Speaking of being a dick...I don't mean to sound like anyone's 6th grade teacher. When you do submit seed to the seed bank, please, please be extra careful with the spelling of the variety name. Spell the variety name correctly. A spell checker won't know about tobacco varieties, so you'll need to do your homework. I usually use the following link for ARS-GRIN searching, now that my favorite pages have gone dead:
http://www.ars-grin.gov/cgi-bin/npg...nk&si=0&si=1&.cgifields=si&.cgifields=reverse
Tobacco varietal names are generally a mess. Some distinct varieties have multiple names (list them all, if you know them). If you know the PI number, the TI number, or any other number associated with the variety, include that too. Country of origin is often helpful as well as interesting.
As an example, this year I've begun growing out a variety, graciously provided to me by skychaser, labeled "Costa Rica 589." (The leaf sample that I kilned came out as a deep, oily brown. Delicious cigar filler.) On exploring the ARS-GRIN, I was able to identify it as PI 114370, and actually named
Iztepeque. Aha! It's not in the FTT seed bank.
[With the FTT seed list showing in the browser, I press CTRL-F to bring up the search box, and search for the PI, search for Costa Rica, then search for Iztepeque. Nowhere to be found.]
I hadn't recorded the TI number (589), so I didn't think to search for that.
Well...today, I noticed two varieties in the seed bank named "
Itztepeque." Notice the misspelling. Boo! One of them is TI 589, which apparently is why my seed was labeled Costa Rica 589 by skychaser.
Sometimes, the original ARS-GRIN accession documents contain misspellings. An example is the Turkish variety Tasova, which is misspelled in ARS-GRIN as Tasoua. Istanbulin was able to clarify this one.
Had I not noticed the Iztepeque issue, then next fall the FTT seed bank would have ended up with a new variety called "Costa Rica 589," even though it already exists as "Itztepeque PI 589." Multiply this mix-up by the total number of varieties in the seed bank, and the list quickly becomes hopelessly confused.
Where typos or careless entries originate doesn't matter (i.e. who's at fault). Eventually, they will all need to be cleaned up, especially for a formal database. The same goes for fancy names that are the product of vendor creativity. Samsun is a variety. Black Sea Samsun is a vendor's invention. Yes, the city of Samsun is on the Black Sea. We all know of bunches of these elaborations.
I have perpetuated incorrect or misspelled names. Don has endured the nightmare of having to enter all the bizarre and foreign names into the FTT forum seed list pages. Typos happen. Some correct spellings are difficult to enter: ñ, ó, ç. That's not to mention Turkish letters. We'll do our best.
Please do your part by carefully spelling the name of seed that you submit. You can misspell everything else, if you like.
Bob