Hey evening everyone!
So we’re looking to get some preliminary testing going (since it’s a been a hot minute from the old site,) and to get things kicked off, I’ve got a load of Brother Mendel’s Vanilla Re-Up and Painted Lady that would be a good starting point (and I chose this because he sent me a lot of these two specifically.)
Dab and I are ironing out the “flow” for the testing; but the gist is that we’re going to require the Milestone Updates; which is basically core/critical updates of the plant through the grow (and again, props to @Man-O-Green for this concept, it’s quite brilliant.)
That doesn’t mean you can’t post as many updates as you want, but instead of hounding testers for weekly updates, as long as the major milestone updates are done (and with some actual effort,) then we’re achieving the goals of the testing.
We’re also going to be getting more specific feedback from the breeders on what kind of feedback they want to see; what’s important, what isn’t really important, etc, to make this more value-added and for the juice to be worth the squeeze.)
We are hammering out what the details look like to include testers from all geographic parts of the word, primarily USA, Canada, and European countries. When possible, we are going to try to get the breeders to ship direct; but if it’s easier (and we’ve done this in the past,) we may pick someone to act as the proxy for the seeds (keeper of the beans for your region,) and then we’d redistribute that way (and if/when possible, AFN would help donate to shipping costs, because this stuff totally adds up.)
The initial testing won’t be limited strictly to Brother Mendels; I have other genetics as well; I just need to make sure we have enough duplicates so the test growers are growing out the same thing.
I also really want to hammer home to the breeders to get their asses on the forum, and to help make sure the test are successful (putting some of the onus back on them and it’s incentive to help make sure growers are successful with their genetics.)
We are likely going to do INDIVIDUAL topics (ie individual journals, not communal grows) as start things out; or we may even do a communal grow to see how things roll with the milestone testing with the Discourse forum format.
But to start, we’re looking at at minimum 3 USA-based testers for the Mendel Seeds. I may consider shipping to Canada, but I’ve never shipped over the border before and not sure all the logistics of that (butthole bears, here we come!)
