Seen some people using that grow diaries website. This is the guy I know who was using it: DiamondGrower grower profile - GrowDiaries
I personally have a hard time using any kind of software for recording or publishing gardening notes. I just keep all my notes on paper cards. Lineage notes are stored within their family’s seed box. For each seed generation, I store those saved seeds with growth habit and season notes of the parental stock used to create them.
I don’t grow flower from clone. If I did, I’d be more concerned with recording environment data and looking for correlations to lab test data and yield results, to further dial in my commercial cultivation. But I exclusively breed and bonsai. Every single plant is seeded, culled, or stalled out in vegetative growth. What other information could possibly be relevant?
Growing from seed, I photograph untrained plants once sexual maturity is reached. Then again in early floral development, and usually the last time before harvest. (Rarely take trimmed dried bud shots as 'most everything is sieved for hash.) For every plant photo I try to capture clear view of the same angles: whole plant viewed from eye-level down, whole plant viewed from soil-level up, whole plant viewed from level profile, internodal lengths, closeups on plant sex parts, along with any interesting colorations or mutations observed. Every photo features a tape measure or yard stick for accurate scale information, along with either a tag or sign or card stating the plant’s name and number. They’re all in dated folders.
I don’t take notes on structure because those notes are relevant only when trying to dial in a room of genetically identical plants; I can review and answer any questions I have about morphology very accurately by bringing my photos into photoshop and applying a grid that aligns with the visible tape measure. Of every plant I ever work with, I can go back and count how many nodes until sexual maturity was reached, the precise distance between every single node or the length of any branch, the horizontal spread, number of lateral branches, etc. And of course the grow media and environment are there too.
And I don’t take notes on environment, because my locality has excellent correlation to my land’s microclimate. For the past 40 years this property has consistently been accurately represented by our mid-island weather service reports and data. So I can look at publicly available weather history data and correlate that to which crops I grew when, to better understand climatic impacts on that expression.
I just don’t see any potential value in incorporating a 3rd party garden notes program or service. It seems like more work for no added insurance. Perhaps just a convenient way of publishing your notes directly for review by other growers.
Because if I enter my notes on their servers, what if I don’t have internet access, or the company goes under, or is hacked, or their servers are destroyed by disaster, etc.? So it is obviously mandatory for my breeding career that I keep hardcopy records on hand, to ensure I always have access to them. And it just makes sense to keep those hardcopies directly with the seeds they relate to–if there’s ever a fire, I won’t have to grab my seed boxes plus their corresponding filing cabinet; I just have to grab my ‘master’ seed box which contains all my recent projects. Or if I ever suddenly die, the inheritor of my seeds will not have difficulty finding information about the seeds’ lineage.
What matters most is that the lineage is recorded to aid further breeding work, whether by myself or others. Having that information separate from the seeds they concern is likely to result in it being lost altogether. And if my boxes of seed are ever stolen or destroyed, the information stored remotely is then largely irrelevant, as those lines are inaccessible, and the information cannot be faithfully leveraged.
I know a guy who got ripped off for his entire life’s work of private seed breeding: he lost over 300 unique lines, all labeled in prohibition-era codes. The break-in looked to be financially motivated by an ex-employee at his facility, and the seeds that were stolen were likely very difficult to sell due to their lack of readable information; just hundreds of envelopes of abbreviated crosses and lineages, cryptic symbols only the breeder understands. This beautiful breeding work may have been lost because the thief was unable to find an interested buyer. And even if they are sold, the grower of them doesn’t truly know what’s what. The guy will never see his genetics again. And if he thinks he does, he won’t know for sure.
If my seeds are stolen, I’d rather them stand a chance at being grown, than be treated like back-alley evidence to be dumped. God forbid they mixed all the seeds together, re-labeled and tried to sell them bulk or something stupid.
But I often think of the guy who got ripped off, and the look of defeat on his face when he told me. He was not angry about the 100+ fixtures stolen, or the nearly 60k cash they took, or the pounds upon pounds of aged concentrates. He was broken in half because he knew that those seeds he worked on for almost 30 years were gone forever.
If they were properly labeled and had detailed information with them, they would have been easier to fence, and may have found a home. And if they found a home and were grown out, the grower may have even called them by their true names. And one day he might have bumped into someone growing one of his plants, or a plant that sounds like it was crossed with one of his lines, and he could start asking questions upstream. He could sleuth his way through growers seed vendors and breeders to get to the original source of what he well-knew were stolen genetics. Even if there was no recourse, he could still at least have the hope of searching, the hope of finding the genetics he lost, or at least getting a better idea of the guy who ripped him off.
So that’s why all my breeding notes are 100% accurate, no lies or codes. If I die or get ripped off, I want my work to be understood, to mean something to someone else, or at least grown with some excitement.
Anyway, one day, when everything is recorded by high-res cameras and uploaded to a cloud for AI to process, we will have access to unlimited data: including how long we’ve stood near each plant, the rates of all directions of growth over any time period, localized microclimate data including the temp/humidity/co2 around each specific plant site during each second of any day in its growth cycle, etc. All those CAPTCHA robots we’re programming will very soon be able to differentiate individual plants, strains, even nutrition or environmental stress. The eye in the greenhouse sky will see Plant436 Row28 has responded sub-optimally to the recent fertigation, and a little drone flies out to the plant and foliar mists it with some chelated iron and boron, or whatever the sensor indicates from the plant tissues, and whatever the AI identifies as the problem, and whatever the drone sprays as the solution.
Make no mistake my friends, here in 2020, we are the very near the last generation of manual farmers. One day I can even see our Purell nation descending into such absurdity as to outlaw human-grown food as dangerous, because “human hands present a contamination risk” and “only robots can handle food with assured sterility” yada yada yada. Some 2080 Mad Cow outbreak blamed on some rural traditional farmer, while trillions of big ag dollars exchange hands, happy to finally cancel their health and life insurance policies. Robots don’t get sick =)
