Why
Every town had somebody who knew.
Which alley the mulberry hung over. Which oak dropped the sweet acorns. That knowledge was spoken, never written, and it left when they did.
A mapped pawpaw is worth nothing in June and everything in September.
So FloraHunter writes down both — the place, and the season that place is actually in, read from the weather that ground has had since January 1.
Seven drawers, one ledger
Nuts
Walnuts, hickories, chestnuts, hazels, acorns.
Fruit
Tree and shrub fruit — apples, pawpaws, persimmons, mulberries.
Berries
Brambles, blueberries, elderberries, currants.
Greens
Nettles, dandelion, purslane, lamb's quarters, cress.
Roots
Sunchokes, groundnut, ramps, burdock, chicory.
Herbs
Aromatic and medicinal — mints, bee balm, yarrow, mullein.
Mushrooms
Morels, chanterelles, chicken of the woods, hen of the woods.
How it works
Stand next to it. Write it down. Come back.
Drop a pin where you stand
GPS takes the spot, or place it by hand. Two taps.
You are here · ±4 m
Grade it honestly
Quality and yield, one to five — then the traits that matter to that drawer.
Nuts
Shagbark hickory
Carya ovata
- Quality
- 4 / 5
- Yield
- 5 / 5
- Crackability
- 2 / 5
Read the season, not the calendar
Heat, rain, soil and frost at that exact pin decide whether it is ready.
Or just ask
The field assistant searches the map, reads the almanac, and logs a find for you.
Field assistant
What’s worth walking to this week?
searching · reading the almanac
Two chanterelle patches within a mile, both under a wet fortnight. Nothing on the pawpaws yet — they need another 400 degree-days.
It will not identify a plant, and says so when asked.
Sources
We did not start from an empty page.
Naturalists, foragers and meteorologists published all of this. We read their work and add the one thing none of them set out to answer: is it ready now? 339,849 pins here came from them already.
Where the plants are
iNaturalist ↗
Research-grade observations, pulled by genus for the ground near you.
Where the food is
Falling Fruit ↗
A million mapped harvests, many already graded. CC BY-NC-SA, credited on every pin.
What the weather did
Open-Meteo · ECMWF ERA5 ↗
Heat, rain, soil and frost from January 1 to ten days out. No key needed.
What the place is called
OpenStreetMap · Nominatim ↗
Turns a coordinate into “Cascade Head, Oregon” — or admits it cannot.
Measured, not guessed →
Heat, rain, soil and frost are measurements. The ripeness windows they are compared against are regional rules of thumb for the temperate north, and every card says so. South of the equator the almanac declines to guess rather than inverting the seasons behind your back. Weather is never stored — it is read live for the ground you are looking at.
Community
The ledger is only as good as the last person who wrote in it.
Every grade is a forager's
Nothing here is scored by a model. A 4 means somebody picked it and thought it was a 4.
The map improves as it is used
One person's lookup adds a name and a photograph to every pin of that species.
Credit travels with the data
Imported pins keep their source and their link home. Your own finds stay yours.
A society of your own
Keep a roll with the half-dozen people you actually go out with.
9 pins here were put down by hand, by somebody standing next to the plant. The next one is the point.
Safety
What it will not do.
Foraging mistakes run from a bad evening to a liver transplant. So here are our limits, up front.
- It never identifies a plant or a mushroom.
- It raises dangerous lookalikes unprompted — false morels, hemlock against yarrow, lily of the valley against ramps.
- It never calls anything safe to eat.
- Access flags are unverified guesses by whoever logged the pin.
- Positive identification is yours to make.
Join the mission
Something within a mile of you is ready.
Grade one find, and the map is better than it was this morning.