For the past year or so I have been looking for a very specific type of calendar for my garden, but I have come to believe that it doesn’t actually exist, so I have made one for myself and have linked to it at the bottom of this post in case anyone else might find it of use.

I have specifically been looking for a calendar that provides a large writing area that splits the month into four weeks. I have been working in the garden in this way using a calendar on my phone for the past year and apart from it being far too cramped on the screen and the weeks spanning awkwardly and messily across daily tasks, the week-by-week method works for me for a few reasons:

Firstly, because though I can’t always plan to dedicate time on a specific day to a task (because other tasks and events might take priority, or chronic illness gives me days where I just can’t do something), I can usually manage some point within a week to get it done, so by setting myself tasks to complete within a seven day week gives me some flexibility. Similarly, some days the weather just might be absolutely against me doing a particular task, but usually at some point within a week the conditions are right enough for me to see to that job. Last, but by no mean least, I often think of garden tasks in terms of week-long chunks of time due to the excellent Garden Focused website, which generates a personalised growing calendar with sowing, planting out and and harvesting dates according to the frost and weather conditions in your location (UK only).

As well as a large writing area for tasks assigned to given weeks, I made space for an area dedicated to each day, so that I could make notes on specific tasks I’d completed, or expected deliveries, online events, visits, or anything else. Though I will mostly be focused on the weekly entries, because that’s how I plan my gardening tasks, I thought it would be handy to have a place to make notes on things that were happening whether the rain was falling and my body responding or not.

In case it might be of use to anybody else, here is the 2023 Gardening Calendar. It is made to be practical, so all of the pages are given over to writing space rather than pretty pictures. It’s stripped back, in black and white (I have a monochrome printer) and unfussy, and because there is no need to be precious about it, it can hang in my shed from a piece of string or a bulldog clip. I can get muddy fingerprints on it, and it will still do the job I need it to perfectly. Finally I have the gardening calendar that I wanted, and if it works as well as I expect it to I will be able to make ones for future years so that I’m not always trying to hold all of my sowing, feeding and potting on tasks in my head.