Naming the variety you are growing

Every plant in Meridian has an optional Variety / Type field. It is the specific thing you are growing: Genovese Basil, Sungold F1, Carolina Reaper, Butterhead Lettuce.

It is free text

There is no dropdown and no list to pick from. You type the name, and that is the name. Meridian does not suggest varieties, autocomplete them, or offer a "popular varieties" list.

That is deliberate. What you grow is your record, so the name should be yours: your spelling, your capitalisation, your shorthand. A suggested list would quietly push everyone toward the same handful of names and would make your journal read like our vocabulary instead of yours.

What we store

Two things, from the one value you type:

• Exactly what you typed, as the display name. We never rewrite your casing or punctuation.
• A normalised key, used only for matching behind the scenes.

The key is why Genovese Basil, genovese basil and Genovese Basil are treated as the same variety when something needs to line them up. You will never see the key, and it never replaces what you wrote.

Where it appears

• On the plant, in your journal and plant detail views
• In the harvest log, when you record how a plant finished
• In AI chat context, so advice can account for what you are actually growing

Changing it later

Edit the plant and retype the field. There is nothing to unlink and nothing to migrate: the value is just text on your plant record, so changing it changes it everywhere it is shown.

If your variety is not in community stats

Community growing data only exists for varieties enough people have logged. When there is no shared dataset for what you typed, Meridian says so rather than silently dropping your submission. Your plant keeps the name either way.