About the dates

The sources

The season windows are assembled from university extension harvest calendars — the crop-by-crop charts that land-grant universities publish for their own states, public domain in most of them — and cross-checked against USDA NASS marketing-season data (editions reviewed in 2026). Where the two disagreed, we followed the extension chart: it's written by the people who walk those fields.

The honesty rules

Half-month resolution, on purpose. Harvest charts are honest to about two weeks, so our bands are too. Anything finer would be theater.

No faked windows. Where a state has no meaningful market production of a crop, its page says so and tells you where the supply really comes from. An empty stretch of chalkboard beats an invented season.

"Now" is your clock, not ours. Everything that says "right now" — the home board, the peak stamps, the dashed today-line on every band — is worked out in your browser from today's date. Nothing on the site is frozen at the moment we built it.

Farms beat charts. Any single farm can run up to two weeks either side of its state's typical window. For a u-pick trip, the chart picks the week; a phone call picks the morning.

What this site is (and isn't)

HarvestDates is about eating local — markets, u-pick farms, and grocery honesty. It stops, deliberately, at the market stall: no growing guides, no farm directory, just the timing.