How My Garden Grows - A gardening journey
Introduction
I tracked my vegetable gardening progress between April 2021 and June 2023. The purpose of this project was to take my garbled notes and make sense of them to answer a few questions:
- When should I start each plant?
- Which plants are worth growing again and which are not?
- Which sowing and growing methods do I use the most? So, I can stock up on materials for next year.
- Where do I need to concentrate my efforts in terms of pest control?
To view the full 2-page interactive Tableau Dashboard click Here
About the Data
The data originally consisted of handwritten notes in my garden journal written between April 2021 and June 2023. When I realized it was time-consuming to search through my notes, I transferred all the information to an Excel sheet. The data contains 3 tables with 23 fields and 53 records in xlsx format. And contains plant information, growing methods, pests, and productivity. I collected information about grocery store prices per ld.
Tools Used
Excel (Data Collecting & Cleaning)
SQL BigQuery (Data Exploration)
Tableau (Visualization)
Insights
- There is no correlation between productivity and taste. Some of the less tasty varieties are ‘pretty productive'.
- Most of the 'not productive' varieties are tasty.
Exploring productivity and taste using SQL
- Some of the quicker-growing varieties are more expensive at the grocery store.
- Some of the slower-growing varieties are cheaper.
Exploring days to harvest and price using SQL
Exploring pests and growing methods using SQL
- Most of my plants were not affected by pests.
- I start most of my plants by directly seeding into the ground and in seed trays.
- I grow mostly in fabric grow bags and plastic pots.
- I created an interactive planting calendar to let me know when I should start each plant.
The complete SQL code can be found Here
This is the master list of of must grow and won't grow varieties.
Recommendations
- With the rising cost of food and questionable growing practices, it makes sense to grow as much of my food as possible.
- Herbs are a must-grow at $57 per lb. and under 60 days to harvest.
- Carrots and squash are not worth growing, since they are inexpensive to purchase and take a long time to grow.
- The productive but not-so-great-tasting varieties such as Micro Tom Tomato aren't worth growing since I won't eat them.
- It may be worth growing some tastier varieties such as Dragon Tongue Beans and some of the less productive Lettuces in larger quantities to make up for their low productivity.
- Since direct seeding doesn't require equipment, I'll only need to stock up on seed trays.
- I'll need to stock up on fabric grow bags and plastic pots depending on how many plants I decide to grow next year.
- I will have to keep an eye out for white flies and aphids since they are the most prevalent of the pests in my garden.
Data Limitations
- I'm a new gardener so many of my plantings were an experiment just to see if they would grow.
- This collection of data is by no means complete, I often forgot to write things down as they happened.
- Unintended casualties, i.e. dead plants were not included in this data.
- At the beginning of my gardening adventures, I didn't know any better and made many many mistakes.
Data Sources
Data was collected by me in a garden journal over the course of 2 years.