Locavore tells you what is in season in your area

Did you know that garlic is currently in season in Rhode Island, but only for another month? New Mexico has another six months of garlic season left to burn. California and Washington are blessed with a garlic season that goes year round, although I’m not sure if you can have a season if you never go out of season. I know all this because I have been tracking garlic, bamboo shoots, winter pears – one more month Washington! – and all sorts of produce using Locavore on my iPhone.

There are lots of foodie apps for the iPhone available but only a handful focus on local, fresh food or farmer’s markets.  Locavore does a great job of merging mobile and fresh food.

Locavore features a seasonal fresh food calendar, locations of farmer’s markets and recipes for fresh food currently in season. The app is beautiful to look at and a fun way to discover fresh produce in your area. On the iPhone Locavore becomes a clever, well designed fresh food remote control. The recipes and content come from other sites such as foodista.com and Wikipedia and the app suffers when it hands you off to other sites. Using the app you get the feeling that when Locavore grows up it will be a great tool but it’s not quite there yet.

The best feature in Locavore is the market finder. The app grabs your current location from the phone and shows a map of farmer’s markets and other fresh food sources in your area using data from Local Harvest. That alone is worth the download. Locavore has a social feature called I Ate Local which seems like the token social feature. I am not sure I need to know that someone named Paula ate some cheese recently. But if I Ate Local got more timely, alerting me of  good deals on fresh food in my area, or providing a question-and-answer service for hard to find food it could get really good.

Locavore is limited to the discovery of produce which is too bad. The app would be really great if it could find fresh local brewed micro beer and tell me where to get fresh crab or salmon and when it is in season.

The publisher of Locavore is Seattle based Enjoymentland, run by Buster Benson. The app is a $2.99 download in the app store.   Download the app on your iPhone and use it on your next trip to the farmer’s markets. You will be supporting a local app developer.  If you get a chance to try it out let me know in the comments section.