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· 3 min read
How to Track What Your Garden Actually Produced
Manesh Jayawardhana
CIO & Co-founder
In February, planning next year’s beds, you will remember two things: the tomatoes were amazing, and the brassicas were a disaster. Both memories are shaped by the best and worst single moments of the season rather than by what the beds actually produced.
A kitchen scale and thirty seconds per picking replaces that with something you can act on.
Why weight rather than counts
Counts don’t compare across crops. Forty radishes and four squashes are not comparable numbers, and neither tells you which bed was worth its space.
Weight does compare, and once you divide by area it becomes the only number that matters for planning: yield per square metre. A bed of courgettes producing 11 kg from a square metre and a bed of brassicas producing 0.9 kg from three square metres is not a close call, however good those brassicas tasted.
It also surfaces the crops that quietly underperform. Sweetcorn takes a lot of space for a modest weight. Salad leaves take almost none and produce continuously. Neither fact is obvious from memory, and both change how you allocate beds.
Why people get stuck here
- Estimating at the end of the season. Which produces flatteringly round numbers and no useful comparison.
- Logging only the big harvests. The continuous croppers — beans, salad, herbs — get missed, and they’re often the best performers.
- No area recorded. Total weight without square metres can’t be compared between crops.
- Overcomplicated systems. A spreadsheet with fourteen columns gets abandoned in week three.
What a useful log contains
Crop, weight, date
Three fields. Anything more and the log stops getting filled in when you’re carrying a basket and muddy hands.
Bed or area, if you rotate
Recording where it came from lets you compare beds as well as crops, which matters if one corner of the plot is shadier or wetter.
Every picking, not every day
You don’t need a daily entry. You need every harvest weighed, however small.
| You Log | You Can Answer |
|---|---|
| Weight per crop | Which crops produced most |
| Weight per bed | Which beds performed |
| Weight ÷ area | Yield per square metre — the planning number |
| Dates | When each crop peaked |
Common mistakes to avoid
- Weighing after trimming and washing for some crops and before for others.
- Skipping small pickings, which cumulatively are often the largest total.
- Comparing your yields to published figures rather than to your own previous seasons — climate and soil vary too much for external benchmarks to mean much.
- Recording only successes, which defeats the purpose.
- Keeping the log somewhere it disappears at the end of the season.
How to do it with Harvest Log
The Harvest Log records weights by crop and date and summarises the season, in your browser.
- Weigh each picking as you bring it in — a kitchen scale by the back door works.
- Record crop, weight, date, and the bed if you rotate.
- Read the summary at the end of the season, by crop and by bed.
- Export it before closing the tab; nothing is stored between sessions.
Other planning and record tools are in the tools directory.
Frequently asked questions
Why weigh rather than count?
Because weight compares across crops and counts don’t. Forty radishes and four squashes are only comparable as kilograms, and only useful when divided by the area they occupied.
What’s a good yield?
There’s no universal answer — climate, soil and variety dominate. Your own previous seasons are the only fair benchmark, which is exactly why the log is worth keeping.
Is my data stored anywhere?
No. Entries stay in the page, so export anything you want to keep between seasons.
Final thought
Weigh everything, including the small pickings, and divide by area at the end. That single number — kilograms per square metre — settles most of the arguments you’ll have with yourself in February.