Wild food gathering in the temperate parts of the world inevitably means coping with the problem of winter. What do you do? Can you do anything?
Yes, you can. Actually, there’s quite a bit going on out there. You just can’t see it. The earth and (eventually, often) the snow conceal most of it from view. The rest is made invisible by our long conditioning that “nothing happens in the winter” when it comes to plants.
The foraging literature itself is faintly discouraging when it comes to winter. They don’t tell you not to do it, but the implication is that it isn’t particularly worthwhile. Emphasis tends to be placed since the Gibbons era on enjoying the fruits of the other seasons of harvest, sitting back in your chair with a seed catalog, shelling hickory nuts and sipping on persimmon wine. The winter section of every foraging book is like an afterthought, usually accompanied by a list of plants so desultory that it squashes the imagination, rather than firing it.
Yet, we all know this is precisely what is needed in the winter. A spark, a kick, especially after the holiday madness/joy (or forced madness/joy) is over and our bodies start to go into hibernation mode. The key is in viewing winter as not a dead time or a rest time but as just another time, simply another season. The activity of plants and trees and fungi around you hasn’t stopped, it’s just different. Which means we need to learn to look differently, to reassess our environment with fresh eyes.
More than just being a neglected time of year to gather wild foods, winter is also overlooked when it comes to studying wild plants and fungi. But if our knowledge of nature is to expand alongside our use of its’ resources, then winter is an ideal time to study as well as collect. Not only will our attention be drawn to interesting things we normally overlook, like mosses and bracket fungi, but towards the familiar things that have changed in aspect. And while the idea of looking at a bunch of dried twigs and seeds might not seem as romantic or appealing as trekking through a spring woods, in reality it can tell us quite a bit about the life cycle of these plants. Ultimately, knowledge of a wild food resource through all of its seasons, all of its changes, is really what we are after : comprehension of the patterns of its growth and how it deploys its energy in order to make our best use of it.
Over the course of the next few weeks I will be discussing in some detail how best to take advantage of the undervalued resource of wild food in winter, including profiles of specific plants and accompanying recipes. I hope to be able by springtime to have made my point that winter isn’t an “off” or “dead” season but simply the fourth season. Perhaps it’s a bit more humble than the others, but one well worth getting outside for, and certainly no occasion to hang up the basket. For now, as an antidote to all those discouraging lists of winter wild foods in foraging books here is one with just some of the things I have either gathered or noted as available in the past few winters :
Acorns
Sow Thistle
Cranberries
Juniper “Berries”
Chaga
Watercress
Maple – Sap / Syrup
Rosehips
Pine Needles
Oyster Mushrooms
Blackhaw / Nannyberry
Dandelions – Greens and Root
Daylily Bulbs
Crabapple (hardy species)
Chickweed
Wild Parsnip
Spicebush – Twig
Henbit
Marsh Yellowcress
Chicory
Evening Primrose – Greens and Root
Bittercress
Velvet Shank Mushroom (Enokitake)
Highbush Cranberry
Yarrow
False Strawberry – Greens
Sunchoke / Jerusalem Artichoke
Persimmon
Cleavers / edible Bedstraw
Wild Carrot
Hawthorn – Berries
Pennycress
Plantain
Wintergreen – Leaves and Berries
Ground Ivy
Northern Bayberry
Nettles
Common Mallow
Spruce – Tips
Hickory Nuts
Cattail – Root
Birch – Twig
Turkey Tail Fungus
Wild Radish – Greens and Root
Thistle Root
Wild Chervil
Teasel
Wapato
Hemlock Tips
Sumac Fruit
Linden Viburnum
Garlic Mustard
Wood Ear Fungus
Purple Deadnettle
Birch Polypore Fungus
Winter cress
Wild Mustard
and, of course, everyones favorite :
Field Garlic !!!
How to Cook a Weed 