Garden Planning Tips: Your Camera Roll Holds the Secret to Success

Most gardeners start planning their season by browsing seed catalogs and making big plans. But here’s what usually happens: you over-plan, get overwhelmed and end up with a garden that doesn’t fit your life. Before you start vegetable garden planning this year, try this garden planning tip that changed everything for my clients. Look at your camera roll from last year. Yes, really. 

Over the past few years, I’ve reflected on the year using a tool created by Mel Robbins, Year End Audit. It’s a simple process where you review each month of the past year to notice patterns, celebrate wins, and identify what worked (and what didn’t). While doing my year end audit, I thought about how this tool could be really useful during garden planning—especially for busy families.

The Real Cost of Skipping Realistic Garden Planning

Last year, I worked with a client with 3 older kids (high school age+) and is also a full time working mom. She wanted a garden to grow all her family's favorite food. We worked together throughout the growing season—spring, summer and fall. My job was to support her in maximizing her growing season here in Connecticut, which can be very unpredictable. In late summer, we got some beautiful fall transplants from Copia Home & Garden and sowed seeds because since her kids were all returning to school, I thought her life would slow down and have some free time to garden during the fall season.  

She had no time. She was focused on her full time job, getting her son back to college, and getting family activities organized for the fall. The only thing she was reliably harvesting was summer tomatoes and peppers. 

What I learned from my year end audit was that if we had used her camera roll in the garden planning process, we might have recognized that she didn't have as much time to dedicate in the fall as much as she had during the summer months. That was the flow of her life and the more we pay attention to that, we can maximize our most productive growing months to reliably produce throughout the growing season without adding more to our plates when we don't have as much time available. For their family, spring and summer are the best times to maximize their growing season. And that's ok, because now we have the information, and we can adjust her garden this year keeping that in mind.

We often plan our gardens based on aspirations rather than the reality of our schedules. By using your camera roll in the first step of garden planning, you will see how your time was actually spent and remember how busy some months really are. This isn’t about judgment, it’s about reality. 

How to use your Camera Roll for Garden Planning  

Here’s how it works:

Scroll back in your camera roll through last year and take notice of the rhythm each month (keeping your calendar handy is also helpful) Where was your time spent? What was filling your days in the spring—home projects, sports schedules, travel, celebrations? How often do you see photos in your garden or outdoors? 

You might notice that June was packed with graduation parties and weekend trips, while July shows you relaxing in your backyard most evenings. Or maybe March had tons of photos of indoor activities and rainy weekends, but April suddenly opened up. These patterns tell you everything you need to know about when you’ll realistically have time to tend to your garden. 

Growing what fits in your life creates space for confidence to grow. You begin to trust your decisions, notice what works and adjust without guilt. That’s when gardening stops feeling like another task and starts feeling like something you actually look forward to.

Since I started using this reflection exercise as part of my regular yearly practice, implementing it with my clients has been a game changer. They’re planning gardens that actually fit into their lives, not what social media tells them about garden planning and ordering seeds. They’re planning with confidence and feeling really happy about what they’ve decided to grow and how it will complement their lives, without overwhelming them. 

Ready to Try It?

I encourage you to give this a try this week. The Camera Roll Exercise is Foundation #1 in my free Kitchen Garden Foundations Guide. Download it now to get all 4 foundations—plus reflection questions and seasonal planning tools—so you can start building a garden that truly fits your life. 

Share your Aha Moment! 

I’d love to hear about your biggest aha moment using the Camera Roll Exercise as a garden planning tool! Comment on this blog or tag me on Instagram/Facebook @simplygrownct. Hearing about your wins is so important to me—it’s my favorite part of my job!