GrünZeit – Saisonkalender

With the GrünZeit app, you can find out easily and anywhere when local fruit, vegetables, salads and herbs are in season.

The GrünZeit shopping aid shows you when local goods are in season or when they are more likely to come from the warehouse or greenhouse. To make it easier to distinguish between them, we have designed the symbols in the traffic light colours: red indicates high energy consumption, yellow indicates medium energy consumption and green indicates very low energy consumption and the corresponding climate impact. Red does not mean that we advise against these products in general. However, we would like to draw your attention to the fact that at the same time there are many alternatives that have been produced with lower energy consumption and therefore have less impact on the climate. If you buy local fruit and vegetables in the high season, you will spoil your taste buds and protect the climate at the same time.

Most fruits and vegetables are now available all year round. Cultivation in the southern hemisphere makes us forget what grows when in our country. Many supermarkets offer imported fruit and vegetables even when they are in season. Peruvian asparagus at Christmas, strawberries from Morocco at Easter, and South African grapes at Pentecost – this is how some shopping looks like. Long-distance food transports consume a lot of energy and pollute the climate through the released greenhouse gases, this applies to a greater extent to air transport. But domestic production can also be very harmful to the environment if it takes place outside of the season in heated greenhouses, e.g. tomato cultivation in spring. Production, storage and transport costs usually play a minor role in pricing, and they are often passed on to other foods.

The content of the GrünZeit app corresponds to the paper version of the seasonal calendar "Heimatisches Obst und Gemüse", 6th updated edition, November 2022, which was developed in a joint campaign by all consumer advice centres. It is available as a pdf at www. Verbraucherzentrale.sh/saisonkalender.

Funded by the Ministry of Agriculture, Rural Areas, Europe and Consumer Protection of the State of Schleswig-Holstein.

Innovations 2023:

In addition to technical updates, the GrünZeit App has been expanded to include some types of vegetables and the category herbs. For example, peppers, aubergines, dill, marjoram, sage and more can now be found in the app. As usual, there is an overview of all domestic foods considered as well as a list by month in which the climate impact can be read.