My Plan A for this GYO blog was a weekly check list of things to do in your fruit and veg garden.

Seemed like a good idea at the time, but as I quickly found out, it was fraught with problems.

It’s not just that the slow and dry start to the 2013 gardening year would have resulted in weeks of me suggesting you look longingly at seed lists.

It’s not even that there’s an overwhelming amount of this kind of information already out there - there are loads of gardening calendars on the web; you can buy a host of gardening books with a ‘what to do, when’ format (my favourites are Your Kitchen Garden Month by Month and The Allotment Seasonal Planner and Cookbook, both by Andi Clevely); there are even gardening cartoons. (The Simple Things lifestyle magazine now has a monthly excerpt from Adam the Gardener – the 1940’s comic strip treasure who advised a nation what to do each week in the garden. The weekly Adam the Gardener features from the Sunday Express are now available as a book and I would highly recommend you read it – it’s a perfect framework for a make do and mend, old-fashioned, skillful way of gardening.)

No, the real problem with trying to do a weekly checklist is that the microclimate on everyone’s plot is just a little bit different.

Wherever I’m using a gardening calendar I always add a month to any of the spring and summer task lists and subtract a month from the autumn tasks – they are invariably written for England and Wales and overlook the delayed and shortened growing season that happens north of (most of) Hadrian’s Wall. I have one friend who always planted their potatoes on their birthday – St Patrick’s Day (am I the only one who can think of better ways to celebrate?). This worked fine when they lived in south east England, slightly less well when they moved to the north east of Scotland.

I can’t even use our garden as a working example. By some twist of fate, I’ve managed to end up with a garden that seems to be constantly at least 2 degrees cooler than the land around us, unless it’s scorchio, in which case it’s at least 2 degrees hotter. So when the daffs are going over in Moffat, ours are just coming into bud!

Believe it or not, you are the best person to know when to plant your chitted potatoes, harvest your gooseberries and sow your winter lettuce! If this is your first year of Growing Your Own, it may not feel like it, but trust me, in no time at all, you will be the expert on your own plot.

One of the best ways to become an expert is to keep a gardening diary or journal. (For anyone with a serious stationery habit, now would be a good time to rush out to the shops and buy a few pretty notebooks.) If you’ve started small, this may seem like overkill, but once you’ve built up a few years of entries in your diary, you’ll be pleased you began early.

Labels always break off or fade away, your once total recall gets overtaken by the exertion of running the rest of your life, but your Garden Diary will be there as a trusty and reliable archive of your gardening activity. Not for you the frustration of finding a cucumber that never stops cropping and then forgetting the variety when it came to choosing seeds for next year. Nor will you suffer the irritation of trying to second-guess where and when - and why - you planted those cardoons. Wherever you are in your GYO journey, it’s never too late or too early to start a gardening journal.

Because the thing that makes a great gardener isn’t having naturally green fingers or loadsamoney to spend on your plot, it’s simply the ability to observe and learn.

So what should go in your gardening journal – and what type is best?

That depends on you. The key idea is to be able to create a kind of perpetual diary for your garden - to be able to go to any particular day or month and see what you were doing this time last year…and the year before, and the year before that.

What method you use to do this is entirely up to you. You can start with a plain notebook, a ring binder, a shop-bought gardening journal which has planting guides and advice. You can use one of the online versions – there are even garden diary apps for your phone. I reckon you may even be able to do a good version by having 52 boards (one for each week of the year) on a Pinterest account!

You’ll be using the journal to record when you planted (and where), how long it took to germinate and how long you had to wait to harvest, and details like the seed company and seed variety. You may want to make a note of the temperature, rainfall, compost you used, and anything else that you want to remember for years to come. Make sure you make a note of your unmitigated disasters – you learn as much from these as your successes.

Make your diary as personal and as much fun as you like – you can include photos of your family and pets and wildlife, or anything else that takes your fancy.

However you do it, start now! In no time at all, you’ll get to know your onions as well as Adam the Gardener.