We have been using a 128K Apple IIe with Appleworks as a data base this past year and find that the program is excellent for working with one season's records (including the seed inventory from crosses). All information was entered into this data base in place of a field notebook. A field notebook was then printed from this data base.

The information encoded in this and most other data bases can be used in numerous ways. This past summer I printed out strip tags on 100 pound tag custom continuous paper which was purchased from Data Documents, a Pitney Bowes Company. I simply printed the contents of the data base regarding each family (family number, pedigree, genotype, number planted, number that grew, and several fields for comments) with an Apple Imagewriter (alias C-ITOH prowriter among others) on this paper, using a standard Imagewriter ribbon with a fixed record length of 11 lines, and cut each page into 6 parts, each containing information about a single family. These were stapled onto the first plant in each family in the research nursery. This ink and paper did not deteriorate appreciably during the growing season, and the tags were in good condition and easily read at the end of the growing season. After harvest, information about specific crosses made with each family was also entered into the data base.

David Weber

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