Ten colour categories in this template — red, black, purple, yellow, orange, green, pink, white, striped, and unknown — which is more nuance than most gardeners apply when selecting varieties and far less than a tomato collector actually needs. That tension is the design constraint this template navigates: structured enough to filter and compare, flexible enough to hold what the seed catalogues actually describe.
What Happens to an Undocumented Collection
A tomato grower who's been trialling varieties for six or seven seasons without systematic records ends up with the same problem every time: they grew something exceptional two years ago, they remember it was a black oblate beefsteak type, they cannot remember the variety name, and the packet is long gone. The seed company they bought from has seventeen black varieties. None of the descriptions match exactly what they remember. The experience is unreproducible.
Multiply that by twenty varieties trialled per season across seven years and the information loss is significant. Good performers, bad performers, varieties that cracked in wet weather, the one that produced into November when everything else was finished — all of that experience exists only in memory and degrades predictably.
A database with one record per variety, accumulating year-over-year sowing history, converts that degrading memory into retrievable data.
The Classification Fields and Why They Matter
Growth / groeiwijze — indeterminate, determinate, semi-indeterminate — is the structural field that determines how the plant is managed in the garden. An indeterminate climber on a 1.8-metre stake is still growing when the first frost hits it, because it never sets a terminal bud. A determinate bush variety concentrates fruit set in a three-week window and then stops. If you're growing both and you don't have that distinction tracked, you're going to stake something that doesn't need staking and fail to manage something that does.
Leaf / bladvorm distinguishes regular-leaf from potato-leaf, and the potato-leaf phenotype is a reliable indicator of certain heritage breeding lineages — Brandywine and its relatives are almost all potato-leaf, and that morphology is often the fastest way to verify variety identity when a plant is growing from saved or unlabelled seed. For the serious grower, it's diagnostic information, not botanical trivia.
Shape and Size together describe the fruit profile without requiring measurement. A heart-shaped, grapefruit-sized fruit is an oxheart or beefsteak type. A long, plum-sized fruit is a paste variety. A cherry-sized round fruit is the entire cherry tomato category. Combined with colour, those three fields create a phenotypic description specific enough to distinguish most varieties from each other.
Seed Stock and the Long View
Seed stock? is the inventory field that prevents you from discovering, in February when the seed catalogues are calling, that you're out of seed for a variety you specifically wanted to grow this year. Yes or no — the binary is enough. If the answer is No and the variety is one you've grown before and logged as exceptional in the Notes field, you know to source seed before the popular varieties sell out.
Sown in... as a multichoice across multiple years is the longitudinal record. A variety checked for 2009, 2011, 2013, and 2015 tells you it's a reliable favourite you return to consistently. A variety checked only for 2010 tells you something about what happened after you grew it — either the trial failed, or you grew it once and moved on. Combined with Notes, the pattern becomes interpretable.
The Foto field is the visual verification layer. A photograph of ripe fruit at harvest, taken in good natural light with a white card for color reference, is the kind of evidence that makes variety identification certain rather than probable. It's also the record that lets you show someone exactly what they're getting when you share seeds.