When you have to prove where your vines came from - for a register, a grant claim or an inspection - the question is always the same: which nursery supplied the plants, and what paperwork came with them. The Planting documents module keeps that evidence in one place: for every batch of plants it holds the purchase invoice, the plant passport, photos of both documents and the rows the vines went into.
Planting documents is a beta module and is being rolled out at the moment. If you cannot see Planting documents in the menu yet, it will appear shortly.
What a batch is
A batch is one purchase: usually one invoice and one delivery of plants that ends up spread over several rows. Inspectors differ on whether they want proof of origin per row, per batch or per parcel, so a batch can be attached both to specific rows and to a whole parcel.
Parcels and rows are taken from Parcels & rows. If the structure is not there yet, fill it in first.
Where to find it
A new batch goes in through VineyardElf › Planting documents › Add batch. The summary printout sits behind Print summary above the list.
Step by step
- Purchase document (invoice). Copy in the Invoice number, Invoice date, Supplier (nursery), Variety and Number of plants. Fill in the Rootstock if the plants are grafted (for example 125AA, SO4). Planting date and Batch name are optional - a name such as “Solaris - spring 2024” is only a label, and without one the batch is listed as the variety and the invoice number.
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Plant passport. In the EU this is the label the nursery attaches to the plants, sometimes printed on the invoice itself. It has four elements marked with letters - copy them exactly as they appear on the document:
- A - botanical name, for grapevines usually Vitis vinifera L.; next to it is an optional field for the variety,
- B - country code and supplier registration number, for example DE-05/12/3456. You can paste the whole code into the number field and the country code is split off automatically,
- C - traceability code,
- D - country of origin as a two-letter code; several countries separated by commas.
Passport number is only for nurseries that give their passports a number of their own. The app checks the format: the country code in B has to be an EU country, and D accepts two-letter codes only.
Outside the EU the plant passport does not exist and your nursery will supply something else - a phytosanitary certificate or a certification scheme tag. Record the invoice and the photos anyway; the batch will simply keep the “incomplete” marker, because the completeness check is built around the EU passport. Treat that marker as a checklist for EU paperwork, not as a verdict on your records.
- Document photos. Both the invoice and the passport have two buttons: Take a photo opens the camera on a phone, Choose a file picks an image from the gallery or a PDF from a computer. You can add several files - each page of the invoice separately, for instance - and a single file can be up to 20 MB. Files are kept in the account’s Drive; Open shows a file and Remove detaches it from the batch and deletes it from Drive. When you edit an existing batch a file is stored straight away; on a new batch it is stored together with Save.
- Where it was planted. In the Where it was planted section at the bottom of the form, pick the Parcel and tick the Rows. Ticked rows mean the batch covers only those rows; a parcel with no rows ticked means the whole parcel. Under the list you get a comparison: how many vines are in the ticked rows and how many plants were on the invoice.
- Save the batch with Save.
When a batch counts as complete
A batch with everything in place gets a green Complete badge on the list; the rest show what is missing, for example “Missing: passport scan, passport C”. A complete batch needs:
- from the invoice: number, date, supplier, variety, number of plants and at least one photo of the invoice,
- from the passport: elements A, B, C and D and at least one photo of the passport,
- a location: a parcel or ticked rows.
Rootstock, passport number and planting date are not required. Above the list are the counters: how many batches there are, how many are complete, how many are incomplete and how many plants in total. Incomplete only leaves just the batches with gaps, and the filter carries over to the printout.
If no batch points to a row - neither directly nor through the whole parcel - a Rows without proof of origin warning appears above the list with the parcel name and the row numbers, for example “Upper: rows 1-3”. Those are the vines an inspector can ask about and for which you have no evidence on file yet.
Print summary
Print summary opens an A4 landscape sheet: the producer details from Settings, the print date and a table of batches with the variety, the number of vines, the invoice, passport elements A-D, the rows and the completeness status. The Print button opens the browser’s print dialogue, so you can save the summary as a PDF as well. Document photos are not on the printout - show them from your phone or print them separately from Drive.
Legal basis
The layout of elements A-D comes from Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2017/2313, which sets the format of the plant passport. This is a reading of the text, not legal advice: if in doubt the regulation itself on EUR-Lex decides, and whether the passport obligation applies to you at all is a question for your national plant health authority.
Example
You buy 450 Solaris plants on SO4 rootstock, invoice INV/12/2024 of 14 March 2024 from a German nursery. The passport reads: A - Vitis vinifera L., B - DE-05/12/3456, C - 2024/SOL/07, D - DE. You photograph the invoice and the label with your phone, pick the parcel Upper and tick rows 4 to 9. The app counts 450 vines in them, the same as on the invoice, and the batch gets the Complete badge.
The most common mistake
A batch typed in from memory, with no photos: it looks filled in, but there is nothing to show during an inspection, and the list keeps it among the incomplete ones anyway. The second common mistake is ticking every row of a parcel “just in case” - the vine count then drifts away from the invoice, and rows from a different delivery stop showing up as rows without documents.
Deleting a batch hides it from the list; the photos stay in Drive.