These tips and tricks will come in handy...

One very interesting book losely related to Homesteading and making it of the grid, though slightly more radical, is the 'Handbook of Traditional living'. http://www.arktos.com/raido-a-handbook-of-traditional-living.html

The same place also sells a few real nuggests (like the Self-sufficency handbook and the Ecotopia-books): http://www.arktos.com/books/environment.html

I was snagged by your mention of geekiness. Do you keep something like a lab notebook for all of your work, or do you use the blog to organize and keep track of things? If you ran a t-test I assume you must keep a book, but just wondering.

I had this idea that keeping a blog would be a good excuse not to write things down (with a two-year old, anything made of paper is hard to protect and all writing instruments eventually disappear), but now I hardly have any records of what I've been doing because it turns out I don't like using my blog for keeping technical notes. I know you've shown your lists on here, but have you ever posted your research?

If not, I'd love to know more about how you manage it all-- like what kind of notebooks, formats, etc. I think I am compulsive about organization, but not very creative when it comes to methods.

This is a question after my own heart. I do use the blog as my lab notebook a lot of the time, but I'm also aware that endless lists or numbers turn readers off, so I do a bit on paper and on spreadsheets too. My spreadsheets include:

Gardening --- what I plan to plant and what I actually plant, including where the seeds come from, which bed they go into, what I add to the soil, etc. Trees, Vines, and Bushes --- what I plant, where they came from, etc. Worms --- How many pounds of food scraps we pick up per week and how many of those go in the worm bin Biochar --- Which beds I treated with biochar and what else I did to them *Mushrooms --- Before we changed over to rafts and totems, I listed when I soaked each log and if it fruited. I also list when and with what I inoculate

Then there are my paper notebooks. I keep one notebook going at a time that is simply a notebook. I jot down anything that catches my fancy, keep notes on books I'm reading, etc. When I run out of space in that notebook, I go through it and rip out any pages that have since been summed up in the blog or in my spreadsheets. There are usually only about ten pages left, so I leave that on the shelf until I go through the next notebook, at which point I rip out yet more pages that have since been summed up elsewhere. I've found that plain old notebooks don't help me much if I don't sum that information up in something more searchable.

Finally, I have a binder of pages from my paper notebooks that are referred to often. This includes various garden maps, soil test results, data on the bees (could be in a spreadsheet, but for some reason it's not), information on how long I have to leave the sprinklers on in each quadrant to get an inch of water, yearly goals, my freezer map, etc.

I highly recommend keeping good notes. At the time, it can be a bit of a pain to come in and rinse off your hands and put pen to paper after a long day in the garden, but it's very much worth it. I talk to great gardeners all the time who don't know what that awesome apple tree is in their yard (or what that terrible one is), who wish they could remember which type of lettuce they planted so that they can repeat it. Every year, we tweak our own garden to highlight the crops that did well in the past and replace the ones that failed, and every year our garden gets easier to handle and gives us more delicious food.

Your last paragraph is exactly why I want to get more organized.

I like the idea of summarizing notebook info. I do keep a notebook for daily thoughts and observations. It's a nice, sturdy art sketchbook and I use it for everything. My only problem is that I rarely review it so all of those excellent ideas that I once had are lost to me. That's something I should work on.

I also love the idea of the reference binder. I have been thinking recently that I should get some of my important computer files printed, protected and bound for quick reference. It would make things a lot easier because I'm much more likely to look into a book than scour through digital files.

Thank you for sharing the details! I suppose I'll just have to keep practicing to see what works for me. It's hard to know at this time what kind of information will be important to me several years down the road, and how I can make it quickly accessible, so I really appreciate hearing your experience.

If you made an ebook about good farmstead record keeping and/or experimental design, I'd totally buy it.