I am so excited to present something to you today that is the product of many months of hard work on the part of my husband and I.

RipeTrack logo

Introducing: RipeTrack –  A searchable produce seasonality calendar to help you keep track of when your favorite fruits and vegetables are in season and at the peak of ripeness!

We’ve been working on this site for several months, but the real catalyst came several years ago. Allow me to tell you a little story about me and sour strawberries…

For years, I had the bad luck of buying carton after carton of gorgeous red strawberries that would all inevitably turn out to be sour and unripe. Strawberries are one of my very favorite fruits, favorite foods even, and I hadn’t had a sweet one in years. Not to mention that berries are notoriously expensive, so I was even more angry that not only was I not getting the experience I wanted from those finicky little fruits, but I was throwing money away as well.

Strawberries and clementine

Last year I made the decision that I was going to try my hardest to not buy some of the more sensitive fruits and vegetables out of season. I ran into one major problem with my shift toward more seasonal eating though, I had a very hard time finding out just when I could expect each item to become ripe in a typical year.

Searching online would often turn up vague seasonality information if at all and usually the answer was hidden deep within a lengthy article. I wished that there was a faster way for me to find out when the best time was to buy my beloved strawberries, and really, the best time to buy all of our produce.

Jeff had been asking me to come up with a project to work on together in our spare time (he’s a programmer/web developer,) and suddenly it hit me that together we could build a database of the seasonal ripeness information for every fruit and vegetable imaginable and make it available on the web!

And so, RipeTrack was born!…

RipeTrack homepage

 

There are 3 ways to use RipeTrack: You can search by the individual item you’re looking for, you can search by month to view everything that’s ripe during that time, or you can search by keyword to view everything of a certain topic.

For example, here I’ve searched for “berry.”

RipeTrack search "berry"

The results are displayed for all berries in the database, neat huh!?

To read the graphs, just move your cursor over the graph and up pops a grid showing the months of the year. The bracketed area represents what part of the year we’re in now.

See, I took this shot on the last day of March, and that’s the bracketed area.

RipeTrack graph with months

The yellow and green areas show when the item is ripe. For the strawberry shown above, you can expect it to be considered ripe from late April to early November. But to insure that you get the sweetest and juiciest strawberries, purchasing during the green “peak season” is more likely to get you the best berry for your buck.

The red areas correspond to when the item is not ripe. You will still probably be able to find the item in stores, but you can bet that it was either grown in a greenhouse or shipped from across the world. For some items, you won’t notice a diminished quality during the off-season, but for others like the tomato, they just won’t be nearly as good in October as they will be in June.

The really cool thing about RipeTrack though is that it’s interactive. If you come upon an item that doesn’t have any information on it yet, and you think you know when it will be ripe, just submit a feedback form and we’ll add your input to the site!

No information on search

Feedback form

We’re hoping that over time, the information on RipeTrack will get more and more accurate with user feedback to become the most complete and reliable source for seasonal shopping on the web!

So, I really hope that you guys are as excited about this website as I am. I know that it’s something that did not exist on the web previously and that it’s something that I have really needed.

We have many more features planned for RipeTrack in the future including how to choose a ripe fruit or vegetable at the store, a monthly newsletter of what’s in season and what’s not, and even a way for you to save your favorite produce and compare lists with other users!

If you have a moment, please visit the site today and experiment with searching for items, months, or keywords. I would love to hear your ideas on how we could improve the site or any other suggestions or comments you may have. I may link to a short online survey about it soon to get some of your opinions anonymously as well.

That’s the big announcement. NO, I’m not pregnant, sorry everyone. 😉 But RipeTrack has been my little baby for the last few months and I’m as proud of it as a new mom. Please tell me what you think!