doing it in many years. 

If you've got your little property, anything outside your house, or even an apartment, you can still do the same and record your area. When do you see this bloom? When do you see this come? When do you see that go, et cetera?

Practice your observational skills in that area, especially if you plan to stay there; it's valuable to know. So that's my start on my 10-year homestead journal. 

Why you should keep a 10-year journal

Hopefully, in many more years, I'll still be doing this and finding it a helpful resource. Right now, it's just getting started. Have you started keeping a homestead journal? Comment below with what you're keeping records on in your part of the country (or world).