Now that the Plant Database has checkboxes for:
"Uses - Salad greens" and
"Uses - Cooked greens",
could you write a script to mass- mark all of these check-boxes for all of these categories?

Uses: Vegetable
Uses: Salad green
Uses: Cooked greens

Do you think annual vegetables should have this checked?
"Uses: Suitable as Annual"

varieties of Brassica rapa to mark as vegetable, salad & cooked greens:
Bok Choy - - - - - (Chinesis)
Yu Choy Sum - Hon-Tsai-Tai - - (Chinesis)
Chinese cabbage - - - (Pekinensis)
Tatsoi - - - - - - - - (var rosularis or Narinosa Group)
Komatsuna - - - - (Perviridis)
Mibuna - - - - - - - (Japonica)
Mizuna - - - - - - - (nipposinica )


Mostly I confirmed these in the Kitazawa seed site, but also I could Google recipes or the suggestion of "salad" for every type I checked.

There might be some B. rapa varieties unsuitable for salad or cooking, but I don't know whatg they would be. No turnips in salad?

In order to do a bulk update of the database, I will need a sold ruleset to find plants.

For example: "All plants with Brassica as genus and rapa as species".

But looking at your list above, I can't really determine how to make this into a ruleset that I can feed into the system to pull out just the matching plants we want to update.

If it were possible to use the Plant DB search feature, and mark anything that matches
("Chinese cabbage" OR "Bok Choy")
you would get 90-99% of everything I wanted to mark (even Komatsuna and Tatsoi).

I've examined all those by eye, and all those should be marked
- Vegetable and
- Salad greens and
- Cooked Greens.

You might get one or two more good hits by searching on
("Chinese cabbage" OR "Bok Choy" OR "Pak Choy" OR Bok Choi" OR "Pak Choi").
I scanned those but won't swear every hit is 'good in salad'. Microgreens, sure.


(Even the odd hit "Water Spinach (Ipomoea aquatica)" IS eaten raw with green papaya salad in Thailand, and stir-fried most places, so it, too, could be marked the same way.)


The problem with marking all (genus = Brassica AND species = rapa)
is that they pull in many Turnips, which are Vegetables and Cooked greens, but no one eats raw turnip greens in salad as far as I can find - too bitter.

And there a few other problems I found by eye, as follows:

We have six hits when searching on "Brassica rapa canola ".
5 of: Polish Canola Brassica rapa
1 of: Canola (Brassica napus 'Dwarf Essex')
I never heard of canola salad or boiled canola greens.

This one seems mostly used for oil, but I found one link that says the leaves "can" be eaten raw or cooked:
Indian Colza (Brassica rapa subsp. trilocularis)
http://www.pfaf.org/user/Plant...
I would not mark that one at all.

I did find two salad recipes for [b ]Broccoli Raab[/b ], but I would not check the box "Salad Greens"
http://www.webmd.com/food-reci...
- Broccoli Raab (Brassica cretica) and
- Broccoli Raab (Brassica ruvo)

I have not found useful info about this one yet, it should not be marked.
[b ]Brassica rapa var. oblonga[/b]
http://www.theplantlist.org/tp...
- L Brassica rapa var. oblonga (Mill.) Tacik is an accepted name
- This name is the accepted name of an infraspecific taxon in the genus Brassica (family Brassicaceae).
--- The record derives from Tropicos which reports it as an accepted name (record 50165561) with original publication details: Fl. Polski ed 2, 4: 276 276 1985.