Following a discussion here, I decided to make a five year diary.
The reasoning behind it is to make notes as and when I see things coming into flower, ripening, being available as wild food and stuff like that. In subsequent years, I can flick back through the diary and see what's there for that month or the next and then I can be aware of what to look out for. Many times I've missed a decent harvest of wild plant food simply because I forgot to look out for it, and when I remembered, the opportunity had passed for another year.
Here's some pics.
The diary is leather bound and is secured with a leather thong.
The inner diary itself is sheathed in thin leather to give the pages strength and support the punch holes so they won't tear out. The punch holes are secured with leather thong.
The pages themselves are one week to each page. Just short notes are needed as an aid memoir. You fill in the month and year yourself and put the dates next to each day so you can start the diary any time in any month in any year and it'll still be good five years later.
There's enough pages for five years of notes.
I've done a bit of tooling on the cover.
You can see from the size that it's not too big, and will fit in a ditty bag or backpack.
The pages were made on CorelDraw v9. I just printed out a master page then photocopied it both sides on A4 paper. These were then cut into four, assembled in one pile and hole punched with a normal hole punch.
Anyone wanting to try one for themselves? If so I'll make the master page into a PDF file and link to it here so you can just download it and print it out. You'll need just 34 sheets of A4 paper and some scrap leather to make this diary.
Anyway, that's my 5 year diary. Thanks for looking.
Eric
The reasoning behind it is to make notes as and when I see things coming into flower, ripening, being available as wild food and stuff like that. In subsequent years, I can flick back through the diary and see what's there for that month or the next and then I can be aware of what to look out for. Many times I've missed a decent harvest of wild plant food simply because I forgot to look out for it, and when I remembered, the opportunity had passed for another year.
Here's some pics.

The diary is leather bound and is secured with a leather thong.

The inner diary itself is sheathed in thin leather to give the pages strength and support the punch holes so they won't tear out. The punch holes are secured with leather thong.

The pages themselves are one week to each page. Just short notes are needed as an aid memoir. You fill in the month and year yourself and put the dates next to each day so you can start the diary any time in any month in any year and it'll still be good five years later.

There's enough pages for five years of notes.

I've done a bit of tooling on the cover.

You can see from the size that it's not too big, and will fit in a ditty bag or backpack.
The pages were made on CorelDraw v9. I just printed out a master page then photocopied it both sides on A4 paper. These were then cut into four, assembled in one pile and hole punched with a normal hole punch.
Anyone wanting to try one for themselves? If so I'll make the master page into a PDF file and link to it here so you can just download it and print it out. You'll need just 34 sheets of A4 paper and some scrap leather to make this diary.
Anyway, that's my 5 year diary. Thanks for looking.
Eric