Your first week

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

This page follows one arrival all the way through Sepal: you add the place it will live, record the arrival, plant it, move part of it, and then find it again. Work through it once with a real plant and you will have used every record the app is built on.

You need an account on a Sepal instance and permission to create records. If you are running Sepal yourself, Self-hosting describes how to start one.

Add a location

A location is a place that holds plants. Add it before you record the arrival, because Sepal will not let you plant anything into a location that does not exist yet.

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. A shelf inside a greenhouse is worth its own location if you want to know which shelf a plant is on.

Record the arrival as an accession

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

Select Accessions in the sidebar.
Select New accession.
Under Identity, enter a Code. Sepal does not impose a format, and the code has to be unique. Gardens commonly use the year and a serial number, such as 2026.0001.
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. The field is optional, and it is worth setting, because it records how the plant came to be where it is. 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. Setting it makes the next step shorter.
Under Dates, set Date Received and Date Accessioned if you know them. Both are optional.
Select Save.

The accession now has no material, and 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 already filled in.

If you left Intended location empty, select Material in the sidebar, select Create, and choose the accession in the Accession field instead.

Then fill in the rest of the form:

Under Identity, enter a Code. Sepal identifies a material by the accession code and the material code together, so a code as short as 1 is enough.
Check that Location names the place you are planting into.
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.

Create a second material for the same accession whenever part of it goes somewhere else. Twenty seeds sown into two greenhouses are two materials.

Move or split the material

Sepal keeps a history of every move and every change in quantity, so record these in the app rather than editing the number and forgetting why.

To move the whole material to another location:

Select Material in the sidebar and open the material.
On the General tab, change Location to the new place.
Set Reason for change. Sepal records the reason in the material’s history along with the move.
Select Save.

To split a material between two locations, reduce the first and create the second:

Open the material, reduce Quantity to the number that stays, set a Reason for change, and select Save.
Select Material in the sidebar, then select Create.
Enter a Code, choose the same Accession, and choose the location the plants moved to.
Enter the Quantity that moved, set Status and Type, and select Save.

Both changes appear in the History section of the material’s panel, newest first. The section shows the three most recent changes, and a Show all button appears when there are more.

Find the record again

Every list page takes the same search box, and it searches text and filters fields at the same time.

Select Accessions in the sidebar.
Type the accession code, such as 2026.0001. A bare word on this list matches the code, so search by name with taxon: instead.
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 rather than by what 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.