Your first week

Follow one arrival from an empty database to a planted, moved, and findable record.

This page follows one arrival through Sepal. You add the place it will live, record the arrival, plant it, move it, and then find it again.

You need an account on a Sepal instance with the editor or admin role. If you are running Sepal yourself, Self-hosting describes how to start one.

Add a location

A location is a place that holds plants. Every material is filed in a location, so add the location first.

Select Locations in the sidebar.
Select Create.
Enter a Name and a Code. Both are required and both have to be at least two characters. The name is what you call the place, such as Greenhouse 2. The code is the short form that appears next to material, such as GH2.
Enter a Description if the name needs explaining. The field is optional.
Select Save.

Add one location for each place you want to tell apart. If you want to know which shelf in a greenhouse a plant is on, give each shelf its own location.

Record the arrival as an accession

An accession is one arrival of one taxon. Record it while you still have the label and the paperwork in front of you.

Select Accessions in the sidebar.
Select New accession.
Under Identity, check the Code. Sepal fills it in with the next code in your garden’s sequence, such as 2026.0001. You can keep it or type your own, and the code has to be unique.
Start typing a name in the Taxon field and select the name you want from the results. The field searches the taxa your instance holds, so you rarely have to add a name yourself.
Under Provenance, set Provenance Type to record how the plant came to be where it is. The field is optional. The glossary lists the five values and what each one means.
If the provenance is wild, set Wild Provenance Status as well.
Set Supplier if the plant came from a nursery, a garden, or a collector that you have recorded as a contact.
Under Placement, set Intended location to the location you added. Leave it empty if the bed is not decided yet.
Under Receipt, set Date Received and Date Accessioned if you know them, and record what arrived in Received as and Quantity received. All four fields are optional.
Select Save.

The accession now has no material. That is a valid state: the arrival is recorded and nothing has been planted yet.

Plant material into the location

A material is a quantity of the accession at one location. Planting the accession means creating its first material.

If you set an Intended location in the previous step, start from the location:

Select Locations in the sidebar and open the location.
Open the Awaiting planting section of the panel. The accession is listed there.
Select Plant here. The material form opens with Accession and Code already filled in.

If you left Intended location empty, open the accession, select Actions, and select Add material.

Then fill in the rest of the form:

Under Identity, check the Code. Sepal identifies a material by the accession code and the material code together, so the suggested code is short, such as 1.
Choose the Location you are planting into. When the accession has an intended location, the hint under the field names it.
Under Holding, set the Quantity to the number of seeds or plants that this material holds.
Set Status to alive for a new planting.
Set Type to what you are holding: plant, seed, vegetative, tissue, or other.
Select Save.

When part of an accession goes somewhere else, create a second material for it. For example, twenty seeds sown into two greenhouses are recorded as two materials.

Move the material

Sepal keeps a history of every move and every change in quantity. Record each one with a reason, so that the history says why it happened.

Select Material in the sidebar and open the material.
On the General tab, change Location to the new place.
Set Reason for change.
Select Save.

The move appears in the History section of the material’s panel, newest first. To move only part of a material, see Move material to another location.

Find the record again

Every list page has the same search box. It takes words and field filters together.

Select Accessions in the sidebar.
Type the accession code, such as 2026.0001, or the start of the taxon name.
Select the row. The panel shows the summary, and the Statistics section links to the material that belongs to the accession.

To find plants by where they are, select Material and filter on a location.

location.code:GH2 status:alive

Select Filter beside the search box to build a term from the fields that list carries. Query syntax describes the whole language, including comparisons, negation, and matching several values at once.