I’d love to see this integrated with https://fallingfruit.org/
Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code
81–90 of 121 posts
Re: Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code
#82This is a great resource. Thanks for sharing it! I have a suggestion which would make it very useful for me: hints on when to plant. Since you have the timing for "peak season" and (I assume) the growing times to get there, hopefully it would be easy to work backwards to arrive at planting times. As a new gardener in Southern California, I could use some help planning my planting schedule. I can get away with plantin…
As someone who frequents farmer's markets often, my suggestion would to visit one close to you. I often ask the local farmers for planting advice especially since it seems our temperatures are getting wackier each season.
Re: Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code
#83Very cool. Not sure if your motivation is to "promote local eating" or if you're trying to build a cool product that would bring in some cash... but if you're looking to monetize, I'd pay a small amount (about the cost of a magazine) for a HIGH-QUALITY set of recipe suggestions that use 6 ingredients or less, and take ~1hr to cook. (because I cook for a family every day, I don't have all day to cook, and I don't want…
> but the recipe is so impractical I'll probably never make it.
or the food amounts to cookies dipped in honey dipped in butter dipped in icing sugar.
Re: Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code
#84This is a great resource. Thanks for sharing it! I have a suggestion which would make it very useful for me: hints on when to plant. Since you have the timing for "peak season" and (I assume) the growing times to get there, hopefully it would be easy to work backwards to arrive at planting times. As a new gardener in Southern California, I could use some help planning my planting schedule. I can get away with plantin…
As someone who frequents farmer's markets often, my suggestion would to visit one close to you. I often ask the local farmers for planting advice especially since it seems our temperatures are getting wackier each season.
That's an excellent point! There are several near me so I'll ask next time I go to the market.
Re: Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code
#85About five years ago, a colleague had an idea for a social/user-driven app for seasonal food (produce, meats, etc.) He called it something like Local Bee, and then we created a version (for Windows Phone 7!) of it over the weekend at a Hack-a-thon. We actually won, though it was small (13 teams). We called it P2P Farms! We made another version (for Android Auto, before it was even called that) at another event, where it would actually alert you right in your dashboard when you got close to specified items. Then our employer started to turn it into "a real thing", and renamed it Fresh! However, I left the company around then and haven't heard much about it since.
At the time, I searched online, and found sites like LocalHarvest, Farmstand, RipeNear.me, LocalDirt, etc., each usually with a little different spin (some focus on specific food, some one farmer's markets, some on actual farms, and some on produce stands).
So you can see the challenges - data, use case, implementation, monetization, etc.
If it's from various feeds, they aren't standardized or consistent. They could update at different frequencies. They might omit huge swaths of geography.
If it's from the users themselves (i.e. you "check-in" when you find a local produce stand selling fruit or beef jerky or something), you need MASSIVE adoption and participation, and you'll probably have a 10-to-1 ratio of people that want to consume vs contribute. And how long is the data useful? Maybe they bought awesome watermelons but 15 minutes later, the last few sold out. Can you get people at the stands to update their listings?
What if you convince producers (farmer's markets, farmers) that it's worth their marketing dollars to get listed (and highlighted)? Does it follow the spirit of the app you envisioned?
And do you combine approaches? Multiple ways of getting data in, keeping it updated, etc? I'm curious where you'll take this, so create an "About/News" section of your site (or Twitter) and keep posting!
Edit: Also, I realize your approach "just what fruit is in season" varies from the above variations, and so the challenges and solutions do as well. I kind of went off on tangents there! Hopefully it gives you ideas anyway.
Re: Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the feedback - this is very first version, and there are a lot of improvements to make. I think you're right about the wording, reading it with fresh eyes it is very confusing, and I'll change it ASAP. Right now, all the farm information data is pulled from aggregated USDA data so there is a ton of work left to do to get better, finer-grained results. My plan is to look at which zip codes get the most quer…
Have you come across [Local Harvest]( https://www.localharvest.org ) before? That might be a good data source, at least for what farms exist where. I don't know if they collect data on what farms actually grow. But I empathize a lot. I've pursued a number of side projects in this space. I've worked on an online farmer's market, a plant database, and a recipe database in the hope of solving a nexus of problems around…
Another good data source that I've used is https://www.farmmatch.com/.
Re: Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code
#87Neat! But you've got some work to do to get the data in there. I put in my Southern Indiana zip code and got 12 results back. Only one was actually anywhere near my zipcode (or even in my state). The rest were anywhere from 200 - 500 miles away. Sorry, but I don't consider Maryland to be local to Indiana. I would suggest you work on getting data about local farms in there, and then tighten up the constraints for what…
Hey dbingham :) 's Josh. So you got "apples" too, eh? What? You dont want to go to "local" tomatoes in Georgia, over 500 miles away?!?
But yeah, I like it, but "NEEDS MORE INPUT"! :)
Re: Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code
#88I showed this to my wife who has never been on HN and is an avid Gardener. I was excited to find some commonality in our hobbies!
She spent three minutes on it and said “this is crap.”
When she entered our Dallas zip code, it noted that the nearest harvests for very basic veggies was over 270 miles away in the middle of no where. Meanwhile she’s growing the very same plants in our backyard.
Gardening is far from my area of expertise. But unless we’re missing something fundamental about the program, there may be some work to be done on this commendable project.
Re: Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code
#89Neat! But you've got some work to do to get the data in there. I put in my Southern Indiana zip code and got 12 results back. Only one was actually anywhere near my zipcode (or even in my state). The rest were anywhere from 200 - 500 miles away. Sorry, but I don't consider Maryland to be local to Indiana. I would suggest you work on getting data about local farms in there, and then tighten up the constraints for what…
I think part of the problem you're finding is just that nothing is in season in your zip code, maybe? I don't really know Southern Indiana but I wasn't surprised that there were no real local results around me here in SW PA.
Up here in northern New England, I just harvested kale from my garden, and my CSA pickup on Sunday had a nice variety of squash, root crops, greenhouse spinach and cabbage. I'm sure there's plenty of things in season in southern PA.
Re: Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code
#90Neat! But you've got some work to do to get the data in there. I put in my Southern Indiana zip code and got 12 results back. Only one was actually anywhere near my zipcode (or even in my state). The rest were anywhere from 200 - 500 miles away. Sorry, but I don't consider Maryland to be local to Indiana. I would suggest you work on getting data about local farms in there, and then tighten up the constraints for what…
I had a similar experience in Yakima county - According to this site the nearest local apples are in Chelan county which is funny because there are many many apple orchards here.