Back in the mid 1970’s when we bought our acreage it was covered in second growth forest. We built our house and then started clearing small areas for gardens. I was working as a gardener at the time, mostly for seniors, and my clients would give me plants that I had divided or removed. Our family would also give us plants to help us establish the garden. It became a habit with my wife Sharron to make an index card record of each plant. She would document what the plant was, where it came from, where we planted it, what care it needed and what beneficial uses it might have. With the advent of more affordable digital photography I started taking photos of the plants. As time went on we started compiling the information together and printing it.
At some point we started looking farther afield and started documenting ALL the plants on the property and that stretched into all the wildlife, birds and bugs.
We have managed to put together a good collection of entries but we are aware of how much it still out there! Haven’t even started on the lichens, fungi and mushrooms yet though I have hundreds of photos still on my computer. Fortunately Sharron has taken up photography in the past few years so we have been able to speed up the process somewhat though admittedly we can’t foresee it being done in our lifetime.
Hard-To-Come-By Lifestyle 
Wow. That’s a big project.
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And it only took us 40 years 😉
What a fantastic enterprise!
Thank you – it has been a great challenge.
Hi Ken . . . thought I would let you know that I am enjoying your posts.
What a marvelous project and such a challenge, too! I am utterly impressed and in awe of such an undertaking.
Thanks Gunta! Not too onerous when you spread it over 40 years but it is a satisfying project.
This is such an admirable project, something to benefit future generations, one hopes!
We hope so. Our daughters are interested but the grand kiddos not so much yet.
The best outcome would be for the collection to go to a library or school if they still aren’t interested at a later date. My mother kept some records – nothing this elaborate but still interesting – of birds and plants (arrival and bloom dates, etc.) around her home in western NC, where my parents retired. After she died I found myself wishing that whoever the next owner of her house was, they might value her notebooks. But it didn’t work out. We have to live in the present, right? She enjoyed making those notes. 😉
That is an interesting idea of passing them onto a museum/library/school. I’m not sure the journals are 100% accurate but they are still local history. Sorry it didn’t work out for your mom’s notebooks but as you say, she enjoyed making them and that is what really matters. I focus almost entirely in the past as the future is looking more and more bleak to me ;-). Preserving photographs freezes time and my genealogical work unravels past family histories.