On recording propagations

Wondering how to handle propagations in IrisBG? The short answer is that there is not one way, but many different ways to do this. Learn how they currently work with propagations at Mt. Cuba Center.

Intro | Community Contribution | Open discussion

Recording Propagations:
Crowdsourcing Solutions to Tricky Propagation Questions

The title of Julie's presentation says it all; finding a workflow that is straightforward, efficient and ideally not prone to errors is a difficult feat, but throughout the discussion, we hope that those who attended got some new ideas – we sure did.

🌱 NEWS! Preserved Material to be included in our Standard package

Julie showed us that at Mt. Cuba Center they have created a designated Item type for propagations, in addition to "Planting" that most of you are familiar with.

To add other Item types you would need the Persevered Material module and since we learned about how other members of the community how found creative, but not sustainable solutions to track their seeds, we have decided that from our next release the Preserved Material module will be included as an integrated part of our Standard package. Follow the topic Latest version of IrisBG to get notified when we release our next version (before the end of March).

Open discussion

As Julie mentions, she is sharing how they currently are working with three different propagation scenarios at Mt. Cuba Center at the moment. She (and we) are very interested in how you are working with propagations in your garden and if you have any good suggestions for improvements. We had an open discussion to talk over some of the questions Julie had. The 8 questions are listed below, some with an IrisBG comment.

Do you have any suggestions or ideas you would like to share? Feel free to comment below on this article or start a forum thread.

This part of the Coffee Chat was not recorded.

1. What information is important to capture to track germination?
   - In IrisBG there is a designated propagation section that appears if you select a propagation status (Accessions screen > Items tab). This is what we at IrisBG think is important. Do you track other metrics?
2. How can we use IrisBG to best (or better) store this information?
   How do you use IrisBG differently?
3. How can reports be used to pull out this information in a more usable format?
   - In IrisBG there is a propagation report (ItemProp01 under 02 Accession Items), but Julie is also using the Item02 report. What do you do?
4. What could we do to limit the number of statuses that are being used, or simplify our workflow?
   - We would suggest limiting the status codes to cover the main events and then using the fields in the propagation section to record details. Which statuses do you use?
5. How often would you recommend running these audits?
6. How does your garden manage plant movement into and out of the greenhouse?
7. Do any of you track plant numbers in a rigorous way such as this? If so, how do you limit errors in numbers that seem to occur quite often for us?
   
8. Does your garden use IrisBG on a tablet to utilize the database in the field? How does this help your efficiency?
   - It is possible to use IrisBG on a tablet that runs on Windows, but we also heard from San Francisco Botanical Garden that they have been using iPads with virtualization software. But many resorts to good old fashioned pen and paper. What do you do?