Why a garden notebook earns its keep

By mid-February most of us have forgotten what January actually did. Was that hard frost before or after the snowdrops opened? Did the sweet peas go in on the first warm Saturday, or the second? A note on a phone quietly vanishes; a hand-sewn book on the kitchen shelf does not. The pleasure of a garden journal is that it is slow to make, slow to fill and impossible to scroll past. Mine lives beside the seed tin, and half its worth lies in the fact that it gets grubby — thumbed at the corners, smudged with damp, with a leaf or two pressed between the pages.

Making one takes an evening, and the materials cost almost nothing.

What you need, and where to find it

• Covers: two pieces of cereal-box card, or a heavyweight brown envelope, cut to 15 x 21 cm — a little larger than A5 so the pages sit tucked and protected.
• Pages: eight to twelve sheets of A4 scrap paper. Printer misprints, the backs of letters, brown parcel paper and a sheet or two of plain cartridge mix beautifully, and the variety stops the book feeling precious.
• Thread: linen bookbinding thread, or strong waxed cotton if that is what you have. Around 60 cm. Draw it across a block of beeswax to stop it tangling and to help it sit tight in the paper.
• Tools: a darning or tapestry needle, an awl (a thick needle pushed into a cork works), a ruler, a pencil, two bulldog clips, and a bone folder — the back of a teaspoon does the same job.

The three-hole stitch, step by step

Fold each A4 sheet in half to A5, keeping the fold running parallel to the paper's grain so it creases cleanly instead of cracking. Nest the folded sheets inside the covers. Tap the spine gently on the table to square everything up, then clip the stack together about 2 cm in from the spine at the top and bottom edges.

Mark three points along the spine: one at the centre, one 4 cm down from the top edge, one 4 cm up from the bottom. Open the book to the middle pages and pierce each hole from the inside out, keeping the awl upright so the holes line up through every layer.

Thread the needle with the waxed linen and tie no knot. Push it through the centre hole from the inside, leaving a 5 cm tail lying inside the book. Take the thread up the outside of the spine to the top hole, and in. Bring it down the inside, along the gutter, to the bottom hole, and out. Run it back up the outside to the middle hole and in. Tie the two ends together in a reef knot in the middle of the book, pull it snug, and trim to about 1 cm. Ten minutes, and the whole thing holds firm.

What to record, and when

Sowings, weather and small discoveries — the three things you will otherwise lose. A few lines a week is plenty, so long as you date every entry.

• Seeds: variety, date sown, where it went, and how many came up. Note the first true leaf and the day you planted out. Next year this is the only information that matters.
• Weather: first and last frost, the week the wind stripped the apple blossom, the morning you found ice on the water butt. Note the date the ground first became workable in spring.
• Small discoveries: the first bee on the hellebore, a hedgehog under the log pile, the exact day the swallows went.

Keep the last three pages for a running list — things to divide, seeds to order, shrubs to move. It becomes next spring's plan without any effort at all.

A bookish home keeps the habit

A notebook only works if it is easy to reach and pleasant to open, so give it a proper home. Mine sits on the kitchen shelf beside the cookery books, with a stub of pencil tied to the spine with butcher's twine. There is a tin of pencils nearby and a small dish for the odds and ends that accumulate: a riven seed pod, a scrap of garden twine, a label from a variety worth remembering.

The habit is seasonal, and that is its charm. In January you write plans; in April, germination; in August, little more than a line about the heat. In November there is more time again, and you read back through the year, pressing in a dried marigold or a feather found on the path. A shelf of these books is a slow, quiet record of a place — far more use than any app, and far better looking on a winter evening.

Variations, mending and giving one away

Once you have the stitch, everything else is decoration. Six holes instead of three make a sturdier spine for a book that will be carried about. Card covered in a scrap of old linen, glued and folded around the edges, gives a softer finish. Wrapping paper, wallpaper samples and maps all work as covers if you paste them over the card and leave them to dry under a weight overnight.

If a spine works loose after a wet summer in a coat pocket, simply unpick it and stitch again with fresh thread — the holes will already be there, and the book will be the better for the repair. A finished journal with a few pages already filled in — a list of the roses in the garden, or a note about the first frost — makes a generous gift for a neighbour who has just taken on an allotment. Add a pencil, tie it with twine, and hand it over with a packet of seed. It is a small thing, but it lasts, and it asks to be filled.