InSeasonChart

Method and sources

Every season window on this site is quoted, not estimated. Here is how we pick, pair and check sources.

National figures

National season windows come from USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) Fruit and Tree Nuts Outlook reports (the FTS series) and ERS Charts of Note. Under each figure sits the exact sentence it's drawn from, word for word, along with a link to the report and the date we checked it. Publishing is blocked automatically whenever that quote can no longer be found in our saved copy of the source, or when a figure we print isn't actually present inside it.

State-level figures

Every crop in the chart has two independent sources, and they have to be about the same place. When both name a state, it must be the same state. When one is a USDA national window and the other a state department of agriculture or university extension calendar, every month in the state calendar has to fall inside the national window. That shows the state calendar fits the national one; it does not mean both sources confirmed that state’s months, and each window is shown with its own source. Two sources that describe different states are not a pair. A crop with only one source, or whose two sources describe different places, is left out of the chart and the relevant page says so.

What this site does not cover

This is a market-availability chart, not planting or harvest-timing advice: it says when a crop is typically for sale, not when to sow, transplant or pick it. We also do not cover food storage or substitution.

How our fetcher behaves

The script pulling these reports announces itself as InSeasonChartBot/0.1 and points back to this page. robots.txt gets checked before anything else (a 4xx there counts as open access), requests to any one host stay at least three seconds apart, and the script backs off for good the moment a host answers with a 403, a 429 or a CAPTCHA. There's no second attempt under a different identity, and whatever that host would have given us just doesn't make it into the data — only its link stays on the page.

Pages and reports quoted