What Ripens Here, and Roughly When

The food pages on this site describe dishes. This one describes the year those dishes come out of, because the table here changes far more between April and October than the restaurants do.

It carries no calendar table, and that is deliberate. Ripening moves with the year, the district and the height above sea level, so a fixed chart would be wrong for somebody every season.

Spring is green, not sweet

The first thing that arrives here is herbs, in quantity. A plate of them lands on the table beside almost everything else, and it is treated as food rather than as garnish.

Fruit comes later than visitors expect. Spring is for greens, young cheese, lamb and the first strawberries at the end of it.

Early summer

Cherries and mulberries come first, and mulberries in particular are a village fruit that rarely travels far from the tree that grew them.

Apricots follow, then peaches. This is also when the roadside tables reappear properly, since there is finally enough to put on them.

High summer

Melons and watermelons take over completely, sold from the back of vehicles and stacked in pyramids at the roadside. Tomatoes are worth eating on their own in this stretch.

It is also the hottest and least comfortable part of the year for travelling. Our summer page is honest about what that heat does to a day.

Late summer into autumn

Figs, grapes and the first nuts arrive together, and this is the point at which the markets become genuinely impressive. If food is why you are coming, this is the window.

The grape harvest matters beyond the fruit itself, and our wine page covers what happens to it in the western foothills.

Autumn

Apples come down from the northern orchards, and the crates carry the name of the district they came from. Quinces appear, and so do walnuts and hazelnuts in the northwest.

Then the pomegranates, which are their own event here. Our page on that season covers the fruit, the sauce and the festival we refuse to date.

Late autumn and the persimmon

Persimmons are the last thing standing. They hang on bare trees after the leaves have gone, which is one of the most recognisable sights of the country in November.

They are also dried in strings and eaten through the winter. If you see them being hung, you have arrived at the very end of the growing year.

The south is its own climate

Around Lankaran the weather is wetter and milder than the rest of the country, and it grows things nothing else here can. Tea, citrus and subtropical fruit come from there.

That is why a lemon in a market in the capital may have travelled a shorter distance than you assumed. Our Lankaran guide covers the region itself.

Winter is not empty

The market gets smaller, not bare. Citrus from the south, dried persimmon, nuts, preserved fruit, pickles and jars of things put up in September.

Winter is when you find out that half the autumn was cooked, dried or sealed rather than eaten. That is a cuisine, not a shortage.

Altitude changes everything

The same fruit ripens weeks apart at the coast and in a mountain village. A crop finished in one valley may be at its best two hours away and higher up.

This is why we hedge every date on this page. It is also why a driver who knows the roads is more useful in this than a calendar.

What we will not print

We publish no prices, no fixed dates and no promises that a particular thing will be out in a particular week. All three change, and being confidently wrong about them wastes your day rather than ours.

What we will do is check. Send your travel weeks and we will tell you what is likely, what is certain and what nobody can know yet.

How to use any of this

Buy at the roadside rather than in a supermarket when the option exists, because that is where the local crop actually goes. Our stalls page explains how that works in practice.

Then eat it the same day. Fruit picked that morning and eaten that afternoon is the entire argument for planning a trip around a season.

Arranging it

Tell us which weeks you have and whether food is a reason for the trip or a bonus on top of it. The answer changes the route rather than the length of the day.

We will say what should be in by then, which markets are worth the detour, and what we cannot promise in advance. That is a more useful answer than a chart with twelve neat rows.