Winter Foraging

 

Winter Foraging

Winter is down time. I can use the shortened days and bad weather and long darknesses to rest and catch up and relax…and then suddenly days are getting longer and it is raining not snowing and I haven’t.

Yes, winter foraging is a thing. Some of it is like summer, that quick trip into the world to taste its bounty. Some of it is the time winter gives for the long game of foraging: learning, observation, preparing, sharing.

In central Maine we are alternating between thaw and snow and icy glaze has been the median weather this winter. I am not going anywhere. But I never stop foraging. At the holidays I told my husband, let’s shop in the house. So we each looked through our too many possessions for a treasure to gift the other, and were content. Dried mushrooms, fruit leathers, pickles, syrups and country liqueurs went out as gifts. Note to self: Design and make up preprinted labels with name and logo and a place for date, ingredients and comments for next year. That masking tape may have the most effective glue but it is so inelegant.

 I have jars of dried mushrooms and greens several seasons old, crusty packages in the back of the freezer, seeds to make into flour or mush if they haven’t turned musty. I sniff to decide. Time to dig deep, see what is still good and what has freezer burned or taken on that back-of-freezer smell. This is soup weather, stew weather, the season for rich gravy cooked down slowly with the pot roast. Rice and other grains speckled with flecks of seasons past, served with a dollop of wild kimchi. Homemade soda made seasoned with dried berries and syrups bottled in seasons past perking not too far from the fire. Tea by the pot. Wild syrups on oatmeal and pancakes. Time to eat down the stores.

If you don’t have all these things from forage years past, time to think about them. Wild soda is easy to make, there are many recipes and people teaching classes (I recently posted one by my favorite foraging chef). Do you have bottles and jars to store things in? Time to start looking for swingtops to recycle for soda. Old champagne bottles are particularly explosion proof; just order corks that will fit. I am always looking for tall containers in which to story my fruit leather rolls. And then I have too many containers, so now is also a good time to purge, starting with all that is rusted, bent and chipped. I made up more motherwort tincture than I can use but someone in the next town over has posted her curiosity about it. I send a PM.  Do I want to take my pickling up a notch and invest in a crock and weights? I read the reviews, shop beyond Amazon,  consider discussing design with my favorite local potter.

What else do you want to learn? On line tutors abound now, from live classes to youTubes to old-fashioned print, there has never been an easier time to find old techniques and new.  I just joined Wild Basketry, my new favorite reason to spare FB despite all its sins, and am making cordage from everything lying limp in the remains of my garden. I consider soap, decide instead to up my salve game for the comfrey, plantain and other healing herbs hanging on my rafters. Oops! Time to bring them down and bag them up.

Speaking of print, this is a great time to organize your library, consider gaps, and start reading and rereading. Do you want to learn some new plants? Pick a few and start studying what writers say, their secret virtues, contradictory advice. Work your way through a field guide as local to where you live as you can find. Search course listings at nature centers and Audubon societies, adult ed and extension services. If you know a lot, consider offering your expertise as a teacher.

 If you keep a notebook, this is a good time to go through and organize and review. Do you want to make a map showing where you found things? (pro tip, don’t post a pin for your ramps or fiddleheads on line). Maybe you have a camera full of snaps. Consider printing out some pictures and adding them to your notes (or if you are doing it electronically, adding notes to the pictures or bringing image and observation together on line.) Some of the most brilliant 19^th century botanists were women, and whether it is Amazonian exploration or notes on a hedgerow, their illustrations and descriptions inspire me to another set of resolutions for 2022. I will make at least a weekly entry to this blog.  Just as a dream journal helps you enter more deeply into your own undergrowth, keeping a nature journal will sharpen your attention and intention.

 Now is a time to make sure you have the equipment and supplies you need. If you don’t have a dehydrator, didn’t get one for your midwinter gifting, now’s the time to look for new year’s sales or people getting rid of the old one that was just replaced. Have you been considering a shelf, or cupboard, or drying rack in an underused area? Project time. I am making baskets out of wild things, my new enthusiasm. Some of them will turn into receptacles  for collecting, drying, storing and sharing foraged bounty. Also, now is a time to organize, repair, clean, repurpose and even discard some of the baskets I already have. Maybe this is the year I will turn an antler shed and a piece of piano wire into a mushroom harvesting extension for my walking stick, or carve and fire harden the end of a new one to double as a digging stick. Time to degum the clippers, sharpen the pocket knife.

The seed catalogs are starting to come in, gardener’s porn. Mushroom sites from the other coast and warmer climes are full of beauty shots. Time to plan. Our winter this year has been soggily unsatisfying so far, too much ice, too little snow, but once we get s little snow, I will get out the snow shoes and tromp out my favorite routes. Without the messy greenery, it’s easy to spot likely treasures for next year. The milkweed patches are obvious without tall grass hiding them. There are tangles of grape vine that I hadn’t noticed, off the edge of a side road I sometimes take. Planning for the next turn of season. Queen Annes lace,  evening primrose, Jerusalem artichoke, dock and burdock all have distinctive drying stalks that mark places to go digging as soon as the ground thaws in spring.

It’s time to plan routes as well as roots. Between my generation and older dying off or downsizing and moving to homes that are easier to maintain, and the influx of newcomers fleeing the city in the face of plague, there has been more turnover than usual in land ownership. Nearby woods where I had roamed have been brutally harvested. (I mourn the shade and mushrooms, while anticipating berries and new kinds of mushrooms.) If you have permissions to harvest on private land, renew them. If you don’t, get them.  My design and printing project for this winter will include a permission slip and gift card; in exchange for permission to harvest, choose one: a foraging tour of your land; shared harvest; or a prepared food foraged elsewhere or on your place. My favorite thing to discover while foraging is new friends.

Finally, foraging season is never over. Some things to consider: Lingering berries, some of which only sweeten once frozen.  Rose hips, hawthorn, crab apples clinging to their branches. Pine needles for tea.The edible inner bark of pine and other trees, stripped from branches snapped and dropped in winter storms. Treetop lichens also can be gathered from the snow after a windstorm, like seaweed tossed up after a gale. These may be edible, medicinal or useful for dyeing, or decorative.  A few mushrooms, oyster and enoki, continue to grow during warmer spells all winter. Chaga, that overharvested prize.  Winter-retted stalks, reeds, blades and rushes for cord and basketwork.

A few hardy plants push leaves at every moment or can be found even under the snow. Many are bitter by now but the most aggressive push out soft leaves whenever the temperature breaks freezing. These are the most aggressive weeds, the most generous allies, including dandelion, plantain, chickweed, garlic mustard and yellow mustard.

Finally, remember that you are sharing. Unless you are unhoused yourself, you have a warm place and probably a store of nutritious food. You are sharing with hunters and hunted whose footprints scratch up the snow around the seeds scattering from last year’s seedhead, whose race to a buried cache was interrupted by that fan of owl feather printing its drama on the snow. Don’t take their food.

1,495 Noon