Introduction

I tracked my vegetable gardening progress between April 2021 and June 2023. The purpose of this project was to take my garbled notes and make sense of them to answer a few questions:

1. When should I start each plant?
2. Which plants are worth growing again and which are not?
3. Which sowing and growing methods do I use the most? So, I can stock up on materials for next year.
4. Where do I need to concentrate my efforts in terms of pest control?

About the Data

The data originally consisted of handwritten notes in my garden journal written between April 2021 and June 2023. When I realized it was very time consuming to search through my notes, I transferred all the information to an excel sheet. The data contains 3 tables consists of 23 fields and 53 records in xlsx format. And consists of plant information, growing methods, pests and productivity. I collected information about grocery store prices per ld.

Tools Used

• Excel (Data Collecting & Cleaning)
• SQL BigQuery (Data Exploration)
• Tableau (Visualization)

Insights

• There is no correlation between productivity and taste. Some of the less tasty varieties are ‘pretty productive'.
• Most of the 'not productive' varieties are really tasty.

• Some of the quicker growing varieties are more expensive at the grocery store.
• Some of the slower growing varieties are cheaper.

Exploring which plants I should grow using SQL

• Most of my plants were not affected by pests.
• I start most of my plants by directly seeding into the ground and in seed trays.
• I grow mostly in fabric grow bags and plastic pots.

Exploring Pests and Diseases using SQL

The complete SQL code can be found Here

Recommendations

With the rising cost of food and questionable growing practices it makes sense to grow as much of my own food as possible.

• Herbs are a must grow at $57 per lb. and under 60 days to harvest.
• Carrots and squash may not be worth the time and effort, since they are relatively inexpensive to purchase and take a long time to grow.
• The productive but not so great tasting varieties such as Micro Tom Tomato aren't worth growing since I won't eat them.
• It may be worth growing some tastier varieties such as Dragon Tongue Beans and some of the less productive Lettuces in larger quantities to make up for their low productivity.
• Since direct seeding doesn't require equipment, I'll only need to stock up on seed trays.
• I'll need to stock up on fabric grow bags and plastic pots depending on how many plants I decide to grow next year.
• I will have to keep an eye out for white flies and aphids since they are the most prevalent of the pests in my garden.

This is the master list of of must grow and won't grow varieties:

Data Limitations

I'm a new gardener so many of my plantings were an experiment just to see if they would grow.

• This collection of data is by no means complete, I often forgot to write things down as they happened.
• Unintended casualties, i.e. dead plants were not included in this data.
• At the beginning of my gardening adventures i didn't know any better and made many many mistakes.

Data Source

Data was collected by me in a garden journal over the course of 2 years.