Tracking change

Many garden bloggers seem to track the progress of their garden if not individual plants, often posting photos of plants in previous years.  It is definitely a simple way to record the growth of plants, one I use a lot.

Sedeveria letizia July 2014

Sedeveria letizia May 2015

Sadly not all plants show a lot of change between photos and so other methods of recording growth have to be used.  It is sad how geeky I get over this.

So the first method is a simple ruler.

Arenaria aurea May2015

This works fine for plants that actually get bigger, but the agaves were the plants that kept frustrating me.  I started thinking about marking the latest leaf, at first using nail polish on the terminal spine.  For a while we had quite a few very bright terminal spines.

In the end I found the solution on one of the plant forums, in which someone placed washers over the terminal spine. So simple.

Now I simply place the washer on the newest leaf at the start of spring and at the end of summer, even if there was no obvious growth, it's possible to see how many new leaves there are.

There have been a few questions about the washers, but a lot less than about the neon nail polish. Does anyone else have strange methods to track the progress of their plants?