Saturday, March 28, 2015

Taking Inventory


So today my buddy Andy and I went ahead and tagged most of the edibles around my yard.


Labels help you identify different varieties when plants are not in bloom or fruiting. They also add a nice touch to your garden when your friends can easily recognize each resident in your backyard.

It was a pretty easy garden upgrade. You can get the tags from most garden centers for less than 10 cents each (a pack of 100 cost me $8.59)

Finding someone with nicer handwriting than me was essential to the plan. Thanks babe!


We came up with 24 edibles and made labels for them:

To bad we missed a bunch as you will see in the upcoming pictures ...Take if from me, if you have a lot of stuff out there, make an inventory of everything before writing the labels. Also take note of how many tags you need to make of each variety. That will save you the back and forth from your house to the garden or worse, back to the store!

Take a look below for some examples of the stuff we labeled:

You might not need to label everything in your vegetable bed, but sometimes different varieties of the same crop can be hard to tell apart. The peppers above are a good example..
It can be really hard to tell apart different types of bananas and plantains. Another plus for the labeling system!

Use the name you remember the plant by. Although technically a Sapindus Saponaria, I like to call the tree above Soapberry!

Doing inventory was a great opportunity to document how every plant was doing. Check out the pictures I took from each edible in my yard:

Tomatoes

Bananas


Plantains

Sugar Cane

Oregano

Strawberries


Bell Peppers

JalapeƱo Peppers

Yucca (Cassava)

Carrots

Chive Onions

Mango

Avocado


Lychee

Guava

Pineapple Guava

Sweet Corn

Luffa Sponges

Passion Fruit

Coffee Plant

Sunflowers

Figs


Hog Plums (Spondias purpurea)

Pinneaple

Chirimoya



Nopal Cactus

Papaya

Are you labeling a different way? Let me know in the comments below.

Keep on learning!