By the third year of growing the same variety, you know things that no seed catalog can tell you: which bed it thrives in, how early it needs to start indoors, whether it actually produces in your climate or just promises to.
The History Layer
2014 Details, 2015 Details, and 2016 Details are the fields that distinguish this template from a single-season tracker. Each year's notes build on the last. A variety that underperformed in 2014 may have been planted too late; the 2015 record shows the adjusted timing and the result; by 2016 the protocol is settled.
Misc Prior History captures anything that predates the tracking period — notes transferred from old records, observations inherited from a previous gardener, or seed sourcing history.
2015 Priority makes planning decisions explicit: Do Not Grow, Grow as Last Resort, Top Choice, FIND & BUY. A garden with 40 plant records and a clear priority field produces a planting plan in minutes rather than hours of deliberation.
Seed Provenance and Starting
Seed Source Description documents where the seed came from — named supplier, saved from previous harvest, traded at a seed swap. Combined with This seeds are... (organic, heirloom, hybrid, open-pollinated), this creates a provenance chain that matters for seed-saving programs and variety purity.
Recommended indoor start date versus Date Seed Planted is the accountability field: what the research said versus what actually happened. Sowing Depth, Qty of Seeds Planted, and spacing fields complete the planting record.
Lifecycle Tracking
Germination, transplanting, flowering, maturity, and first harvest each get a date and a notes field. The pattern across years tells the real story: a plant that flowered two weeks later in 2015 than 2014 had a different spring. That context explains the harvest timing difference without guesswork.
Saving Seeds? and replant interval link the current season to next year's planning. Annual or Perennial determines whether the plant appears in the plan every year by default or needs to be actively replanted.
The five image fields with captions create a visual timeline: seed packet, germination stage, transplant location, flowering, harvest. A five-image sequence across a single season is a more useful reference than any written description.