Methodology and quality

Taxonomy and naming

Our basic unit is the accession, seed from one documented collection event. The accession number ties it to a country, a growing area and its field record. A local name is kept where the grower gives one. It does not replace the accession number or merge separate collections into one variety.

The geography is hierarchical. A position, locality, growing area, region and country have to agree. Classification describes what the record can support and a change needs a dated source.

How a record is made

It is written in the field, at the time, before the next village blurs it. The position, the elevation, the harvest year, the date, who collected it and the grower where a name was given. Those notes go onto the accession record afterwards, as a separate job. Nothing gets reconstructed from memory a season later.

A field nobody recorded stays empty. We would rather the record say nothing than say something plausible, and there is plenty of older material where half of it is blank for that reason.

The geography then gets checked. A position has to fall inside the growing area the record claims, the elevation has to be possible for that area and the administrative units have to agree with where the point actually is. A record failing one of those gets fixed before it goes anywhere. Changing a status needs a dated source behind it.

Not everything is documented equally

The best records carry a verified position, photographs and a botanical description. Others hold a location and a collector and little else. Some of what we sell predates our own fieldwork and came through collaborators, mostly in Thailand, documented from their account rather than from a field we stood in. Those carry the collaborator on the record.

The depth is visible on the accession page itself. A thin record looks thin, because the empty fields are simply absent rather than filled with something reasonable.

How the seed is kept

Seed is cleaned and dried before it enters the collection, and none of that happens in the field. The base collection then sits in cold storage in Thailand.

One rule sits above the rest. An accession never moves in full. What travels to Europe for packing is drawn from the bulk stock and the conservation copy stays behind in the fridge, which is how genebanks have run for decades. A lost shipment is not allowed to become a lost accession.

The seed of one accession is not always held as a single lot. Where it is split, each lot keeps its own entry in the register and the accession page links to every one of them. Where two lots differ enough that you would be choosing between them, both get named there.

We do not print germination rates. A test means germinating seed we cannot spare: for most accessions the lot is small enough that testing it would cost a real part of what exists, and the facility to do it properly is a long way off. Where a lot is large enough to test without losing something that matters, it can be tested. Nothing on this site is a promise that a given seed will grow.

What a status means

Every accession page carries one of three. Available means there is seed behind the record. Archived means sales ended and the material stays in the bank and on the record for conservation, and seed collected in the same place again gets a new number and its own page. To be verified means the record stands but the seed behind it has not been checked against the shelf, so it goes on sale, or to the archive, once the stock check reaches it.

A good part of the collection sits in that third state today. Most of it is older material, plus stock at the European end where the botanical record is far better than the physical one.

Where you can check it

The register entry behind a lot sits on landrace.wiki, an independent encyclopaedia of landrace cannabis that we do not control. Anyone can read it and anyone can correct it. Every accession page links the entries behind what it is describing.

Positions publish exactly as they were taken. How precise a published location should be is the wiki's call and nothing is softened on our side.