Which vegetables should not be refrigerated — and which fruits and vegetables must not be stored together
umrkosh is a produce storage chart for a stall, a thela, a shop floor or a kitchen. Free ethylene and chilling-injury charts already exist and are worth printing — the UC Davis postharvest compatibility chart and the commercial ethylene guides are one search away, and they cover the same commodity facts. umrkosh differs in three specific ways, and in no others: it prints the Indian market name beside every item, it names the items it has no fact for instead of leaving them silently absent, and it deliberately does not print the storage-temperature column those charts lead with, because a cart is not a cold room. The holding-days column is filled with your numbers rather than invented ones.
It carries two kinds of information and never mixes them. Look for the two colours: moss green is the book, pencil grey is yours.
1. Chilling injury — what a named handbook records
The source is The Commercial Storage of Fruits, Vegetables, and Florist and Nursery Stocks, USDA Agriculture Handbook 66. For each item umrkosh prints the handbook's own symptom words and nothing else:
| Item | What Handbook 66 records |
|---|---|
| Cucumber (kheera) | Pitting, water-soaked spots, decay |
| Okra (bhindi) | Discoloration, water-soaked areas, pitting, decay |
| Eggplant (baingan) | Surface scald, alternaria rot, blackening of seeds |
| Potato (aloo) | Mahogany browning, sweetening |
| Ginger (adrak) | Softening, tissue breakdown, decay |
| Banana (kela) | Dull color when ripened |
Notice what is not in that table. The handbook's "Lowest Safe Temperature" column sits immediately to the left of every symptom above, and umrkosh never takes it. Handbook 66 is written for controlled cold rooms in another country; a cart has none. There is no temperature, humidity or shelf-life figure anywhere in this app — not as a column, not as a tooltip, not in the data and not inside a citation. The build fails if one appears in a quote.
"No chilling injury recorded" does not mean "keep it cold." It means the handbook did not list an injury. umrkosh has no value meaning "safe to refrigerate" and will never tell you to chill anything.
2. Do not store together — the ethylene pairs
One item gives off ethylene; another reacts to it and ripens and yellows faster. Keep the two apart in the crate, the cart and the bag. These roles are read from the handbook's per-commodity chapters, one quotable sentence per side:
| Gives off ethylene | Reacts to ethylene | Both — keep alone |
|---|---|---|
| Apple, Mango, Papaya | Cucumber, Okra, Spinach, Cabbage, Carrot, Cauliflower, Green pea, Lettuce, Pepper, Sweetpotato, Watermelon, Sweet orange, Ridge gourd, Snap bean, Eggplant, Pumpkin, Coriander | Avocado, Banana, Guava, Muskmelon, Tomato |
Who the chilling half is actually for. A chilling-injury flag only changes what you do if you have somewhere cold to put things — a fridge, an ice box, a cold room. If your stall has none of that, this half of the chart tells you nothing you can act on today; it is the half that matters in a kitchen, and it is the half that free temperate charts get wrong for Indian produce. The do-not-stack half below is the half that needs no cold storage at all.
Ethylene pairing is a rate, not a switch. A producer next to a sensitive item makes it ripen and yellow faster; it does not ruin it instantly, and separating them does not stop ripening. Handbook rows are commodity-level — your variety, your season and the day's heat can all move the answer.
3. The blank column — your own holding days
These days are ours. No book, no lab and no app supplied them. umrkosh ships zero holding days. Not a "typical" range, not an average, not a starting point. Nothing in this app knows how long anything lasts on your cart, in your season, under your cloth — so it asks one family for one number per item, once, and then does arithmetic with it.
A worked evening
Suppose your own sheet says banana 2 days, tomato 4, spinach 1, potato 12, and you have written nothing for cucumber. Tonight is 4 August 2026 and the floor has five heaps on it:
| Heap | Came in | Days old | Left, by your sheet | Goes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Banana | 2 Aug | 2 | 0 | Sell tonight |
| Tomato | 2 Aug | 2 | 2 | Holds tomorrow |
| Spinach | 4 Aug | 0 | 1 | Holds tomorrow |
| Potato | 28 Jul | 7 | 5 | Holds beyond tomorrow |
| Cucumber | 3 Aug | 1 | — | Unsorted — no days on your sheet |
The cucumber heap gets no number at all, not a zero. A zero would read as "sell tonight", and umrkosh did not earn that. And if your sheet is entirely empty — which is how it ships — no bucket heading is drawn at all; the app says so in one sentence and sorts nothing. The do-not-stack check still runs, because it comes from the book and does not depend on your sheet: with banana and cucumber in the same crate it prints "Banana makes Cucumber ripen faster — keep them apart".
What this sort is, and what it is not. It is subtraction of a number you invented, handed back to you. It cannot tell you anything your own sheet did not already say, and it is only as good as your memory of the date each heap came in — a heap entered as arriving today always has its full count left. Sheet B pinned above the crates does the same job with a pencil, which is why the printed sheet, not the screen, is the thing worth having. umrkosh will never dress that arithmetic up as a prediction.
What it will not do
No storage temperatures, humidities or shelf-life figures. No spoilage prediction, freshness score or photo detection. No food-safety claim of any kind — umrkosh never says anything is safe to eat; if it looks wrong or smells wrong, throw it out whatever any chart says. No prices, mandi rates, weights or margins. No stock register, no credit or udhaar ledger, no staff attendance or salary book. No accounts, no sync and no sharing. The app makes no third-party request: the CanvasKit engine and every font ship with the page, and the renderer's fallback-font URL — which would otherwise point at Google — is pinned to this same host, so a glyph outside the bundled faces renders as a blank box rather than being fetched. Some things families sell every day are simply not in this handbook, and some that are in it carry no sentence umrkosh could quote for one of the two facts. Those are two different silences and it names them separately rather than merging them or guessing.
Where the facts come from
One source, named on every card: The Commercial Storage of Fruits, Vegetables, and Florist and Nursery Stocks, USDA Agricultural Research Service, Agriculture Handbook 66 — the chilling-injury table on pp. 63–64 and the per-commodity chapters. Every fact in the app carries the handbook's own sentence, the page it sits on and the date the source was fetched. Tap "Why does it say this?" on any card to read it. Nothing is inferred, nothing is taken by analogy to a related commodity, and nothing comes from a secondary blog.
Try it below
The chart below is the real, cited corpus — there is nothing to fake in it. The holding-days sheet is empty, exactly as it is in the installed app, so the first thing you see is the true zero-state. Write your own days, print the sheet, stick it on the wall. Nothing you type leaves this page and nothing is saved.