A garden head ache with an old fashioned solution............

I buy myself a treat

50 summer flowering bulbs, an impulse buy at the supermarket checkout – £5. Great price and know I'm going to love them when they flower.

My treat becomes a trauma

The box says plant now, but where are the empty spaces in my garden? I wonder 

around looking at suitable sunny spots but I can’t remember. Instead of garden eye candy, these bulbs are giving me a garden head ache! 

I look at photos of my garden. It should be easy to spot gaps in the planting.
I'm always taking photos of my garden with my phone, or my compact camera, and when there's something special - on my SLR. so there are plenty to look at.

Finding photos of the garden doesn’t cure my headache, it just creates a bigger one.

There's photos on my phone, on memory cards, on face book, my laptop and the old computer I don’t use much any more. 

Then there's thousands on a portable hard drive, more on Picasa and some on flickr. I've tweeted some, I've emailed some, I've texted others and a few have got pinned.

So how do I 

• compare photos on my phone with ones on my computer?
• compare photos in different folders?
• look at more than four at a time big enough to see the details?
• compare spring photos with summer photos?
• remember when I get into the garden!

My low tec solution

Old fashioned photos and sticky corners! Yes I'm printing my garden photos and sticking them in a scrapbook.

I've created a scrapbook print Photoshop action at work  (Robbies). It adds an off centre white border to the print, room for me to write on - just like instant Polaroid photos (remember them?) 

Its great, I can stick labels from new plants in the book next to photos of where I planted them with the date. No more cursing the garden label eating monster! (He's the younger brother of the sock eating monster that lives in my washing machine)

Now I'll be able to see exactly where my gaps are and this autumn I won't be digging up established bulbs as I plant new ones.

A surprise benefit

I'd forgotten just how beautiful real gloss photos are. Its a real treat to sit and look through the photos without sitting at a screen or peering at my phone.

What are you doing with your photos? Let me know in the comments.