GardenBinder Guides
Your Garden Spreadsheet Deserves a Better Home
Mea Cara · October 20, 2026 · 4 min read
Let us start by defending the spreadsheet. If you have one — a tab per year, a row per plant, columns for variety, source, date sown, date planted, first harvest, notes — you have done more careful record-keeping than most gardeners ever manage. A spreadsheet is free, it is yours, it lasts forever, and nobody can shut it down. Nothing in this post argues with any of that.
What a spreadsheet cannot do is be in the garden with you. It is never open when the first tomato ripens, it holds no photos, and next April it will not tell you that the bed you are about to sow stayed wet until June last year. This guide is about moving the rows, keeping the file, and picking up the parts of a record that a grid never could.
Before you import: tidy the header row
GardenBinder matches columns by their headings, so two minutes on the top row saves ten in review. It recognises, in any reasonable spelling:
- Name (or Plant, Common name, Title, What)
- Scientific name (Latin, Botanical)
- Variety (Cultivar)
- Type (Kind, Category) — vegetable, herb, shrub, perennial, annual, tree, bulb, vine, grass
- Notes (Description, Comments)
- Sun (Light, Exposure) and Water
- Planted (Date planted, Acquired, Added, or just Date)
- Quantity (Qty, Count)
- Location (Area, Bed, Where, Spot)
Columns it does not recognise are ignored, not lost — the file is never changed. If you keep separate tabs per year, export the current one; the older years are an archive and can stay in the file.
Step by step
- Save a copy as CSV (File → Download → CSV in Google Sheets; Save As → CSV in Excel). An .xlsx file works directly too; a CSV is just the surest thing.
- Open GardenBinder → Settings → Bring your garden in → Spreadsheet, and choose the file.
- Review the drafts. One row becomes one plant. Sun and water values like "full sun" or "moderate" are recognised; anything unfamiliar is left blank rather than guessed. Dates in any common format come through, including Excel's serial numbers. A location column lands in the plant's notes, ready for the next step.
- Save, then place the plants. Create your areas and beds, open each plant, and put it where it grows. This is the step that a spreadsheet's Location column was always standing in for.
The spreadsheet route uses no AI and counts against nothing. If your sheet is thin — names only — you can paste the names into the list box instead and the AI writes each plant a starting profile with sun, water, and a care rhythm; the first ten AI imports are free on the Free plan.
What to check after the import
- Merged cells and title rows. A sheet that starts with a decorative title row confuses the header match. If the review looks wrong, delete the rows above the real headings and try again.
- "Tomato — Sun Gold" in one cell. Split name and variety, either in the sheet before you import or in the plant afterwards. Varieties are what make seed and harvest records useful later.
- Dates you kept as text. "mid-May" will not become a date. Pick the 15th or leave it, and put the original words in notes.
- Harvest columns. These do not import as harvests. Add this year's harvests as journal entries as they happen, and keep last year's totals in the spreadsheet where they already are.
Keep the spreadsheet
Seriously. It is a perfect archive, and GardenBinder will give you a complete export of your own — every record as plain data, every photo as a normal file — whenever you want one, so you are never further from a spreadsheet than one download. What you gain in the meantime is the part a grid could not hold: a phone in your pocket that opens to today's care, a photo journal that files itself by plant and season, a map of the beds, harvests that add up by crop, and a recap of the season in your own pictures when it ends.
If you built the spreadsheet because you wanted to remember, you are exactly who a journal that survives was written for. The apps comparison is honest about spreadsheets too, and GardenBinder is free to start, with the import taking a minute or two.
#switching #import #spreadsheet #csv #record keeping