Growing and maintaing old varieties together

The foundation ProSpecieRara has a large collection of over 4000 old varieties of vegetables, field crops, fruits, berries and ornamental plants. To maintain this diversity a network of over 1000 people is involved. The advantage of the network are manyfold, but there is a disadvantage: A lot of the knowledge about the old varieties is in the network and does not arrive at our foundation and is not stored in our database. We do not have adequate information on all of the varieties. For the seed propagated varieties we have a small questionnaire on paper that they send in with the propagated seeds. There we ask about the germination rate, diseases and description of their conditions (soil, climate, altitude etc.) and descriptions of the variety. But this data is so far not rendered or entered systematically into our variety database. For the other varieties there is no systematic approach to collect the knowledge.

So for us it would be a huge facillitation and progress, if the sustainers and other plant enthusiasts could easily enter their information (preferably not textbase, but through an intelligent choice of options) and experiences with those varieties, including pictures into an app (which would desirably be compatible with our filemaker database?).

It would be great too, if the sustainers of a certain variety could easily communicate with each other about this variety and they and we could see if the development of the variety is normal, where the difficulties lie or if there needs to be an intervention.

In a second step this information could then be transformed and complemented with other databases to be interesting for the wider public: Where carrots do best, if the soil is compatible with the desired crop etc.

Challenge proposé par Esther Meduna, ProSpecieRara

Could be mixed with Challenge Gardening Knowledge Map