Practical guide / Garden & Growing Workbook 1.0
What needs attention in the garden, and what did we harvest?
Keep plants, beds, batches, your confirmed offsets, tasks, actual harvest and costs connected. Yield retains its recorded unit; dates come from your inputs. The worked batch links a plant to one bed and two entered timing offsets. Harvest records 800 g total and 70 g unusable. Changing the plant unit cannot silently reinterpret that historical measurement.
Your first useful result: Follow one crop from a batch to its usable harvest. Follow the first task
Define your own growing plan
Give each crop/variety and bed a short text ID. Enter days to transplant and harvest only from sources relevant to your variety and conditions. Blank offsets mean unknown, never zero days.
Plants PL-01 uses grams for its harvest. Batch B-01 links PL-01 to BED-01; your own timing offsets produce estimates, not guaranteed growing dates.
Review: Open Batches and compare the linked reference with the records above.
Track a planting batch
Connect a batch to one plant and bed, enter its sowing date, quantity and stage. Estimated dates derive from your offsets; they are planning aids, not growing advice.
Harvest H-01 records 500 g total and 450 g usable. H-02 records 300 g total and 280 g usable. Both belong to B-01.
Review: Open Harvest and compare the linked reference with the records above.
Record what actually happened
Tasks hold due and completed dates separately. Harvest records measured quantity and usable quantity in the plant unit. Costs record actual purchases without estimating the value of the food grown.
Crop Review PL-01 shows two harvest records: 800 g total, 730 g usable and 70 g not usable. The separate radish reference uses individual items; its unit is not added to grams.
Review: Open Crop Review and compare the linked reference with the records above.
Review one crop at a time
Crop Review aggregates harvest within the selected period in that crop unit. Weekly shows due tasks and estimated harvest starts for 16 weeks from your period start. Retired batches keep their history.
Crop Review PL-01 shows two harvest records: 800 g total, 730 g usable and 70 g not usable. The separate radish reference uses individual items; its unit is not added to grams.
Review: Open Crop Review and compare the linked reference with the records above.
Check the assumptions.
- 100 plant/variety records; 30 beds; 200 planting batches; 300 tasks; 300 harvest records; 200 costs; 16-week review.
- Estimated dates use user-entered whole days after sowing. No climate, frost, soil, pesticide, food-safety or planting advice.
- Harvest quantities are aggregated per plant/variety and its unit. No mixed-unit total or predicted yield.
- Costs are historical amounts in one currency. No automatic garden layout, bed capacity calculation, notifications or weather connection.
- Native Excel verification pending.
Keep a copy you can return to.
Keep the supplied clean and example files unchanged. Save your own working file with a useful name, such as garden-workbook-2027-home.xlsx, and keep a dated backup before a large edit. A purchased ZIP is the blank source, not a backup of your entries.
If an input or formula is replaced
Undo the edit while it is still available, or return to a known good backup. If you need a fresh clean file, transfer only your records into its marked input cells and follow the setup guide again. Do not paste whole sheets over the supplied formulas, validations or reference lists. Check IDs, units, dates and linked results against the example before relying on the copy.
When the supplied rows are full
100 plant varieties · 200 planting batches · 300 harvest records. Calculation ranges and validations have fixed capacities. A new row below a table does not prove that every linked result includes it.
For a separate period, project or volume, preserve the old workbook and start a named clean copy. If records must carry forward, record exactly which inputs you transfer, preserve their references and compare the opening and closing figures. Avoid copying historical activity as both an opening amount and a new movement. There is no automatic migration between files.
Inspect the workbook before you choose.
View its real sheets and a fictional calculation example.
Explore Garden & Growing WorkbookWritten for version 1.0. Examples describe the supplied workflow; they are not customer results.