HELP APPRECIATED: Tatiana's TOMATObase

Tania · January 5, 2013

Inspired by the thread about the 'most informative' tomato websites, I decided it would be appropriate to come out and ask for some help getting Tatiana's TOMATObase even more informative

There are two things people positively comment on most often:

1. growout notes about the same variety from different people (because most of us appreciate seeing unbiased personal opinions)
2. Seed availability - where one can buy a particular variety

#1 could greatly improve if you consider contributing some of your growout notes. This will help to see how a variety performs in different regions and climates. Even 1 note from you would be awesome, especially for varieties that do not have any personal growout notes yet.

As Scott mentioned in the other thread, notes from southern states are particularly scarce if not 100% lacking.

#2. This is a HUGE job to update Seeds Availability sections for 1500+ tomato varieties every year. Only 1 seed vendor out of 44 listed updates his vendor listing at TOMATObase every year. And Michael (Germany) helped a lot with updating two vendors' listings this year. The rest I do myself.

Yesterday I just finished with lettuce seed availability (huge THANK YOU goes to Jeff Flemming who sent me his spreadsheet with lettuce varieties and vendors who carry them). Jeff's spreadsheet also gave me a good idea - to compile a 'master' spreadsheet with all vendor listings and then import them all into TOMATObase. As opposed to going through a vendor website and updating each variety at TOMATObase with the vendor code, and keep doing the same for each vendor.

Unfortunately the job is still very manual, as there is no good tool to update the pages automatically - at least not yet, we'll have to work on this. However, collecting the data first will help to minimise the number of page updates and hence will take less time.

So, if anyone has a list of all 2013 varieties for any vendor from the list below, please email it to me. The ideal format would be a spreadsheet with 1st column listing variety names, and 2nd column having word 'new' if variety is newly offered in 2013. However, even just a list of names would be awesome!

I still need the lists for the following vendors:

Casey's Heirloom Tomatoes of Airdrie - sent PM to Jeff asking for the list
Gleckler Seedmen - website not updated for 2013
Marianna's - website is not available, not sure what happened there
New World Seeds & Tubers - not updated for 2013, Seed Shop is currently closed for maintenance.
Pinetree Seeds - done by Doug9345
Reimer Seeds
Sand Hill Preservation Center - website not updated for 2013 yet
Seed Savers Exchange - done by RobinB and Darrel
Seeds of Change - done by Robin
Skyfire Garden Seeds - Robin is working on it
Snow Seed - done by Doug9345
Solana Seeds - done by Doug9345
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange - done by ContainerTed
Terroir Seeds - done by Robin
Tomato Growers Supplydone by ContainerTed
Tomatofest - done by ContainerTed
Trade Winds Fruit - done by Doug9345
Twining Vine Garden - done by Doug9345
Two Wings Farm - done by Doug9345
Veseys Seeds - done by Robin
Victory Seed Company - done by Doug9345
West Coast Seeds - done by Doug9345
Wild Boar Farms - done by ContainerTed
*bonus vendor listing - Swallowtail - done by ContainerTed

I have already compiled the lists for the following vendors:
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds
Blue Ribbon Tomatoes
Double Helix Farms
Fedco Seeds
Full Circle Seeds
Gourmet Seed International
Hazzard's Wholesale Seeds
Heirloom Seeds
Heirloom Tomatoes
Heritage Harvest Seed
Heritage Tomato Seed (thank you Steve!)
J.W. Jung Seed Company
The Sample Seed Shop (thank you Remy!)
NE Seed
Salt Spring Seeds
Territorial Seed Company
Knapp's - thank you Carol!

I know this is not the most exciting 'job', so if no one responds, I will totally understand!

Cheers,
Tatiana

Tania · January 5, 2013

Forgot to mention one very important thing:

If you do not have a vendor list but thinking about helping to create it, please respond in this thread, so I (or anybody else) do not pick the same vendor and duplicate the job.

I will be working on these tonight:

New World Seeds & Tubers
Pinetree Seeds
Salt Spring Seeds

RobinB · January 5, 2013

Tatiana,
I would be happy to compile one or more of these vendor lists for you. Why don't you "assign" me one and I'll get to work. I don't mind at all. I use your TOMATObase a lot!

What is involved in submitting growout notes/photos? Would you just like those emailed to you? I'll have to see if I've got notes/photos on any varieties that you might need help with.

Robin

Tania · January 5, 2013

This morning I received 3GB worth of beautiful tomato photos from Aleksey Kulik, a tomato grower and seed vendor from Ukraine, who kindly donated them for TOMATObase. So I will be busy processing and posting the pictures on his behalf - I am sure you would love his pictures as much as I do when you see them.

Tania · January 5, 2013

Quote:

Originally Posted by RobinB

Tatiana,
I would be happy to compile one or more of these vendor lists for you. Why don't you "assign" me one and I'll get to work. I don't mind at all. I use your TOMATObase a lot!

What is involved in submitting growout notes/photos? Would you just like those emailed to you? I'll have to see if I've got notes/photos on any varieties that you might need help with.

Robin

Robin,

THANK YOU!

How about you'd take Seed Savers Exchange public catalog?

Re growout notes and photos - you can post them directly to TOMATObase, you just need to create a user account at TOMATObase and email me your user id and your first and last name and garden location, so I can assign you a member code, create your member page, and give you uploading rights if you want to upload pictures. Then you can edit away! (I will fix formatting if necessary, so please do not worry if something does not look quite 'right')

Here is some basic 'help' notes on editing wiki pages: http://tatianastomatobase.com/wiki/Help:Contents

RobinB · January 5, 2013

No problem. I'll get to work.

Robin

RobinB · January 5, 2013

Tatiana,
I assume you mean seeds available at:
http://www.seedsavers.org/onlinestore/

Only tomatoes, or other things as well?

Robin

ContainerTed · January 5, 2013

Interesting. I just came here to send you a PM about a somewhat long list of my recent growouts, but I think it needs to be in the public eye. I should have been updating and adding more and have been very remiss. I'll also have some pictures. Anyhow, I'll have it ready in a few days.

Fusion_power · January 5, 2013

Note to self: Tania is "Coming Out"!

Tania, no promises, but I will ask Glenn Drowns if he can provide the Sandhill listing as a text file. If so, that would allow you to update quickly and easily by importing into Excel.

One more item, I don't usually advertise this, but my 9 to 5 job includes being a master data manipulator. There are likely some things I can show you how to do with Excel that would dramatically speed up the process of merging and grouping data. Also, Excel has the ability to open a website, extract records, manipulate them, then push them to another website in a modified format. With a site like Sandhill, you could write a macro that would grab the entire tomato page, parse the variety names, then update your master list. In other words, you would NOT have to do much in the way of manual manipulation. It would be trickier to do with a place like Johnny's that insists on putting the webpages in fancy formats with pictures and buttons and such.

DarJones

As an example, here is the list of tomatoes Seedsavers has for 2013 in the public catalog.
Amish Paste
Aunt Ruby's Green Conv
Aunt Ruby's Green
Austin's Red Pear
Beam's Yellow Pear
Black Cherry
Black from Tula
Black Krim
Black Plum
Black Sea Man
Blondkopfchen
Brandywine
Brandywine (Sudduth's Strain)
Brown Berry
Chalk's Early Jewel
Cherokee Purple
Cherry Roma
Cream Sausage
Crnkovic Yugoslavian
Crnt Gold Rush
Crnt Sweet Pea
Czech's Bush
Dester
Dr. Wyche's Yellow
Earliana
Egg Yolk
Emmy
Eva Purple Ball
Federle
German Pink
Gold Medal
Green Grape
Green Sausage
Green Zebra
Hartman's Yellow Gooseberry
Hillbilly Potato Leaf
Hungarian Heart
Isis Candy
Italian Heirloom
Japanese Trifele Black
Jaune Flamme
John Baer
Kellogg's Breakfast
Kolb
Large Red Cherry
Lemon Drop
Martino's Roma
Mexico Midget
Moonglow
Mortgage Lifter (Halladay's)
Nebraska Wedding Conv
Nebraska Wedding
Nyagous
Opalka
Paul Robeson
Peach Blow Sutton
Plum Lemon
Ponderosa Red
Principe Borghese
Red Fig
Red Zebra
Redfield Beauty
Riesentraube
Rose
Rosso Sicilian
Sheboygan
Siberian
Silvery Fir Tree
Soldacki
Speckled Roman
Striped Cavern
Stupice
Tasty Evergreen
Mamie Brown's Pink
Tommy Toe
Trophy
Trucker's Favorite Pink
Ukrainian Purple
Variegated
Velvet Red
Wapsipinicon
White Cherry
White Tomesol
Wisconsin 55

RobinB · January 6, 2013

And, I just emailed you an Excel file for Seed Savers as well, so now you have it twice!

Let me know what else I can do.

Robin

Tania · January 6, 2013

Robin, thank you! Your next assignment is Seeds of Change and Skyfire Garden Seeds.

Darrel, thank you! Sandhill's listing in text format would be great, if Glenn can do it, it would be lovely. [After all, I think vendors benefit from being mentioned at TOMATObase, as I often see folks going to their websites after visiting TOMATObase - hopefully to buy some seeds

]

Yes, Johnny's is not the best website wrt getting the data I need. But not many vendor websites are built with data extraction in mind - why would they be anyway?

)

Tania · January 6, 2013

Darrel, any website data importing tricks for Excel would be so much appreciated! (I was going to ask my younger son to do it, but he promptly decided that computer programming is not 'his thing'

)

Data manipulation within Excel I can manage reasonably well. I can create a string with all the vendor codes for each tomato variety within Excel (already did it for lettuces) - and all is left is to take it and import it into the wiki page, which would be more tricky, as we need to write code to update pages programmatically. The alternative is a manual input, which is tedious.

We thought that writing some code to export a page, update the required section, and import it back in would be the way to go, but it was not that easy. The other way (doing it through MediaWiki API) would be more involved.

Doug9345 · January 6, 2013

I just put Solana's Tomatoes in a spread sheet I'll do Victory next.

Tania · January 6, 2013

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doug9345

I just put Solana's Tomatoes in a spread sheet I'll do Victory next.

wonderful!!!

You guys are so fast.

Tomatovillians are the best!!!

Doug9345 · January 6, 2013

I'm working on Victory. I have SSE, Solana and working on Victory all on the same page with a check system for a vendor. They do'n overlap as much as I would have thought. I'm going to finish it in the morning as it is 1:15 am here.

January 5, 2013	#4
Tania Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: Anmore, BC, Canada Posts: 3,970	This morning I received 3GB worth of beautiful tomato photos from Aleksey Kulik, a tomato grower and seed vendor from Ukraine, who kindly donated them for TOMATObase. So I will be busy processing and posting the pictures on his behalf - I am sure you would love his pictures as much as I do when you see them. __________________ Tatiana's TOMATObase Last edited by Tania; January 5, 2013 at 11:24 PM.

January 5, 2013	#8
ContainerTed Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Jul 2008 Location: 6a - NE Tennessee Posts: 4,538	Interesting. I just came here to send you a PM about a somewhat long list of my recent growouts, but I think it needs to be in the public eye. I should have been updating and adding more and have been very remiss. I'll also have some pictures. Anyhow, I'll have it ready in a few days. __________________ Ted ________________________ Owner & Sole Operator Of The Muddy Bucket Farm and Tomato Ranch Last edited by ContainerTed; January 6, 2013 at 11:25 AM. Reason: Going to help with lists first thing

January 5, 2013	#9
Fusion_power Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Feb 2006 Location: Alabama Posts: 2,250	Note to self: Tania is "Coming Out"! Tania, no promises, but I will ask Glenn Drowns if he can provide the Sandhill listing as a text file. If so, that would allow you to update quickly and easily by importing into Excel. One more item, I don't usually advertise this, but my 9 to 5 job includes being a master data manipulator. There are likely some things I can show you how to do with Excel that would dramatically speed up the process of merging and grouping data. Also, Excel has the ability to open a website, extract records, manipulate them, then push them to another website in a modified format. With a site like Sandhill, you could write a macro that would grab the entire tomato page, parse the variety names, then update your master list. In other words, you would NOT have to do much in the way of manual manipulation. It would be trickier to do with a place like Johnny's that insists on putting the webpages in fancy formats with pictures and buttons and such. DarJones As an example, here is the list of tomatoes Seedsavers has for 2013 in the public catalog. Amish Paste Aunt Ruby's Green Conv Aunt Ruby's Green Austin's Red Pear Beam's Yellow Pear Black Cherry Black from Tula Black Krim Black Plum Black Sea Man Blondkopfchen Brandywine Brandywine (Sudduth's Strain) Brown Berry Chalk's Early Jewel Cherokee Purple Cherry Roma Cream Sausage Crnkovic Yugoslavian Crnt Gold Rush Crnt Sweet Pea Czech's Bush Dester Dr. Wyche's Yellow Earliana Egg Yolk Emmy Eva Purple Ball Federle German Pink Gold Medal Green Grape Green Sausage Green Zebra Hartman's Yellow Gooseberry Hillbilly Potato Leaf Hungarian Heart Isis Candy Italian Heirloom Japanese Trifele Black Jaune Flamme John Baer Kellogg's Breakfast Kolb Large Red Cherry Lemon Drop Martino's Roma Mexico Midget Moonglow Mortgage Lifter (Halladay's) Nebraska Wedding Conv Nebraska Wedding Nyagous Opalka Paul Robeson Peach Blow Sutton Plum Lemon Ponderosa Red Principe Borghese Red Fig Red Zebra Redfield Beauty Riesentraube Rose Rosso Sicilian Sheboygan Siberian Silvery Fir Tree Soldacki Speckled Roman Striped Cavern Stupice Tasty Evergreen Mamie Brown's Pink Tommy Toe Trophy Trucker's Favorite Pink Ukrainian Purple Variegated Velvet Red Wapsipinicon White Cherry White Tomesol Wisconsin 55 Last edited by Fusion_power; January 5, 2013 at 11:58 PM. Reason: add Seedsavers tomato list

January 6, 2013	#11
Tania Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: Anmore, BC, Canada Posts: 3,970	Robin, thank you! Your next assignment is Seeds of Change and Skyfire Garden Seeds. Darrel, thank you! Sandhill's listing in text format would be great, if Glenn can do it, it would be lovely. [After all, I think vendors benefit from being mentioned at TOMATObase, as I often see folks going to their websites after visiting TOMATObase - hopefully to buy some seeds ] Yes, Johnny's is not the best website wrt getting the data I need. But not many vendor websites are built with data extraction in mind - why would they be anyway? ) __________________ Tatiana's TOMATObase Last edited by Tania; January 7, 2013 at 09:24 PM.

January 6, 2013	#12
Tania Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: Anmore, BC, Canada Posts: 3,970	Darrel, any website data importing tricks for Excel would be so much appreciated! (I was going to ask my younger son to do it, but he promptly decided that computer programming is not 'his thing' ) Data manipulation within Excel I can manage reasonably well. I can create a string with all the vendor codes for each tomato variety within Excel (already did it for lettuces) - and all is left is to take it and import it into the wiki page, which would be more tricky, as we need to write code to update pages programmatically. The alternative is a manual input, which is tedious. We thought that writing some code to export a page, update the required section, and import it back in would be the way to go, but it was not that easy. The other way (doing it through MediaWiki API) would be more involved. __________________ Tatiana's TOMATObase Last edited by Tania; January 6, 2013 at 01:17 AM.

January 5, 2013	#1
Tania Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: Anmore, BC, Canada Posts: 3,970	HELP APPRECIATED: Tatiana's TOMATObase Inspired by the thread about the 'most informative' tomato websites, I decided it would be appropriate to come out and ask for some help getting Tatiana's TOMATObase even more informative There are two things people positively comment on most often: 1. growout notes about the same variety from different people (because most of us appreciate seeing unbiased personal opinions) 2. Seed availability - where one can buy a particular variety #1 could greatly improve if you consider contributing some of your growout notes. This will help to see how a variety performs in different regions and climates. Even 1 note from you would be awesome, especially for varieties that do not have any personal growout notes yet. As Scott mentioned in the other thread, notes from southern states are particularly scarce if not 100% lacking. #2. This is a HUGE job to update Seeds Availability sections for 1500+ tomato varieties every year. Only 1 seed vendor out of 44 listed updates his vendor listing at TOMATObase every year. And Michael (Germany) helped a lot with updating two vendors' listings this year. The rest I do myself. Yesterday I just finished with lettuce seed availability (huge THANK YOU goes to Jeff Flemming who sent me his spreadsheet with lettuce varieties and vendors who carry them). Jeff's spreadsheet also gave me a good idea - to compile a 'master' spreadsheet with all vendor listings and then import them all into TOMATObase. As opposed to going through a vendor website and updating each variety at TOMATObase with the vendor code, and keep doing the same for each vendor. Unfortunately the job is still very manual, as there is no good tool to update the pages automatically - at least not yet, we'll have to work on this. However, collecting the data first will help to minimise the number of page updates and hence will take less time. So, if anyone has a list of all 2013 varieties for any vendor from the list below, please email it to me. The ideal format would be a spreadsheet with 1st column listing variety names, and 2nd column having word 'new' if variety is newly offered in 2013. However, even just a list of names would be awesome! I still need the lists for the following vendors: Casey's Heirloom Tomatoes of Airdrie - sent PM to Jeff asking for the list Gleckler Seedmen - website not updated for 2013 Marianna's - website is not available, not sure what happened there New World Seeds & Tubers - not updated for 2013, Seed Shop is currently closed for maintenance. Pinetree Seeds - done by Doug9345 Reimer Seeds Sand Hill Preservation Center - website not updated for 2013 yet Seed Savers Exchange - done by RobinB and Darrel Seeds of Change - done by Robin Skyfire Garden Seeds - Robin is working on it Snow Seed - done by Doug9345 Solana Seeds - done by Doug9345 Southern Exposure Seed Exchange - done by ContainerTed Terroir Seeds - done by Robin Tomato Growers Supplydone by ContainerTed Tomatofest - done by ContainerTed Trade Winds Fruit - done by Doug9345 Twining Vine Garden - done by Doug9345 Two Wings Farm - done by Doug9345 Veseys Seeds - done by Robin Victory Seed Company - done by Doug9345 West Coast Seeds - done by Doug9345 Wild Boar Farms - done by ContainerTed bonus vendor listing - Swallowtail - done by ContainerTed* I have already compiled the lists for the following vendors: Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds Blue Ribbon Tomatoes Double Helix Farms Fedco Seeds Full Circle Seeds Gourmet Seed International Hazzard's Wholesale Seeds Heirloom Seeds Heirloom Tomatoes Heritage Harvest Seed Heritage Tomato Seed (thank you Steve!) J.W. Jung Seed Company The Sample Seed Shop (thank you Remy!) NE Seed Salt Spring Seeds Territorial Seed Company Knapp's - thank you Carol! I know this is not the most exciting 'job', so if no one responds, I will totally understand! Cheers, Tatiana __________________ Tatiana's TOMATObase Last edited by Tania; January 7, 2013 at 08:50 PM.

January 5, 2013	#3
RobinB Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Jan 2012 Location: Near Reno, NV Posts: 1,621	Tatiana, I would be happy to compile one or more of these vendor lists for you. Why don't you "assign" me one and I'll get to work. I don't mind at all. I use your TOMATObase a lot! What is involved in submitting growout notes/photos? Would you just like those emailed to you? I'll have to see if I've got notes/photos on any varieties that you might need help with. Robin

January 6, 2013	#13
Doug9345 Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Oct 2011 Location: Durhamville,NY Posts: 2,706	I just put Solana's Tomatoes in a spread sheet I'll do Victory next. Last edited by Doug9345; January 6, 2013 at 01:18 AM.