Do you keep track of your growing information? Not only for giant pumpkins, but anything you grow, well if you don’t you should.
What sort of things could you keep track of?
- The date your bought seeds or equipment
- Where you bought things from
- When you sowed or started your seeds
- When you prepped your patch or garden
- When you applied fertiliser
- What the weather conditions were like
- Growth over time, including measurements
There’s a lot of things you can track but you may be wondering why would I want to track any of this?
The answer is because our memories aren’t that good, no matter how well you think it is it can be very hard to recall exact specifics.
The true benefit of tracking this information/data become apparent when you have kept it for a year and refer back to it the following year. It can help make you informed choices, maybe you could tweak things, use different products or application rates. With multiple years worth of information you can compare seasons with each other.
What method could you use to keep track of your giant pumpkin growing data?
There are many different ways to do this, and you will have to have a look find what works best for you, it may even be a combination of ways.
Diary’s – Diary’s are a good way to keep track of information. You can do this via a traditional paper diary or an online growers diary.
- Traditional Diary – If you aren’t normally a person who writes in a diary then a half year diary spanning the last half of this year and the first half of next year might work well for you as you can have one for each growing season. Check out Warehouse Stationery to see their mid year any year diary.
- Online Diary – There are many blogging type platforms out there, but if you want to be part of the giant pumpkin community then you should look no further than BigPumpkins.com which has it’s own grower diary’s section. And if you need help setting one up, then check out this video I made a few years back explaining how to do it.
Free pumpkin tracking sheet – Not as full on as a diary, but still on a couple of sheets of paper, I made a free download you can print out and fill out with all the important information you have.
On the computer – You could store the data in a word document with photos as the season progresses or as a simple text file. A spreadsheet is great for recording measurements of your pumpkin.
What am I going to use?
I’ve used a mixture of all of the above and I have had varying results over the years. I sometimes forget about diaries and misplace pieces of paper no matter how hard I try to hold onto them, and I have to admit I have got water on them before which is not the best.
Of course I have the blog section on the website, where I note down things and share what I have been up to, but the limitations of that is I only want to share what is interesting and relevant and not update it every time I do anything, while it maybe a good record for me it might not be for you. So i came up with another plan for this growing season.
The new plan for me to record what I am up to.
First off I am going to make a bigger effort to update a growers diary over at BigPumpkins.com. While I may not have the biggest patch around and I have no idea how the season will go, I think it will give the northern hemisphere growers something to read in there off season.
And the second thing I have just implemented today is a calendar. A sort of high tech one compared to one hanging on a wall.
I also made the menus a bit easier to navigate today by tweaking them a little bit as some parts of it weren’t easily noticeable as items you can click.
Let me know in the comments below how you record your date, and any methods that work best for you.

Growing giant pumpkins is a passion that I love sharing. 🎃 If you’ve found my content helpful or entertaining, why not say thanks with a coffee? ☕
It’ll fuel my next giant pumpkin adventure!