Show 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

Comment by perspectivezoom 1 day ago

Oh, neat. I submitted this a few days ago, and it got no traction back then. Thanks mods for giving it a second chance.

I probably should mention that I'm looking for new opportunities. My LinkedIn is at https://www.linkedin.com/in/perspectivezoom and you can reach out there or at hn@perspectivezoom.com.

Comment by sghiassy 1 day ago

Really liked the project. Printed it out and put it on my fridge. Best of luck on the search

Comment by skyberrys 1 day ago

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.

Comment by perspectivezoom 1 day ago

> Also it has a picture of an avocado and no data about avocados.

If you're referring to the middle left picture in SF, that's actually a plum from Vacaville, CA: https://pomological.art/watercolors/POM00005135.

There's some code to prefer the produce you select, but there really aren't that many unique fruits in the collection; just lots of varietals of the same fruit.

https://pomological.art/watercolors is pretty neat. You can see that there's 3788 apple drawings, far more than any other, and it quickly dies down to 959 peaches and 445 pears. For any given region, there's only like ~7 unique fruits to draw from.

Comment by hackernud3s 1 day ago

Are people really driving hours to get to farmers markets? The carbon footprint of that feels like irony.

Comment by skyberrys 1 day ago

I don't think so, but when I am driving long distance I do make a habit to stop by all the local markets. The funniest situation was when I went to one in AZ, this one vendor had incredible raspberries just like home. I asked his secret... he had driven hours that morning from my home. He was on his way to selling out though.

Comment by hackernud3s 1 day ago

I hope he at least was driving an EV. Sigh.

Comment by mariocesar 1 day ago

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!

Comment by nosmokewhereiam 1 day ago

Do WI next please! Were vendors and this would be really cool to have on a Facebook page, with credit given where due ofc

Comment by recursive 1 day ago

I don't understand what the y-axis on the graphs mean, and what the second color for each series represents.

Comment by martyvis 1 day ago

Per the small text at the bottom of the poster I would say they are based on shipment volumes -so how much is available. The lighter colour probably indicates variation depending on how good the growing season is

Comment by perspectivezoom 1 day ago

Yes, this is correct. Realistically, you only care "is it there", and "is it there and good", and those are the two levels. For SF, I'm using shipment volume as a proxy for ripeness, on the assumption that the best produce occurs when you're shipping the most of it. The shaded parts are when the annual history says that it's only good in some years but not others.

I decided against a legend because I thought that it was self evident. Maybe not... https://vertumnus.fyi/about/transcript?view=topic%3Aposter-f...

Comment by skyberrys 1 day ago

I guess the second color is the margin of error or wiggle room on the prediction.

Comment by c54 1 day ago

There's no y axis labeled or marked, the visual is vertically spreading each curve out so it's not all one big color jumble. Not sure what the second color means exactly either.

Comment by ramon156 17 hours ago

gonna check tomorrow if i can support my own area

Comment by niyonx 1 day ago

sick graphic. did you use any libraries for them?

Comment by perspectivezoom 23 hours ago

Yes, D3. There are 8 external dependencies for the entire project (React is one of them), enumerated at https://vertumnus.fyi/about/licenses/#software.

Comment by rc_kas 1 day ago

oh nice work. very cool project