About

302 apple orchards, cider mills and farm markets within about two and a half hours of New York City — 100 of them pick-your-own, 34 making hard cider or spirits.

Where the listings come from

The New York Apple Association's member directory. It carries names, addresses, coordinates, phone numbers, websites and categories, which is more than any other single source has.

OpenStreetMap was the obvious first choice and turned out not to work. Across this whole region, self_harvesting=yes — the OSM tag that means pick-your-own — appears on exactly one feature, and only 82 farm shops carry a website at all. It is a good source of orchard polygons and a poor source of orchard facts.

The association states no licence for its directory. That is ambiguity rather than permission, so every row here records where it came from and when, and withdrawing the source would be one filter rather than an archaeology project.

Coverage is uneven, and here is exactly how

New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania each have a state-level source. New York's is the richest — its association publishes categories, so those listings arrive knowing whether a farm does pick-your-own. Connecticut's and Pennsylvania's are rosters: names, addresses, phones and websites, with few attributes. Those get filled in by reading the farms' own sites.

Massachusetts is still 10 OpenStreetMap leftovers — pins with names and little else. That is a gap in our data, not a shortage of orchards; please do not read a thin state as a state without farms.

New Jersey is the worst of it. The state's own directory, findjerseyfresh.com, serves Disallow: / to every crawler — the whole site. That is a clear answer and it is respected; nothing here touches it. So New Jersey depends on OpenStreetMap and on people adding farms themselves.

Connecticut comes from the Connecticut Apple Marketing Board, and Pennsylvania from PA Preferred, the state Department of Agriculture's branding programme. Pennsylvania is thinner than it looks it should be for a reason: Adams County, the state's apple capital, is about two hundred miles from New York City and falls outside the day-trip radius entirely. What is here is the north-east — the Lehigh Valley, Bucks County and the Pocono foothills.

Greenmarkets are not on the map

The directory also lists 51 New York City greenmarket stalls — a folding table on a pavement on 175th Street. That is a fact about the grower who drives down, not about the corner, and somebody looking for somewhere to spend Saturday does not want them in the results. Farms that sell at greenmarkets and grow apples, like Fishkill Farms, are here.

What is missing, and why it says so

Opening hours, whether picking is open, prices, varieties, dogs, restrooms, hayrides, cider donuts — none of it is checked yet. 217 of these farms have a website, and a scraper that reads them is the next piece of work.

Until then those fields are shown as unchecked rather than as "no". The distinction matters more here than it looks: a wrong "open" costs somebody a two-hour drive with children in the car, and the only thing worse than a map that does not know is a map that pretends to.

Licences

Every listing records where it came from and under what terms, so withdrawing a source is one filter rather than an archaeology project.

A few rows carry a field from a second source — an OpenStreetMap listing whose address comes from the state directory, say. Those fields are recorded individually and credited individually on the farm's own page, rather than letting the row's label take credit for work another source did. Withdrawing a source therefore means dropping its rows and clearing that short list of fields, which is still one query rather than an archaeology project.

• New York Apple Association — no licence stated. That is ambiguity rather than permission, and it is recorded as unstated rather than left blank or guessed at. (188 listings)
• Connecticut Apple Marketing Board — no licence stated. (41 listings)
• PA Preferred — no licence stated. (14 listings)
• OpenStreetMap contributors — ODbL 1.0. Requires attribution and share-alike. The only rows here whose terms are not a guess. (10 listings)
• a person, by hand — user-submitted. Compiled by somebody rather than taken from a directory, so there is no published roster to re-check it against. What each farm actually does still comes from reading the farm’s own website. (49 listings)

Driving times

When you say where you are travelling from, the drive times come from OSRM, the demo server sponsored by FOSSGIS, running on OpenStreetMap data. One request per origin, for every orchard at once.

There is no traffic in those numbers. They are free-flow road times, and a Saturday morning in late September is exactly when that is most wrong. Treat them as a way to sort the list, not as an arrival time — which is why every one of them says "without traffic" next to it.

Source

github.com/minormending/orchard-map. Corrections are welcome, and accounts for submitting them are coming.