I bought this little Anemone nemorosa at the post-meeting plant sale at the Adirondack Chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society in Ithaca, NY last Saturday. After doing a little research, and finding out it likes shade and woodsy soil, I planted it on the shady side of the house on Sunday evening. I didn’t realize the hot weather was expected to get even hotter (90+F!) the following day. I knew the little plant would wilt in the heat and wind, so I hunted up my cache of plastic, open-weaved berry baskets and covered the little anemone with a basket. The rock keeps the basket from blowing away and provides additional shade.

A simple, temporary device to help a transplant get acclimated.

Improvise a Cool, Cloudy Day

It’s best to transplant divisions or seedlings on cool, cloudy days. But sometimes that’s not possible, or the weather unexpectedly changes. In that case, you want to provide an approximation of cool, cloudy weather by providing filtered sunlight and a windbreak. Divisions of perennial plants are often too big for berry baskets. Some gardeners construct A-frames with some kind of covering especially for protecting transplants, saving them from year to year. I usually come up with a cool, cloudy day, but when I can’t, I improvise:

Not too long ago, a reader emailed me and asked,

I bought some hostas and dwarf bleeding hearts to plant. Shortly thereafter I hurt my knee and I can’t go out there and plant them. They are all planted in one gallon plastic pots. How can I safely winter them? If I put them in my garage they will still freeze.

You may have plants in containers that should have been planted, but weren't. How do you winter them over?

It is the roots you are worried about freezing. The rule of thumb is that roots in a pot will effectively be in a situation two zones colder than plants in the ground. So if the plant tag says zone 5 and you are in zone 7 they should be fine.

But I’m guessing you live in a colder place. Definitely keep them outside until the tops die down. You want them to go dormant. After that, you want to put them in a situation where they will stay dormant but not get colder than two zones warmer than the hardiness zone on the tag. That will be different depending on what is available at your place. The garage might be okay, if it gets cold, but not as cold as outside. You could put them up against the house, and surround them with bags of leaves for insulation.

The other thing to consider is the greater the volume of soil in the container, the more insulation the roots will have. A one gallon container is not that big, and won’t have much insulating soil mix for the roots, so you might err on the side of caution and make that three zones warmer than the tag.

I have a drafty, dirt floor cellar that barely stays above freezing. I have put dormant plants in the coldest corner of the cellar and pulled them through the winter. They did start growing sooner than they should have, and made some pale spindly growth, but I very carefully hardened them off and planted them after all danger of frost. It was a pain in the neck but better than losing them.

Most herbs taste much better fresh, and rosemary is no exception. That’s why every winter I try to keep my rosemary alive in a pot inside the house. Rosemary is not reliably hardy north of zone 7, so while southerners can grow this in the ground and watch it take on shrub-like proportions, we cold climate gardeners must bring it into our houses and attempt to give it the equivalent of a southern winter indoors, or it will never really get big enough to harvest from regularly.

It’s not easy, let me tell you. More than one northern gardener has finished the winter with a dead rosemary plant. To succeed with any plant, a gardener thinks about its native range and tries to approximate those conditions. Rosemary is native to the Mediterranean basin. This is where many people make their first mistake. They hear that rosemary is drought-tolerant, and they let it dry out. But as Nancy Szerlag, Detroit News gardening columnist states, “a dry rosemary is a dead rosemary.” What people forget is that the Mediterranean climate receives almost all its yearly precipitation during the winter. The rosemary wintering over on a windowsill still expects it to rain.

That same Mediterranean native thinks winter is significantly cooler than the typical furnace-heated northern residence. Judy Miller, owner of Paradise Gardens Rare Plant Nursery and occasional contributor to this website, says, “I either keep it on a barely heated sunporch so it doesn’t go below freezing or above 50, or against the coldest window in a cold room.” No habitable room in my house stays below 50F in the winter, but some rooms are definitely cooler than others. Those are the rooms I consider for the rosemary.

This 8 year old 'Salem' rosemary is over 3 feet tall and wide. It spends each winter indoors. Photo by C.L. Fornari.

This frost damaged rosemary gives you an idea of how large my rosemary had gotten after two years. Unfortunately, all the leaves dropped and one whole section of the plant never came back after it was subjected to a late spring freeze.

Where to find named cultivars of rosemary

You can find rosemary in the spring almost anyplace that sells vegetable seedlings. However, if you want to get a specific cultivar, such as ‘Salem,’ you will probably have to order through the mail. Papa Geno’s Herb Farm has an extensive selection of rosemary varieties, including ‘Salem.’ I’ve never tried them myself, so if you have experience with them or have your own favorite source to recommend, please tell us all in the comments.

It all started when Jenn said my new bird bath needed some phlox. “Gosh, she’s right,” I mused. “And I have some bright pink phlox in the front bed that I want to move out before I dig out the goldenrod infestation. Those pink phlox would look perfect by the bird bath.”

In 2006, the birdbath seemed stuck in the middle of nowhere

Bird bath transforms septic lid

The bird bath rests on the lid to our septic tank. The septic lid was a level and stable place to put the bird bath. But it also disguises the septic lid, and incorporates it into the garden. When you look at it, you don’t think, “Oh, look, they put a bird bath on their septic lid.” Instead, your mind sees a bird bath resting on a concrete base. But without plants around it, the bird bath still looked like it was just plopped down.

Shape of bed determined by mowing path

The shape of the bed was determined by another design problem. We use a DR Brush Mower with a lawn attachment to cut the grass. The mower operator runs the machine along the chicken yard fence until he approaches the septic lid. Then he must turn away from the fence in order to go around the lid. This leaves a crescent shaped patch of grass that the operator must retrace his steps to mow. (You might be able to see that unmown grass shape in the photo above.) I used that crescent shape to determine the shape of the bed.

Plant choice informed by practical considerations

Plant choice was also affected by the septic lid. Our septic tank is pumped every year in early spring. That means foot traffic around the lid. Any plants growing in the immediate area either have to be slow to emerge or able to tolerate some foot traffic at that time. Furthermore, I had to accept that in the event of problems, the area might need to be dug up at any time. No sense planting anything precious or irreplaceable there, only to have grief later.

Too late to dig

It was already October when I realized it would be best to move the phlox that autumn if I wanted to dig goldenrod next spring. There was no time to dig a bed in the usual manner, removing sod, forking the soil to loosen clay and remove rocks, adding organic matter and forking it in. If I was going to make the bed before the ground froze solid, it would have to be without digging.

Proceeding without research

When I was in high school, someone had given me a copy of The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book, but sometime in the period after college but before gardening I got rid of it. Neither Lasagna Gardening nor Weedless Gardening were in my local library, and it would take too long for them to come from another library. I was forced to rely on my vague memories of Stout’s book and other reading I had done on the topic, plus an article in the April 1995 issue of Garden Gate (issue 2).

Now, I’m the kind of person who reads Consumer Reports before shopping for kitchen appliances. I don’t care if it’s a Cracker Jack prize, I read the instructions before attempting to put anything together. So, if I’d had my druthers, I would have read all three of the above mentioned books plus spent the summer calculating how many square feet of newspaper I needed and how many cubic yards of compost and mulch I needed to stockpile. But, I realized it was now or never. So I winged it, big time.

Follow along in this photo essay to see if starting this project without adequate research was a good idea.

Tell the truth, the whole truth

This fall I checked out Lasagna Gardening and Weedless Gardening and flipped through them. They both sound like miracle cures, and if you do everything right, maybe they are. But to summarize, here are some problems I had:

• Not enough cardboard/paper available
• Not enough organic material on hand
• No edging to keep grass out
• Truly pernicious weeds to battle

All of these problems could have been eliminated with better planning and a willingness to wait another year. But I find it disturbing that neither Lanza nor Reich address problematic plants such as bindweed or Japanese knotweed. Have they never had to deal with them?

Neither author addresses the price you must pay for the organic materials you can’t scavenge from your own property. They love to talk about free leaves or manure for the hauling, neglecting to mention that you need to have the use of a truck, or figure out a way to package manure so it won’t stink up your trunk. And no one was too concerned about the price of gas when either of those books were written. And where are you going to store all that stuff before you have time to build your bed?

This method does work. Colleen of In the Garden Online used it with great success. Margaret Roach has made her beds this way for years. And I have used a modified form of it for the beds I have reclaimed. I remove the garden plants I want to save and I dig out all the perennial weeds. Then I shovel at least three inches municipal compost on top–but I don’t dig it in. The compost is semi-decomposed wood chips, and functions as soil amendment and mulch. I just wish these books would tell the whole truth, and not just the part that’s pleasant to hear.

How to fix this mess?

I’m going to collect a bunch of newspapers, cut down the weeds in that one end, and start all over again. On the better maintained end, I’m going to cut the dianthus off at ground level and put more organic matter over the bed. I would love to cover the whole thing with mulch, but frigid weather may arrive before I get to that. As for the bindweed, I will continue to work on eradicating that, but I’m in it for the long haul.

How About You?

Have you tried a version of no-dig or weedless bed making? How did it work for you? I’d like to know. Or have you ever been frustrated by a gardening project that was supposed to be simple and easy–and turned out to be anything but? Tell us about it in the comments.

If you are short on time, energy, and money, but notably the first two, be conservative. You’ll be more pleased with one fair-sized, well-composed, well-maintained bed than with a half-dozen large beds that are choked with quack grass and creeping Charlie.

That’s excellent advice from The Complete Flower Gardener by Karan Davis Cutler and Barbara W. Ellis. Too bad their book wasn’t written in 1993, when I started work on my second flower bed. On second thought, it’s not at all certain that I would have recognized that advice as applying to me. I was keeping up on my first bed–The Birthday Garden–and there were neglected irises elsewhere in the yard that needed lifting and dividing, and then, of course, I’d have to make a bed to plant them in. Yes, there was always a good reason for creating yet another bed, and I was always confident that next year everything would be under control.

It was just two years ago that it finally started to dawn on me that I was in over my head. Something more drastic than triage weeding was called for. I had to think about eliminating entire beds.

Every spring since then has been a search and rescue operation. The photo above shows a portion of the bed in the front yard that has the single white lilac and the purple-leaved smokebush (Cotinus coggygria ‘Nordine’) in it, that I’ve decided will be a shrub-only border. In Autumn 2005 I removed some Oriental lilies from this bed. Much to my surprise, I discovered two more sprouting up this spring–but that’s not what the arrows are pointing to. Although Asiatic lilies can be moved almost anytime, Oriental lilies are best moved in fall, so I’ll mark them and move them then–if they haven’t succumbed to the competition.

You can probably recognize the clumps of narcissus foliage. Those are all Narcissus poeticus that were original to the property, which I had dug and replanted. Each one of those clumps was once a single replanted bulb. I hadn’t yet read the advice about not dotting things around when I planted them here. I will dig them up when the foliage withers, store them in net bags over the summer, and replant them in new locations in the fall. I’m already looking for potential planting spots for them in the landscape. They’re not going back in the garden beds, so I’m looking for spots that can stand to be left unmowed until mid-July, when the foliage will finally have died down. Since each clump easily represents over a dozen bulbs, I’ll probably have to give some away, too.

There’s a clump of colchicum foliage in there toward the front. That also represents one bulb, a white form of Colchicum byzantinum that turned out to be neither. I might put some of these in a garden bed, or give them the same treatment as the poet’s narcissus. They are also best dug when the foliage withers.

The arrows are pointing to two daylily clumps, which I need to dig soon and move . . . somewhere. They are two bits of the same original plant, a “plum” that often looks more like a washed out purply-gray. The poor color could have been due to too much shade. I’d like to give them a chance to prove themselves in better circumstances. Hmm . . . maybe to the side of the hydrangea I planted last year. The daylily blossoms just might complement the hydrangea blossoms, which are supposed to be blue or pink, but were rather indecisively neither, at least last year.

The remainder of the space is taken up with asters and golden rod, aggressive natives that will colonize any open ground that isn’t mowed like a lawn. They can be dug out as I have time and strength and motivation. The motivation will come when I decide what shrub to plant here. It should be fairly vigorous, able to compete with lilac and smokebush for water and nutrients, and able to take part shade, as the lilac will block it on the south and the smokebush will block it to the east. Ideally, some part of the new shrub will play off the foliage of the smokebush. I’d love to hear your ideas.

Remember the forsythia I pruned so that I could force some branches? It doesn’t look so floriferous out in the open, does it? (For comparison, check out the forsythias here.)

When I’m faced with a plant that’s not doing as well as expected, I try to analyze the situation before taking action. In the case of the forsythia, I observed that the flowers were only on the ends of the branches. If it were cold damage, I would expect the flowers below the snowline to bloom, and the ones exposed to the cold higher up on the shrub to be missing. That’s not the case, and besides, this variety of forsythia is supposed to be bud-hardy to 30 below zero Fahrenheit, and it didn’t get that cold this winter.

I know that most flowering shrubs need lots of sun to give them the energy to form flowers, and I think this is getting closer to the problem. At first, I thought the lilac bushes on either side were shading the forsythia too much, but that doesn’t quite fit with the blooming pattern. All the missing flowers are towards the center of the shrub. I’m coming to the conclusion that the forsythia is shading itself too much, and needs a substantial thinning.

So in a week, two at the most, I’ll use my loppers to prune the thickest branches as close to ground level as I can manage. I hope this will let more light into the center of the shrub, enabling it to produce more flower buds for next year. If that doesn’t help, I’ll have to suspect the general root competition from those lilacs. If that’s the problem, the choices are:

1. Remove one or more lilacs
2. Relocate or get rid of the forsythia
3. Make an effort to give the forsythia more water and perhaps fertilize it
4. Reconcile myself to a less than optimum display

Given those choices, I will probably go with number 4. I don’t want to get rid of any of the shrubs (they do their job of screening us from the road quite well), and anything I do to help the forsythia in terms of extra water will no doubt help the lilacs just as much. The point of the forsythia is to give me pleasure in spring, and it does that, even without a maximum amount of bloom. I find that bright yellow immensely cheering. I need it; I want it; I’m gonna have it–but I know I don’t have time to baby it. For me, that’s an acceptable trade-off.

A Reader’s Forsythia

Recently, a reader commented:

We just bought a house and the forsythia is very overgrown and old. It has many branches deep inside the bush that have nothing at all on them. Do we try to cut out all those old, non-blooming branches and hope for the best? We love forsythia. Help!!!!

This sounds like the same problem my shrub is having, only to a much greater degree. If a branch truly has nothing on it–no flower buds and no leaf buds, either–the branch is dead. By all means, prune it out. For branches that have leaves, but no flowers, the first step is to look around the shrub. Are other trees or shrubs shading the forsythia in summer? If so, no amount of forsythia pruning will help. You’ll have to prune away whatever is shading the forsythia, and that might not be worth the ugliness that might ensue.

You also have to consider if the forsythia isn’t bud-hardy for the climate. Any forsythia in the warmer part of zone 5 and south of that should be fine.

If both the above conditions don’t seem to be the problem, it does sound like a radical pruning is in order. Forsythias are very vigorous shrubs, and many people would advocate cutting the whole thing to the ground, watering and fertilizing well (using fertilizer suitable for flowering shrubs), and letting the shrub rejuvenate itself.

That’s just a little too scary for me. A more conservative approach is to cut out one-third of the branches for each of three years, gradually bringing the shrub into a more productive growth habit.

A “new” garden needs patient observation

When you first move into a house, you’re all excited and you want to roll up your sleeves and whip everything into shape. But really, the best thing to do is to wait a year and observe your property through the four seasons, taking lots of notes. For my first spring at this place, if I had assumed that the foliage coming out of the garden beds was old tired tulips that were no longer able to bloom, and had dug them out immediately, I never would have seen the colchicum blossoms that fall, and discovered a plant that has fascinated me for years since. Having said that, I can’t see how it would hurt to thin out your forsythia by pruning it this spring. Just watch where you step, there could be another plant growing at its base!

What discoveries have other gardeners made when they first moved into an established yard and garden?

In part 3 I showed how to put the finishing touches on a spreadsheet that calculated the potential cost of a plant order in progress. But because of its tabular format, a spreadsheet is often used in situations where a lot of information needs to be organized, even if no calculations are made. Below are several examples of other ways a spreadsheet can be used in garden planning, but none of them makes use of the mathematical abilities of the spreadsheet program. Still, I hope even you hardened Excel veterans out there will pick up an idea you can use this year. And if you have other implementations of your own, by all means share them in the comments. All of the following examples were created as additional sheets of our previous workbook, Demo3.

Seed Starting

This seed starting worksheet was derived from my last several years starting seeds; I just picked out representative entries until I felt I had a good selection to show you. I always started out with lofty ambitions in regards to record-keeping, but I never managed to track all the information I so hopefully made columns for at the beginning of the seed starting season. It was helpful to have a record of when I started the seeds and under what conditions they germinated well, even if I rarely marked down when they actually went in the garden. Hints:

• Where I have a column for stratification, you could use the date you put the container outside for winter sowing.
• Don’t forget you can format the date columns in the same way you format currency–use the drop down list.

Old Roses of A Gardening Year let me see her Seed Order workbook from last year. She didn’t have dates in hers. She used it solely to track purchases, and wrote her seed starting information in her planner. Make sure your spreadsheet serves you–don’t become a slave to those little cells!

Planting Calendar

I recently finished reading Gardens by Design by Noel Kingsbury. He had a table on page 171 illustrating a way of organizing information about plants that you either already have in a border or are considering for a border. It enables you to see at a glance what colors you have in the border during various times of the year. By using this table you can see if there are any times when nothing is blooming or the colors will probably not mix well. When I saw this in his book I immediately realized it was another good use for a spreadsheet. I duplicated a bit of his chart in another sheet of my demonstration workbook. For some of you, I know, it is a bit too anal of an approach, but for a novice gardener, planning his first border and unfamiliar with many of the plants, it is a helpful way to get a grasp on a large body of information.

Specialty Collections

Sometimes a gardener gets a little, um, obsessed with a certain genus or type of plant (alpines, for example)–or even a garden tool!. A spreadsheet can be very helpful for tracking purchases, trades, and the occasional demise of those special plants. I’ve used my colchicum collection to give you an idea of the kind of information you might record. But just because I have 34 entries for a flowering bulb many people have never heard of doesn’t mean I’m obsessed with them. I just find them interesting . . . .

Other Helpful Links

Since Google’s spreadsheet program can import Excel files, you can get additional Excel templates from Microsoft and import them into your Google spreadsheet. Also, since I first wrote about alternatives to Excel, I’ve discovered a source for free portable applications, software “that works with any hardware you like (USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, etc).” This means it is small enough to download on a dialup connection, and can be used even if you don’t have a computer to call your own–as long as you do own one of the above mentioned pieces of hardware.

That wraps it up. I’ve now made it possible for you old-timey gardeners to join us in the 21st century. Go forth and conquer!

In our last part we had finished entering data and were getting ready to sum up. Actually it’s best to create this autosumming Subtotal before you enter much data. That way, you have a good idea how much your wishlist is costing you as you go along.

Creating a Subtotal

The first thing you need to do is make an educated guess as to how many items you’re going to be wanting from this particular merchant. The Subtotal formula will be constructed in a similar fashion to the one calculating total price for an item. First, click on the Formula tab (Figure 1). Then click on the cell in which you want the Subtotal to appear. Most people would pick a cell in the Total Price column several rows down from the first item, but you could also put it up at the top in an unused column. Shoot, you could even put it both places by copying the formula. We’ll be traditional and put it in the classic place, about 20 rows down (Figure 2).
Then click on the word Sum. Now we have to select all the cells we want to be added. That would be F2 through F20, giving us room for 19 items.Notice as you drag your mouse down the column, the cell label increases, showing you the range of cells that are going to be added together (Figure 3). Unfortunately, I couldn’t capture that in a screen shot. When you’ve selected all the cells, stop. Then add the closing parenthesis (Figure 4). Then press the Tab key on your keyboard, and if all went well, your potential purchases should be added up in the cell you designated. If you left room, you can continue to add new items and the total will automatically be readjusted. Decide not to get something? Zero out the quantity and tab to the next cell. The total is recalculated. Want more or less? Change the quantity, and the rest is changed for you. That’s the real beauty of the spreadsheet.

Final Touches

Let’s label the subtotal so we can pick it out better. And let’s include the box charge so we have a better idea of the total we’re racking up (Figure 5). Calculating the shipping is a bit trickier. We first will have to check if the subtotal is more than $70. If it is, the shipping is 10%. If the subtotal is less than $70, the shipping is a flat $7. And we need to remember that our subtotal cell is F21. The first thing we need to do is get back on the Formula tab. Then select the cell where we want the grand total, as shown in Figure 5. Next, click on the more link at the far right of the list of functions (Figure 6). When you do that, a list will come up. Choose the Logical category (Figure 7). Then select the IF function. Figure 8 shows the pattern for our formula. We need to erase the words that are there and substitute our own values. What we are testing for is whether or not our subtotal is more than $70. So you need to erase the word test and type F21>70. (Keep the comma after the 70.) You don’t have to add the dollar sign because that is added by the formatting. If the subtotal is over $70, what do we do to find the shipping? We multiply by 10%. So, where it says then_value, erase that and type in F21*.10 (leaving the comma once again). And if the subtotal is not over $70, the shipping is a flat $7, so where it says otherwise_value just type 7.When you’re all done, it should look like Figure 9. Hit the Tab key and your formula is in place. Woo-hoo!

Now, can you create the Grand Total yourself? (Hint: you need to use the Sum function again.) Mine looks like this now that it’s all done (Figure 10):
Yes, my grand total is bolded green. Why? Because I wanted to be able to see it easily, and I think green is a good color for a gardener’s spreadsheet. The more observant among you might notice that the numbers are different, too. That’s because I decided I wanted to get the Jack-in-the-pulpits from Seneca Hill after all, so I zeroed them out, and the change was immediately registered in my subtotals. View it here.

More Examples

For those of you already familiar with spreadsheets, I’m sure I went into way too much detail. For those of you who have never used a spreadsheet before, I hope I told you enough. If I didn’t, well, you know how to comment, right? I’d like to know if this helps you, as well. I’m going to publish one more part to my tutorial after this, mostly to discuss other ways you can use spreadsheets in garden planning.

In part 1 we logged into Google Spreadsheets and got things set up. Now let’s get this thing to do some work for us.

Creating the Formula

We’re going to teach this worksheet to multiply the price of a plant by the number of plants we want to give us the total price. The end result will make us gasp and reconsider if we really want that many. In following posts we will also teach it to add up all the total prices to give us the order subtotal. Then we’ll look at other ways to use spreadsheets.

Click here to get back to the Google Docs and Spreadsheets Main Menu. (Bookmark it now if you haven’t already.) You should see something similar to this:

Okay, you won’t see the red circle. “Demo” is what I called the workbook we saved last time. I don’t know what you called yours, but click on the name of your workbook to open it. There are two columns that we want to show up as money, so we have to tell the spreadsheet that. First click on column E, “Price per Package,” to select that column (red arrow, Figure 2). Then click on the down-arrow by the word Format and select the currency format from the list (green arrow, Figure 2). Do the same thing for column F, “Total Price.”

Then click on the Formula tab (Figure 3). Now, creating a formula in a spreadsheet works the opposite of the way you’d expect. You start with the end result and work backwards. So the first thing we’re going to do is select the cell where we want the answer to be. That’s the box right under the words “Total Price,” F2. Then we click the word Product, because that’s the kind of result we want (Figure 4). Next we click the cells of the two things we want to multiply, “Number of packages” (B2) and “Price per package: (E2). It should look like Figure 5. In spreadsheets, as in adding machines (perhaps I date myself), multiplication is symbolized with an asterisk (*). So you need to insert an asterisk between the B2 and the E2. Finally, add the closing parenthesis.Press the Tab key and you’re done (Figure 6).

But wait a sec. You’re not going to order just one kind of plant, are you? We’ve got to make this formula work for all the rest of the rows. Right-click in that cell with the zero dollar amount and choose Copy(Figure 7). Hover your mouse over the cell directly below the one that you put the formula into. Then click and hold down the left mouse button, and drag it down however many rows you think you’ll need. Right-click and choose Paste (Figure 8 ). Now each of those cells will be the product of the B column and the E column of the corresponding row.

Enter Data

I bet you never thought we’d get to this point. Actually, it doesn’t take that long to set up once you know what you’re doing, and now we’re going to watch this spreadsheet work for us. Go through your catalog page by page. Enter information in a cell, then tab to the next. The math is done for you. If you don’t like the total price, go back and lower the quantity. If you decide you don’t want a certain plant, change the quantity to zero, but don’t delete the row. It’s useful to know what you thought about buying but didn’t. I save my spreadsheets and sometimes I order stuff that I decided not to get in a previous year. Other times, it’s just good for a laugh: I wanted that?

In the next post we’ll learn how to find the grand total. To see how far we’ve come today, click here.

I mentioned in a recent post that I use a spreadsheet to plan my garden purchases. Others have mentioned using a spreadsheet to track their seed sowing. But that doesn’t help you much if you don’t know a spreadsheet from a tablecloth, so let’s start right there: a spreadsheet is a computer program that arranges numbers in a table and allows you to make calculations in the cells of the table. When you change the number in one cell used in a calculation (called a formula), it recalculates the formula and updates the answer. Very handy.

The most common spreadsheet program is Excel, made by Microsoft. Most people get it included in Microsoft Office, or the less powerful version, Microsoft Works. Many home computers come with one or the other of these, but not all. A free alternative would be Calc, but that involves a huge download and a lot of disk space. Another alternative is Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which is what I am going to use for my tutorial.

Google’s Spreadsheet program is only available online. The advantage of this is that anyone with access to the internet can use it. If you need to work on a spreadsheet from more than one physical location, such as both home and work, this is an advantage. Also, Google’s Spreadsheet program is designed so that many people can work on the same file. So this is great if you want to assemble a group order with fellow gardeners, for example.

I know it seems unlikely, but what if Google’s servers went down? You’d lose all your work unless you’d made backups. Or what if your cable modem goes on the fritz? Or you’re on dial-up? Then an online spreadsheet is not the best solution. I will be using it for this tutorial because I can give you all a link to the finished product, and because even if it isn’t ideal, it’s the one program most likely to be accessible to all.

I do have Excel and I have used it in the past for these kind of spreadsheets. If you have Excel on your computer but have never used it, this .pdf file has the least you need to know to use Excel. Or, start out with a Google spreadsheet and then save it to your hard drive as an Excel file. Fortunately, we’re not going to be doing anything that complicated.

Getting Started

(Note: Hover your mouse over the illustrations to see the accompanying caption.)
If you don’t have a gmail account, you’ll need to register with Google first. If you do have a Gmail account, there is a link right in the email program to the spreadsheet program.(See figure 1.)

Once you’ve logged in, you should see a welcome screen. Click the words “New Spreadsheet” to begin (Figure 2).

What we have in front of us (Figure 3, below) is an empty worksheet. You can have many worksheets in a work book. In this case, each nursery that I am considering ordering from will have its own sheet. The entire workbook will be one file.
So the first thing we want to do is rename the worksheet. Down at the bottom of the page is a tab that says Sheet1. Click the little down-arrow and choose Rename. I’m going to call it Fedco Trees.

Next, open up your copy of the catalog to the order form. I find if I use the same columns as the order form, it makes it easier to transcribe my order when I’ve finalized it. (Columns go down, like the columns on a porch. Rows go across.) We want all the headings for our columns to be in bold, so first we’re going to select all of row 1 by clicking on the number one (see red arrow). Then we’re going to click on B for bold (circled).
Double-click on the first cell. Notice the cell gets bigger? Type the heading text in the cell and then press Tab to move to the next cell. Figure 5 shows the first cell with text and the second cell with text in the process of being entered.

Uh-oh. When I type the word Description, it’s half hidden in the box. Not to worry. Hover your cursor over the line separating the two cells, and when it turns into a line with arrows at both ends, you can drag the border to the right and make the cell bigger. Drag it a good ways past the end of the word, because you usually need a big space to describe the item.

Continue typing in the rest of the column headers: Price per package and Total Price. That takes care of the columns in the order form. But I always add three more columns, and I recommend that you do, too: Page, Plant Where? and Notes. When you’re all done, it should look like this:

By now you’ve seen this warning (Figure 8). I think it’s good that they remind you. Click on Start Autosaving. Give it a nice, descriptive title like 2007 Plant Purchases and press the Enter key. Hopefully that took a lot longer for me to write than it took for you to do. You can view what we’ve done so far here.

Coming up in part 2: Creating the Formula