What would be good category names that describe growing from seed, geophytes, nuts or from plants?

Question

I am building a vegetable gardener website that allows visitors to start gardening journals in which they can record all kinds of data like the days until maturity, plant size and width, harvest date and also propagation method.

With propagation method i mean how they started growing the plant. Right now i only have the option from seeds or from plant. With the latter i mean that they bought a small plant at a gardening centre. But there are more ways to grow a vegetable/fruit plant. In fact, there are many different ways. But i don't want to list them all because i also want to use the same list to filter garden journals results. For instance, if you plan to grow asparagus from rhizomes then you only want to see garden journals that grew asparagus from rhizomes and not from seed for example. I don't want to overwhelm the user with too many filters to choose from.

So far i was thinking about making a list that has the following:

1. Seed
2. Bulb / corm
3. Rhizome / tuber
4. Nut
5. Cutting
6. Plant

Would such a list be enough? I'd love to hear from you

EDIT:

This is the propagation list i have made after doing more research. Do you guys think this list is inclusive enough?

SEED,
BULB_OR_CORM,
RHIZOME,
TUBER,
NUT,
SPORES,
-------artificial propagation-------
CUTTING,
GROUND_LAYERING,
AIR_LAYERING,
DIVISION,
BUDDING_OR_GRAFTING

Answer 1

I can see where you are coming from, Maurice, you are trying to normalize your database which would appear to be a database question, but the normalization can only be achieved by someone with specialized domain knowledge which is why your question is here and not in another forum, although it might do as well in a botanical / scientific arena.

The primary division here is seed or not seed, that is vegetative. The distinction is important since genetics are involved. With a seed often you are dealing with something potentially genetically different from the parents. Seeds come in various structures such as pomes and nuts and spores, where the embryo is wrapped in various layers to help with success in survival. Garlic does not produce nuts, but it does produce seed, so you don't want to make "nuts" a special category since it won't apply to most plants and as soon as you know the name of the plant you already know whether it produces a nut or not. Recording "from seed" will be enough information, so that is a toggle, either seed or vegetatively; both is not possible and neither is neither.

On the vegetative side we retain the genetics, however there are many ways of propagating vegetatively and again most of these will be species specific because gardeners have greater success with one method or another, some of which might be quite impossible given the species so you open yourself to potential internal database contradiction. You could quite easily end up with a list of 20 methods from cuttings to air layering to division. You might want to make it a text box until, through user input, you have some popular sub-categories and then assess the need for extra fields later. The text box could also record seed information such as parentage.

If your garden journal info also has keywords such as "rhizome" attached then it will be easy to match those keywords with the textbox in the recorded field.