Seed pack labelling

[Cidermanrolls]

I received my BCSS seeds today, alongside deliveries from Jan Novak and Ian Young (a Lithops seed seller on eBay).
Jan labels his seed packs with the catalogue number. Ian has a mix of styles, ranging from a paper slip insert to handwriting on the pack. All of their packs matched the description of what I ordered.

BCSS has a range of styles too, but I faced the frustration of the label on pack not matching the catalogue description. This wasn’t just one or two packs, it was a significant proportion. In some cases it’s just omission of the field number, but in others the varietal name was dropped from the pack (for example, ‘Ferocactus setispinus’ on pack, but ‘Ferocactus setispinus var orcutii Repp 410’ on the catalogue list).

Jan’s style of using a catalog number is also used by the MSG. I find it a tiny bit frustrating as it requires more effort from me at sowing, but it is simple and removes all doubt.

I understand how the volunteers for BCSS may want to abbreviate what they write on hundreds of packs, but is it time to follow either the catalogue number option, or adopt the printed insert slip method? Either method would remove doubt and reduce work for the packers.

[Aiko]

Yikes. That is not a good thing.
I would immediately wonder if an error has been made and I would not trust the locality number or the species and subspecies in your example at all.
If you can't confirm what you get is right, I would assume it is probably wrong.

[MatDz]

I also just noticed that all the information from the "Details" are not printed out on the packing slip, hope the full 2024 seed list will be archived as a PDF for those who did not note them down.

Edit: I also received 5 unexpected packets, 2 of them with nothing but species names (e.g. "Pyrrhocactus curvispinus", which is listed under 2 positions with locations on the 2022/23 list). Would be a shame to lose the locality information because of the packet labels, year/position number would work much better indeed.

[Paul D]

I also just noticed that all the information from the "Details" are not printed out on the packing slip, hope the full 2024 seed list will be archived as a PDF for those who did not note them down.

Edit: I also received 5 unexpected packets, 2 of them with nothing but species names (e.g. "Pyrrhocactus curvispinus", which is listed under 2 positions with locations on the 2022/23 list). Would be a shame to lose the locality information because of the packet labels, year/position number would work much better indeed.

All, apologies for our teething troubles! We have not only changed the selling system, we've also changed the packing, changed distributor, and changed name checker, and all this done while moving from one location in the country to another and rushing to try and meet expectations for the deadline. The names were put on the packets at an early stage and unfortunately some don't match with the corrected names, or are abbreviated. We will try hard to improve this going forward.
What I will say is that if anyone has any doubts as to what is written on a seed packet, please write to the seeds team (seed@bcss etc) and we can confirm species.

The next upload of seeds in spring will be better labelled.

[el48tel]

I also just noticed that all the information from the "Details" are not printed out on the packing slip, hope the full 2024 seed list will be archived as a PDF for those who did not note them down.

Edit: I also received 5 unexpected packets, 2 of them with nothing but species names (e.g. "Pyrrhocactus curvispinus", which is listed under 2 positions with locations on the 2022/23 list). Would be a shame to lose the locality information because of the packet labels, year/position number would work much better indeed.

............

What I will say is that if anyone has any doubts as to what is written on a seed packet, please write to the seeds team (seed@bcss etc) and we can confirm species.

The next upload of seeds in spring will be better labelled.

Ah
That sheds light on the problem and provides a solution. I'll ask for clarification of a couple of the labels I have.

[MatDz]

[.…]
What I will say is that if anyone has any doubts as to what is written on a seed packet, please write to the seeds team (seed@bcss etc) and we can confirm species.

The next upload of seeds in spring will be better labelled.

Ah
That sheds light on the problem and provides a solution. I'll ask for clarification of a couple of the labels I have.

Same here, and thank you Paul for replying. I can only imagine how chaotic it was.

[lyrabelacqua]

First of all, congratulations on the new seed ordering process, which was seamless and very fast, and has the distinct advantage that items out of stock cannot be ordered, avoiding the traditional disappointment. Can I enter a small plea though that something like the old physical style seed list is also made available as a pdf on site. This would let me see more rapidly what is being offered rather than scrolling through several webpages, even though I am fully converted to ordering online from now on.

I recognise this might be complicated by the intention to update the list more regularly throughout the year, but anything you can do without undue extra work would be much appreciated. I’m assuming (maybe wrongly!) that such a “physical” list will have to be produced anyway (and periodically updated) for those who still want to order that way?

Many thanks again to all the volunteers for their sterling work, which is very much appreciated.

[Paul D]

First of all, congratulations on the new seed ordering process, which was seamless and very fast, and has the distinct advantage that items out of stock cannot be ordered, avoiding the traditional disappointment. Can I enter a small plea though that something like the old physical style seed list is also made available as a pdf on site. This would let me see more rapidly what is being offered rather than scrolling through several webpages, even though I am fully converted to ordering online from now on.

I recognise this might be complicated by the intention to update the list more regularly throughout the year, but anything you can do without undue extra work would be much appreciated. I’m assuming (maybe wrongly!) that such a “physical” list will have to be produced anyway (and periodically updated) for those who still want to order that way?

Many thanks again to all the volunteers for their sterling work, which is very much appreciated.

Thanks for the kind comments Lyra I will explain why I'm not keen on a pdf on the website. Firstly, though most people will probably not have noticed we've made efforts to try and make the website more accessible to those with disabilities. In particular, we have been careful to remove words in all-caps, ensure that the contrast between text and background is good, and that there is good separation between elements, and that all sections look clear on different devices. We still have a way to go but I think it is improving, slowly but surely. There are some good summaries online about why it is not good practice to have downloadable pdfs on websites, and I've gradually been going through the pdfs we had (inherited from the old website) and converting them instead to actual php web pages. If you do a search for "why it is not good practice to have downloadable pdfs" you'll see there are quite a few other reasons too, apart from accessibility.

The other reason is that I and everyone else involved in the website and the seed shop (and indeed everything else in the BCSS!) are volunteers, doing everything in our spare time. The seed list is continually updated, as seeds go out of stock and new ones come on stream, and so a pdf if going to go out of date very quickly. For example, we have already updated the list six times since the new year. Small updates are done online, so making a pdf would require first exporting all the online seed products to a csv file, removing all the extraneous data, importing to word and formatting to make it readable, compressing, converting to pdf, then re-uploading. When you consider that we have had hundreds of successful online seed orders so far, but only 8 (to my knowledge) requests for printed lists, it is really too much work for the resulting benefits. Colin makes up a printed list as and when required, when asked by people who can't or don't want to go online, but this is quite a bit of extra work and in its spreadsheet form would need further work to convert to pdf. We want to try and encourage as many people as possible to use the online system as it makes everything so much easier for the volunteers.

If I can suggest an alternative, you could highlight the online list on the web page, and copy and paste it yourself into a Word or Excel file; the added advantage being that you could then sort them in whatever way you wanted?

[MatDz]

If I may suggest, having an option to display all positions at once would serve the same purpose as a downloadable PDF I believe, it would also make ordering much faster on larger screens.

Besides that, massive thanks (again) for making this happen!

[Paul D]

If I may suggest, having an option to display all positions at once would serve the same purpose as a downloadable PDF I believe, it would also make ordering much faster on larger screens.

Besides that, massive thanks (again) for making this happen!

Do you mean a single long list? It's against good practice advice, as there are accessibility issues again, and takes longer to load on slow connections. I agree it would be good to have the option to display in different ways, so people could choose whether to have a single list or split over pages, but the software doesn't allow that, unfortunately. I'll have a look into it.