alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Vertumnus – printable posters of farmers' market produce seasonality
The origin of this project was me, as a casual farmers' market attendee, grossly misremembering the start date of early girl tomatoes. Ironically, I still haven't achieved that goal, because I couldn't find a suitable source with varietal level granularity online. I'm half dreading a "Why didn't you check X?" comment and discover there's some perfect local varietal data source, but that would really be the best case scenario.
The poster is customizable per crop, and the pictures reposition heuristically. There's only two regions, SF and NY, with very different source data for each. See https://vertumnus.fyi/about/sources for methodology.
A static poster is not the greatest form factor for a schedule with annual variation, and this whole project was a non serious side exercise. See https://vertumnus.fyi/about for more.
The project was coded in a single 731 prompt Claude Opus 5 session over 22 days within a 46 day period, from July 20th to September 2nd, 2026. I've published the entire transcript, searchable and organized by chapter, at https://vertumnus.fyi/about/transcript. A write up, with the stuff that Claude was good at and its repeated code quality shortcomings, is at https://vertumnus.fyi/about/ai.
Comments
Great work, and thanks for sharing the transcript! Just skimming through the chats, I've already learned a lot. Would be so awesome to have this for any region/city, but that is a data problem to solve.
Congrats again!
I don't understand what the y-axis on the graphs mean, and what the second color for each series represents.
It sounds like you need me to visit your market ( or my market... It only takes one super user per market and I assure you I am almost always there), film everything and then feed that into your website. I like the idea, but it's not complex for my fanatical farmers market mind. It only has two geographic regions and okay 1 is only hours driving from me, but I would be more likely to use it if it was my own region.
Also it has a picture of an avocado and no data about avocados.
And don't get me started on the market availability between the first hour and the last hour because if I keep losing all the caviar limes to the restaurant buying the whole batch I'm going to start camping at 6am.
Some things I hunt for: Concord grapes, pomegranate, caviar limes, raspberries, mara des bois strawberries, amaranth and all types of kale.
ETA: the early girl tomatoes I recall as end of May or June, probably mid June for you. Too late now I think. Those little orange oblong ones are good though and my favorite breed of tomato is Japanese tomatoes. They have almost 100 percent availability at my market too because they have a specialist grower who uses green houses.