Merging Time Garden

How to combine Time Garden’s temporal journaling with an existing Obsidian vault — without losing what you already have.

If you already have a beloved Obsidian vault — full of project notes, research, a knowledge base — you don't have to choose between that and Time Garden. You can have both, in the same vault.

This is what we call merging Time Garden. It's one of Time Garden's most popular workflows.

The Core Idea

Your existing vault stays exactly as it is. You just copy in the Time Garden folders, plugins, and templates — and the layered journal lives alongside everything else.

Your daily notes go to 01 Daily/. Your project notes stay where they are. Time Garden's CSS classes only style its own notes (because every Time Garden note has a timegarden-* class), so your existing notes look unchanged.

The Merge Process

1. Back Up Your Existing Vault

Don't skip this. Even if it's "just notes". Copy the whole vault folder to a safe place. Or commit it to git. Both, ideally.

2. Download A Fresh Time Garden

Get the latest from the download page — same as a fresh install (see Download and install Time Garden).

3. Copy The Time Garden Folders Into Your Vault

From the Time Garden vault, copy these folders into your vault:

00 Dashboard/
01 Daily/
02 Weekly/
03 Monthly/
04 Quarterly/
05 Yearly/
06 Templates/
07 Notes/      ← optional; rename if you already use this folder

If any of those folder names already exist in your vault, rename Time Garden's version (e.g., 00 TG Dashboard/). You'll need to update the templates to match — see Adjusting Templates Yourself.

4. Install Time Garden's Plugins

Time Garden depends on ~18 community plugins (Templater, Dataview, MetaBind, Journals, etc.). The easiest way to install them all:

Copy the entire .obsidian/plugins/ folder from the Time Garden vault into your vault, merging with your existing plugins folder (don't overwrite — merge)
Copy .obsidian/community-plugins.json from the Time Garden vault and merge its plugin IDs into your existing one
Restart Obsidian
Trust the new plugins when prompted

(Alternatively, install each plugin manually one by one. Slower but cleaner.)

5. Copy The CSS Snippets

Copy the contents of .obsidian/snippets/ from Time Garden into your vault's same folder. They'll only affect Time-Garden-classed notes.

6. Configure The Journals Plugin

Open Obsidian Settings → Journals. Set up the daily / weekly / monthly / quarterly / yearly journals to point to Time Garden's folders (01 Daily/, 02 Weekly/, etc.) and the corresponding parent template (06 Templates/Parents/Daily.md, etc.).

The "Hide Frontmatter" Gotcha

The single biggest merge issue.

Time Garden's CSS hides the frontmatter properties pane on every note (because Time Garden uses frontmatter for internal data, not user-facing properties). If your existing notes use Obsidian's Properties feature for tags, due dates, etc., that hiding will affect them too.

Fix: in Appearance Settings, turn off the snippet time-garden-hide-visible-frontmatter. Then in Editor Settings, set "Properties in document" to show. Your Time Garden notes will show frontmatter (a small visual cost), but your other notes will work normally.

This combination is also what causes the disappearing-title bug — the fix above resolves it.

What To Test After Merging

Open Time Garden in your merged vault and:

✅ A daily note auto-opens (or can be opened from the ribbon)
✅ The banner shows up
✅ The navbar appears
✅ The rating slider works
✅ Quick Note buttons insert tagged bullets
✅ A weekly note can be created (try the navbar's "↑ Up" button)
✅ The week's bar chart renders
✅ AI buttons work (if you have Eternal set up)

If any of these fail, see Daily note bugs or Performance & Slowness.

What You Get After Merging

A fully-functional Time Garden as your temporal journaling layer
Your existing knowledge base, projects, and research untouched
The ability to link from a project note to a daily note (and vice versa) via Internal links — your project history starts integrating with your life history
One unified search, one unified graph, one unified backup story

A Note On Updates

When Updating Time Garden, you'll want to be selective — updating the plugin is fine, but updating 06 Templates/ can clobber any customizations you made. The recommended approach: copy the new templates into a different folder first, diff against yours, then merge by hand.

Up Next

Adjusting Templates Yourself — make Time Garden's structure fit your existing vault
Daily note bugs — common merge-related issues
Updating Time Garden — keeping it healthy long-term

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