What is in season in Lahore, month by month.

Why does seasonal sabzi actually taste better?

Two reasons, and neither of them is romantic. The first is time. A crate of matar picked in Okara or Pattoki yesterday morning is on a Lahore shelf today, and peas begin turning their sugar into starch the moment they leave the plant. That single fact is the entire difference between a pea sweet enough to shell straight into your mouth and one that tastes floury in the pulao.

The second is that in-season crops get picked when they are ready to eat. Out of season, fruit has to be picked hard enough to survive a longer journey, so it ripens off the plant on whatever sugar it had already made. It softens, it changes colour, but it does not get any sweeter. Apples held for months in controlled-atmosphere stores are the clearest case of this: crisp, handsome and flat.

There is a third thing worth knowing, because it catches people out with aloo. Potatoes lifted in spring go into cold storage and stay there most of the year, and cold storage slowly converts their starch into sugar. That is why a cold-stored potato browns quickly in the pan and tastes faintly sweet, while the naya aloo of February and March fries pale and clean.

November to February: the saag months

This is Punjab's strongest season and the crates show it. Sarson, palak, methi and bathua arrive by the bundle. Gajar turns up first as the crisp orange hybrid and then as the softer red desi carrot that halwa and kanji actually want. Muli, shalgam and gobhi are at their best, matar is sweet enough to eat raw, and hara pyaz appears with the roots still on.

Winter fruit means citrus and guava. Kinnow runs from December into February with malta and mausambi alongside it, amrood carries through from late autumn, singhara shows up on the carts and shakarkandi goes onto the coals.

• Greens: sarson, palak, methi, bathua and hara dhania, all at their fullest and least stringy.
• Roots: gajar, muli, shalgam, chukandar, and naya aloo from February onwards.
• Pods and heads: matar, gobhi, band gobhi, and broccoli where you find it.
• Fruit: kinnow, malta, mausambi, amrood, papita, and strawberries from late January.

March to May: the short spring

The greens thin out fast once the nights stop being cold. By late March sarson is finished and palak has gone stringy and bitter. What replaces it is the heat-loving fruiting sabzi: kheera, tinda, torai, karela and the first bhindi of the year. Aloo is at its freshest in this window, which is when it is worth cooking naya aloo whole with the skin left on.

Fruit is the good, brief part of spring. Loquat lands in April and lasts a matter of weeks. Falsa follows in May, tarbooz and kharbooza start in earnest, and the first Sindhri mangoes reach Lahore in the last week or two of May.

June to August: mango, monsoon and difficult greens

Mango dominates and everything else quietly gets harder. Dusehri, Anwar Ratol and Langra fill June and July, Chaunsa carries August, jamun and lychee overlap through June, and tarbooz is on every corner.

For sabzi, the monsoon is the awkward stretch of the year. Leafy greens grow quickly, arrive gritty with splashed soil and wilt within hours of reaching a warm kitchen, and the humidity is unkind to bhindi and to anything with a cut stem. This is the season to lean on the vegetables that are genuinely thriving in the heat and to buy leaves in small amounts you will cook the same day.

• Thriving: bhindi, tinda, kaddu, arvi, karela, torai and baingan.
• Struggling: palak, methi and dhania, which come in wet, sandy and short-lived.
• Buy leaves for one meal, not for the week, until the humidity drops in September.

September and October: the turn

The mangoes end, the humidity breaks, and autumn brings the fruit that keeps well: anar, amrood, persimmon, and apples down from the northern valleys. Bhutta is on every roasting cart. In the sabzi crates the summer gourds run out and the winter crops start arriving in ones and twos — the first gajar late in October, the first matar, gobhi heads that are still small and tight.

How to read the season without a calendar

The most reliable seasonal signal in any sabzi shop or kiryana is volume and turnover. What is in season arrives in quantity, gets stacked deep and sells through, so the crate you are picking from was filled this morning. What is out of season sits in a small tray, gets handled again and again, and shows it: dulled skin, dried stem ends, leaves already trimmed back once.

• Deep stacks mean the crop is running. A thin tray of one item means it is being carried, not grown nearby.
• Look at the cut ends. A freshly cut stem is pale and damp; two days later it is brown and dry.
• If a vegetable is available in two sizes and the small one looks better, the crop is early. Late-season produce runs big, seedy and fibrous.
• When the thing you wanted is clearly out of season, cook the thing that is in. Sarson in June is a poor imitation of sarson in December.