The garlic went in late. You know this because the bulbs are still sitting in loose neck at the end of October when the variety profile said you'd be harvesting by September. You don't know exactly how late because the 2017 planting date is in a notebook that's been shelved behind a row of seed catalogs. This happens every year.
An organic teaching farm running multiple crop trials across multiple fields generates planting data that outgrows handwritten records within a single season.
The Planting Record Is the Phenological Record
Planting Date anchors the timeline. Every subsequent date — Emergence and Flowering — is meaningful relative to it. The days-to-emergence calculation tells you whether the germination rate matched the seed supplier's specification under actual field conditions. The days-to-flowering tells you whether the variety's phenological clock tracked what the catalog claimed in your specific microclimate, with your specific soil inputs, in that specific year.
For a teaching farm running twenty-five to forty crop trials per season across eight to twelve fields, this comparative data is the curriculum. When students ask why the direct-seeded carrots in Field 3 emerged twelve days later than the transplanted stock in Field 7, the answer is in the record — or it isn't, and the teaching moment is lost.
Type and Source together document what was planted and where it came from. Source is the seed supplier or the seed lot — not just "tomato" but "Brandywine, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Lot #BRS-2417." The lot number matters for organic certification trace-back and for replication: if this variety performed well, you need to know exactly which seed stock to reorder.
Transplant source distinguishes field-seeded crops from those started in the greenhouse and transplanted — a distinction that affects emergence date calculations, root establishment protocols, and labor records.
The Field as the Unit of Analysis
Field is the geographic anchor that makes crop comparisons possible. KPU's farm fields have different soil histories, different drainage, different sun exposure. A kale variety planted in Field 2 (loamy, good drainage) and the same variety planted in Field 9 (clay-heavy, seasonal wet) won't perform identically. Without the field field, you have planting dates and outcomes with no spatial context.
Over multiple seasons, filtering by field and crop type reveals the farm's micro-agronomic map. Which fields favor early brassicas? Which benefit from the OMRI-listed amendment additions recorded in the linked amendment library? The planting record alone doesn't answer that question, but it's the foundation from which the answer is built.
Notes is where the gritty reality lives: the week of frost that hit just after transplant, the slug pressure in the wet corner of Field 6, the observation that the lemon cucumbers in the high tunnel flowered three weeks before the open-field planting. These aren't structured data points — they're the narrative that gives the numbers context when you're reviewing the season in November.