Why
Every town had somebody who knew.
Which alley the mulberry hung over. Which of the two oaks by the school dropped sweet acorns and which dropped acorns you would have to leach for a week. The fortnight the pawpaws went soft, and the morning after the first hard frost when the persimmons were finally worth stopping for.
That knowledge was local, spoken, and unwritten. It moved from one person to the next by walking somewhere together, and when the walking stopped it went with them. A supermarket is a fine thing. It is not a reason for a whole season of food to fall on the pavement of a city every year and be swept up.
Two things have to be true before you can pick anything: you have to know where it is, and you have to be standing there in the right fortnight. A map answers the first. The second is where most foraging tools quietly give up — they print a calendar, and a calendar is a poor guide when the same date runs three weeks apart between a cold spring and a warm one.
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, not from a date printed a year in advance. That is the whole idea. Everything else on this page is bookkeeping in service of it.
What we are
A ledger, kept by the people who walk past the tree.
A ledger, not a field guide
It records what foragers found, where, and what it was worth when they got it home. It does not tell you what a plant is, and it will never tell you a thing is safe to eat.
Two scores everything shares
Quality and yield, one to five, on every find in every drawer — so a shagbark hickory and a hen of the woods can be compared at all. Traits layer on top where they mean something.
Seven drawers, one cabinet
Nuts, fruit, berries, greens, roots, herbs, mushrooms. Each carries the field traits that decide whether that thing was worth the walk.
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 at the right time.
Drop a pin where your feet are
Open the map, stand by the plant, and log it. GPS takes the spot; the map takes it instead if you would rather place the pin by hand. It is two taps and it is the entire cost of remembering a tree for the rest of your life.
You are here · ±4 m
Grade it honestly
Quality and yield, one to five. Then the traits that matter to that drawer — crackability for a nut, sweetness and seediness for a berry, firmness and condition for a mushroom. A grade is a note to the next person, including the next-year version of you.
Nuts
Shagbark hickory
Carya ovata
- Quality
- 4 / 5
- Yield
- 5 / 5
- Crackability
- 2 / 5
1 barely worth it · 5 the best you'll find
1 a handful · 5 fills a bag
1 shell fights back · 5 opens clean
Read the season, not the calendar
Every pin carries a reading of its own weather: heat accumulated since January 1, rain over the last fortnight, soil temperature at six centimetres, and the frosts behind and ahead. Those four decide whether a thing is in its window — and the card names the place it read, so a season is never mistaken for somewhere else.
Or just ask
A field assistant sits beside the map. It searches what is mapped, reads iNaturalist, moves the map for you, and logs or grades a find when you ask it to — with your GPS fix, the view on screen, and the open card as context, so “what's ready around me” is a whole question.
Field assistant
What’s worth walking to this week?
searching · reading the almanac · moving the map
Two chanterelle patches within a mile, both under a wet fortnight and soil at 16 °C. The hickory on Elm is three weeks early on heat this year. Nothing on the pawpaws yet — they need another 400 degree-days.
It answers from what is mapped and what the weather says. It will not identify a plant, and it says so when asked.
Sources
We did not start from an empty page.
Naturalists, foragers, and meteorologists have been writing this down for years, in public, under licences that invite you to build on it. FloraHunter reads their work, credits it on the card where you read it, and adds the one thing none of them set out to answer: whether the thing is ready right now. 339,849 of the pins on this map came from them already.
Where the plants are
iNaturalist ↗
Research-grade observations — the ones a community of naturalists has independently agreed on. Pulled per category by genus, so a seed run brings back what is actually growing near you.
Where the food is
Falling Fruit ↗
A million-odd mapped harvests, a good share already graded on the same quality and yield axes this app uses. Shared under CC BY-NC-SA — every imported pin keeps its id and links back to its record.
What the weather did
Open-Meteo · ECMWF ERA5 ↗
Reanalysis and forecast, stitched into one series from January 1 to ten days out. Free, worldwide, and needing no key at all — which is why the almanac works the moment the app is cloned.
What the place is called
OpenStreetMap · Nominatim ↗
A coordinate is not a place. Two keyless geocoders turn the middle of the map into “Cascade Head, Oregon”, and a spot nobody can name simply says so rather than guessing.
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 in the app says so where you read it. 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 on this map is scored by a model. A quality of 4 means somebody stood there, picked it, took it home, and thought it was a 4.
The map improves as it is used
A binomial resolved to a common name and a photograph is cached once and pushed onto every pin of that species — so one person's lookup improves the map for everybody who opens it next.
Imports are remembered
Every pull is saved with its place and radius and can be run again next season, picking up whatever the source has added. Anything already mapped is skipped, so it is always safe.
Credit travels with the data
Imported pins keep their source and their link home. Your own finds stay marked as yours and separable from everything that arrived in bulk.
A name, if you want one
Sign in with an email address and one link — no password to invent. Your ledger follows you between the phone and the desk, and your name goes on the pins you put down.
A roll, not a scoreboard
Points come only from mapping and grading what you actually stood in front of, so the roll is a record of who has been out walking. Your own line is always shown, whether you are first or ninetieth.
A society of your own
Found one, hand out its calling card, and the half-dozen people you really go out with keep a roll of their own. Four friends and a hedgerow is a season; the whole map is a lot to be twelfth on.
3 pins on this map were put there 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 an unpleasant evening to a liver transplant. A tool that is vague about its own limits is worse than no tool, so here are ours, before you have given us anything.
- It never identifies a plant or a mushroom, and it says so plainly when it is asked to.
- Dangerous lookalikes are raised unprompted — false morels, poison hemlock against yarrow and elderberry, lily of the valley against ramps.
- It never calls anything safe to eat. That sentence does not exist in it.
- Access flags are unverified guesses by whoever logged the pin, and every screen that shows one says so.
- Positive identification is yours to make, against a field guide or somebody who has been picking it for twenty years.
Join the mission
Somewhere within a mile of you, something is ready.
Start with the tree you can see out of the window. Grade one find, and the map is already better than it was this morning — for you next autumn, and for whoever walks down that street after you.