Those are all great questions. I’ll go through them one at a time.
I am in 7b which I believe is similar to Washington D.C. (but that may not be right).
I’m not entirely sure what kind of soil we will have at our field, but at our home, our soil is essentially totally silty. Actually, I’m having problems with drainage and my plants getting nutrients. I can tell because many of them have chlorosis on the leaves and new growth. However, that’s another topic. My father-in-law planted our garden, so I had no say in preparing the soil.
When it comes to soil for my breeding roses,I’m planning to start with them in large containers, so I can essentially create whatever soil I want. Once we plant them in the ground, I plan to use raised beds, so I should be able to also create a decent soil. Of course, I need to first do a soil test in our field, but like I said, I haven’t been able to yet.
When it comes to rain, I’m not entirely sure how to describe it. I’ll have to get back to you.
At this point, I’m planning to breed initially for garden roses, but there is a chance that I’ll do florist roses in the future. It’s not my plan for now, though.
Atlas of Woody Plants in China: Distribution and Climate, Volume 1, is a useful book (online) that gives the geographical distribution of Chinese plants. Genus Rosa begins on page 551.
There is a lot of coded information beneath each map that I have not figured out. It probably encodes the info from Chapter 3: Climatic Variables and Their Distribution in China. This begins on p. xxvi. There are other maps in that chapter showing comparable climatic regions around the world.
Loads of information in there that I have only begun to tap. The maps help me sort out statements botanists make about closely allied species that are not found in the same regions. That is, a tetraploid species may be derived in part from a diploid that is not found in the same region. But they may have shared a space in the past when the climate was different.
My wife and I are in our 3rd year hybridizing in the Seattle/Olympic area. Coming from a software / data science background I’m personally obsessed with the tracking and process optimization.
We manage our rose database in Airtable and we have out DYMO label printer hooks up to a little Raspberri Pi “Kiosk” touch-screen so we can easily label our crosses in the field without a lot of work. Last year we did about 650 pollinations, and this year was 700. Roughly about 1400 seeds and something like 100 active breeding plants each year.
Here’s how we setup our database, if you are curious:
Breeding Plants Table, with a unique ID for each plant in our program
Hips Table, Each cross essentially
Seedlings Table, Each Seedling that germinates and survives the winter
[ Year ] Pollination Log
[ Year ] Rose Log Book
Each morning when pollen is collected or something in the garden is interesting we can make an entry in the rose log book. The entries from that day will be used later to enter in data for the pollination log. That way we can track the bloom cycle of every active breeding plant more or less accurately and collect a series of pictures or observations on a rose as a part of the daily routine. The daily routine should be easy enough to do from a phone.
After we have finished pollinating we transfer the pollination log over into the hips table so we can track their development. If a hip produces seeds and those germinate they enter the seedlings table. If we decide to use that cross in our breeding we will transfer that into the breeding plants program.
The advantage of all this work is that I can then do some post-analysis on the data to see which transitive crosses are likely to be successful. We can also better plan our program for our particular climate and possibly find unique patterns in the data that can help us with our experiments.
John, kudos to you for your organization system. I consistently underperform in the area of recordkeeping, but have made some valiant thrusts in that direction including creating a Filemaker Pro database, which remains unfinished. I actually was able to print out a roll of labels with bar codes representing a four-digit ID so that I could scan a label onto my phone for entering a seedling or calling up it’s record. Sounds cool but it would probably be easier to just punch in the number. Anyways, I can use these tags to number my preliminary keeper seedlings so that if I use their pollen or seed I can look up what they are. For now I simply type an entry into a note in the Notes app on my iPhone, usually along with a photo. That allows me to do a search in the notes app for that number and quickly access the parentage of that seedling. Crude compared to a database but it is all I am up for right now. The Filemaker database remains unused.
What I find interesting is that lineage (ancestry) databases require some complex relationships that even a pretty good program like Filemaker has trouble with. As it is I can create a relationship graph with multiple instances of the rose table, but each generation back requires an exponentially greater number of instances. 2,4,8,16,32, etc. It would be quite a task to go back more than four generations. It’s interesting that the HelpMeFind folks have solved this problem.
Thanks so much for your info! I found Airtable, and I’ve been putting together my own database in there. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than anything else I’ve found! Good thing to know I’m not the only one, so it must be decent haha.
Would you be open to sharing how you have the raspberry pi and printer setup? That’s a piece I haven’t figured out yet.
Yes, the whole relational database thing (to track lineage) is a problem I’ve also run into. Airtable is wonderful, but if you want to use more than one level up (in a rose’s lineage), that’s about as far as you can practically do. For now, I’ve just done that. It’s annoying, but it’s easier. I haven’t tried Filemaker Pro yet, but I’m going to stay with Airtable since it seems to be at least decent for breeding.
I’m not sure if I can easily share a copy of my database as a template, but I can see if it’s possible if you’d like.