? help with plant files ?

I am trying to find information about legumes. Planting times, and other general information.

I do not know the names of all the different legumes so I was hoping to get a selection in the plant files to look at and see which would be best for me. But I find no as in zero, nada zip entries when I use the general or advanced search feature for "legume" or "legumes"

"peas" brings up a couple options as does "beans" but neither shows as being legumes.

Is the term legume obsolete? Am I spelling it wrong? AAArrgh! it should be so simple!

I don't know all the right names either.. hope this link will help.
http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/b/Papilionaceae/Lathyrus/none/cultivar/0/
boots

That is a start but it covers mostly sweet peas and still doesn't include good old pod peas or green beans or pinto beans, or ... and there is no reference on any of them to the name Legume.

Just doing a search with Papilionaceae as Family would be more inclusive. But it would give you over 4,700 search results. Perhaps someone can give you a few more ideas for Genus search terms beyond what bootandall already recommended -- unfortunately, I can't. :-)

Another way I can think of to go about it would be to put in Papilionaceae as Family, and pea (or bean) as common name. That would still get you a total of over 3,500 results from the two searches, though.

This thread might help explain why Leguminosae is no longer used in PlantFiles:
http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/413338/

heres the beans http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/search.php?q=Scarlet+runner+beans&Search=Search+PlantFiles
http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/finder/index.php?sname=Beans

any closer

http://www.iit.edu/~beans/pinto.html

This message was edited Dec 27, 2007 11:41 PM

Suze_, thank you! that link explains it very well.

Now the question is, when a novice like myself tries to find something in our very correct plant files using the general search for something like this why are we told "no results found" instead of Classification changed see ___, ___, or___.

This system is "by gardeners for gardeners" but the average backyard gardener is not going to be up to date enough to find the needed information without some help from the search function to send us off in the right direction and it renders the plant files worthless to us.

Speaking of beans - how about that scene in "Blazing Saddles"? :)))

Yes, I am that immature, but tell me honestly that none of you laughed when you saw it for the first time. :)))

If you haven't seen it yet - tell me you aren't at least a little interested.

Sorry :)))))))))

**Grin** I laughed.

You are right Zanymuse. Plantfiles is nowhere near 100%.

Thanks, but how old are you? :)))

This message was edited Dec 27, 2007 5:35 AM

LOL a young woman would answer that question, a middle aged woman would lie and and old woman would simply avoid answering...

Well, that could just be a sly form of one of those tactics, but either way you
are young at heart. :)))

I laughed EVERY time and I may watch it again tonight.

Thats right - I even bought it. I'm that bad off. :)))

Well, laugh at it again for me. It is almost 3:00 a.m. and time to kick the dog out of my bed and get in some snoring time.

Good luck and goodnight. :)

Use the singular in the general search. 'bean' instead of 'beans'. This would be the easiest way to search if you are not familiar with Latin names.

When I do this, I get a huge difference in the number of entries.

The same would be true for roses or cucumbers. Always use the singular form.

This would be what you would type in for the Common Name too, if you are using the full search. Just type the most common identifier in that space. "Pole Bean" or 'Sweet Corn' will yield more selective results than 'beans' or 'corn' If you are looking for something specific, you can type that under 'Cultivar' or just put it in the General Search, such as Kentucky Wonder. Both ways will take you to the proper page in PF.

Mel is right...and using the singular tense is a pretty common requirement for databases.

Terry, Suze_ pointed me to this thread and it made it simple to do the searches I required. Sort of...

What would you suggest we do to make it more user-friendly to the novice gardener? (We're always open to suggestions ;o)

I know absolutely zero about veggies, in particular peas or beans. So I took Zany up on her suggestion to try searching for peas. I went to PF and typed in "pea" in common name and got about 8 pages of results with the first page showing flowers. So I changed my search to "sugar snap pea" and got no results. Last try....typed in "snap pea" in the common name and voila 43 results that appear to be the edible veggie.

I am truly the quintessential veggie novice and came up with a good list of results to start me on a search for a pea to try.
Not sure how many "novices" would attempt snap pea, but it seemed pretty intuitive to me and I don't even eat peas! :-)

On the flip side, a search for "green bean" yielded nothing. :-( And I have no other monikers by which I know that veggie.

The only idea I have so far is to make more information available on the common name searches and to add the commonly known terms like legume to that search with it taking the viewer to the information about the changes in the correct terminology.

I was rather stunned that simple common terms like Pea and Legume received zero results.

The Plant files are a wonderful resource and the correct listings are an important factor in that for the advanced gardener. You and many others have put in a tremendous amount of work to make it the best resource available. I would just like to see it made more novice friendly so that they (and I) are not left feeling frustrated and foolish. It struck me that if I am having a problem with it, and I have been using it since it was first started, then a newbie would almost certainly find it to be awkward to navigate through successfully.

I wish there were an easy solution to the specific example you've used. But unfortunately, the term "legume" is only a descriptive term, it's not a common or botanical name of any peas or beans so there's no good way to include it within each PlantFiles entry.

However, we do have some safety nets in place to help newbies or anyone who gets lost in PlantFiles:

1) The browse-by-cultivar list on the home page of PlantFiles, which has grown quite a bit, and includes beans: http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/finder/index.php?sname=Beans

2) We're pretty prompt at giving individual attention to PlantFiles questions that come to us via two helpdesks (one is for reporting PF errors, and occasionally winds up with a how-to inquiry; and the main helpdesk, accessible through the "Contact Us" link.)

3) We have a forum dedicated to PlantFiles questions, which is seriously underused:
http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/f/plantfiles/all/

Within that forum is a sticky thread with a searching tutorial: http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/608659/

Perhaps a link to forum itself should be included if the search results come up empty-handed?

A link to that how to forum would be a good step in the right direction. To be honest, it was not on my watched forums list on my home page and I forgot it existed.

But your link to the forum does not work and returns me to my home page. I finally got there using the link to the individual thread and now I will add it to my home page as well.

That legume is not a name but is a descriptive term would indicate that the general definition would be available in the Botanary (it isn't)

Hopefully there will be someone else come along with some better suggestions because I truly feel this search problem is important.

I found what I needed on another site so the need for this specific information is no longer a priority for me. But I would like to see it develop so that such basic information is easily found right here at DG

Like Langbr said a search for "pea" turns up 2143 matches. That includes any thing that has "pea" in the common name. A google search for "pea" will yield even more and include a raft of non-plants. However, if you use more specific common names like cowpea, English pea, Snow pea etc, you will get a list of those types. If all you know abouts beans is green bean, then you would be better off using the browse by list that Terry mentioned. It does not contain all the beans and does include the cowpeas (Vigna group) but it does cover all the types in common usage. Green bean by the way would include any bean that had a green pod and would exclude the colored pod beans. The list would be so large as to be useless. Many common names came from market terms, so edible podded beans are known as snap beans, French beans and several other names.

While it would be nice if the advanced search had checkboxes that more specifically identified characteristics of a specific cultivar, That would make somebody a ton of work. Besides it only works with list, so you are out in cold at present for anything but cowpeas. My first druther would be to have the advanced search, be capable of searching by genus and/or species.

You can find definitions of legume in Gardenology. Botanary gives you definitions of Latin genus/species names, Gardenology is the place to look for gardening terms.
http://davesgarden.com/guides/terms/search.php?search_text=legume

OK I found Legume in the garden terms section. So at least the information is available once you know where to look.

I found the search tutorial once a link to it was placed here but Terry's idea of linking to it if no results are found is a really good one.
It is under used because it is not all that easily located :~)

The browse by cultivar list includes beans but not peas.
A first time visitor looking for Peas is most likely to come through the following steps once they sign in.

They are most likely to go to the plant files directly.

From there they will see the report an error and search plants buttons at the top of the page. Few will scroll down past that since they know they are looking for Peas. So they will click the search plants button and when that loads they will type in Pea.

This will tell them

" No results found!
Try making your search a little less specific.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tip: If you want to search by family, genus, species, etc, try our advanced search engine."


BUT: according to the tutorial the advanced search is available only to subscribers.

So what happens to this member?

I can tell you that human nature is going to take this person on to the next entry in google until they find a site that gives them the basics in one easy step and they will probably never try DG again to know how much information was really hidden here IF... they had...

How about adding these kind of names to the common name part of the database? It would be alot of work, but feasible, right? ...I'm not volunteering :) technically that means I should just shut up and sit down, but I do think Zanymuse has a valid point. I just don't know who would be able to do all that work quickly? I wonder if Dave could sort the database by formal name and then do a batch cut and paste of the desired common name? I don't know how databases work, so that might be completely impossible. Always hated it when people wanted me to do the impossible with computers..but the other way is not impossible (simple data entry in each item) just very tedious and time consuming.

I just went through and checked out what happens with other common items in this search method and with the exception of Pea I recieved the expected results. So the problem is not widespread but an isolated case that I just happened to run into.

This is not to say it shouldn't be fixed but that possibly the "fix" is to include this simple word in the search capacity somehow?

If I have figured this out correctly, The problem is with the search button to right of the plantfiles screen ( The general search if you will). I never use it, but tried it just now and got no response searching for "pea". Even worse it advises advanced search which does not cover peas. If one goes to the regular plant files search , the green bar that says click here to search by name, over two thousand entries come up for "pea". So as noted before "pea" is already in the common name in the database. For some reason, the general search does not pick it up.

The reason "pea" doesn't work in the general search is that words have to be at least 4 letters long before it can search for them. I'm not sure why it's that way, I just know that it is. So for the majority of things that people would be looking for, the general search should work fine, the problem here is just a coincidence because pea is such a short word.

Farmerdill you got it exactly. Rather an odd situation isn't it?

LOL so it is 3 letter words that are not acceptable instead of the 4 letter kind... oh dear!

There's a bit of confusion over the term "advanced search"

The *real* Advanced Search is here: http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/advanced.php - this is the one that is available only to subscribers.

However, somewhere along the line, the generalized search error message (which appears when you don't get any results) says:

That sounds like it would cover all the bases quite nicely!

I knew that someone here would know what it would take to clear this up!

LOL and one step at a time, I am learning... slowly but uncertainly ;~}

Hello. Maybe not the right place for this, but how about the numerous and extreme "errors" in plantfiles. I am referring mostly to things like reported plant hardiness.

What should you do when you find errors like that in plantfiles?

Each PlantFiles entry has a red "report an error" link in the upper right-hand corner. If you find an entry has information that contradicts your own reference materials, you're welcome to report it to our editors via that link.

Please be sure you leave the link that the system automatically imbeds in your message, and you add the specific errors you spotted, and what you believe should be posted in place of that information.

It is very helpful is if you include hyperlinks to other references that support your contentions - it will allow our editors to verify your corrections faster.

OOps. What if the only hard proof that you have is dead trees/plants?

If you can't locate verification you might want to add your unhappy results to the comments section as a "beware" warning to anyone thinking of trying it in your zone.

Have you tried doing a search on Google for other references to the dead plant's hardiness? Unless it's something really super rare I have never had trouble digging up references on hardiness. There's always some variation in the info that's out there, but if you focus on the more reliable sources you'll often come up with a pretty good consensus on the hardiness. I usually search for the name of the plant and the word hardiness, that pulls up a decent number of results in most cases.

ecrane3, that is exactly what I do. Sorry to say that when I get plantfiles
as an option I usually avoid it.

Most timely example - look up the hardiness for Cashew trees.

Plantfiles is very far off and my experience says that the other sources are right.

#2 Baobab trees - 55 degrees is far off the OTHER way.
That is unusual, because most of the time plants are "rated" as hardier on here than they really are. I'm thinking that people are taking what it says on seed packs as word from GOD. I would say that the usual stated 55 degrees is the low temperature for keeping Baobab trees from going dormant (not a hardiness rating by any means).

Zanymuse, that is what I was trying to avoid. I don't want to c*** on someone else's parade. Especially when I don't know who they are.

Thanks everyone :)