Does that come with Access ? Never thought at looking at templates.

Look at templates, see if your version has it. As I remember it when I was using Access the plant collection one was in the same menu as the household inventory.

Historically, I've used Word to record what I've done in previous years (to the tune of 80 pages of very tightly phrased text) organized by the date of the Sunday of the week.

If and when I need, I refer to the same Sunday from the previous week of the last year (or other years), but it's surprising how rarely they relate to each other!

I keep inserted charts of NPK ratios of things applied to the lawn and gardens with the date in the leftmost column. Those end up getting posted to my blog, which I've been neglecting this year.

To really be able to help with your problem we really need to know what you have done, and more importantly to know why the attempts failed.

Did the attempts fall because:

you were keeping track of the wrong things? to much detail or not enough detail?

The items in the database were nor as accessible as you would like?

The system was to complicated and time consuming to keep up?

Etc?

If maintaining the data is time consuming you could use a table or smart phone that would read the bar codes on each item used, ie fertilzer,, pest control; and record it with the GPS location where you applied the item.

Inventory related failure would require a different approach.

One thing to understand is that Excel is not a database. It is a spreadsheet tool for testing ideas you might want to put into a database. A database protects data from accidents by users. The spreadsheet most definitely does not. Have you ever sorted a spreadsheet and forgotten to get all the columns??

I don't need a database to remember when to fertilize, because it happens to coincide with some major holidays. I fertilize on The Big Three: Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving. If I really want to up my fertilizer game, I'll fertilize on the added days of Washington's Birthday and 4th of July. I live in South Texas, so my seasons are different from most of the readers. The big three are pretty standard for lawns. If I am going to do post emergent weed control in South Texas, I do that in mid April. If you are doing preemergent weed control, you have to listen to the whispers of Nature. For most people where forsythia grows, watch for the first signs of flowers. In my area we don't have forsythia. I have noticed that weeds pop FAST following the first multiday rain event after New Years. Then every rain event after that more weed seeds germinate. The time to apply preemergent here is during or immediately following those events. You cannot put the whispers of Nature into a database to predict the future. You can marvel at the past, though.