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Winter Foraging in New England

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vampirebox	Winter Foraging in New England	Lead	[-]
Posts: 45 (12/07/08 7:48 AM) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	Tags : None For those of you living in/around the New England area of the U.S., what do you do during winter? What's good to eat, or to collect? During spring it's so easy to head out and to find a plant of interest, but during winter, everything has already died off... are there any good tubers, or foliage that I should be aware of? Thanks! -C
Haines		#1	[-]
Posts: 808 (12/09/08 12:04 PM) Administrator Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	vampirebox, There is a fair amount of good foraging to be done in the winter, but things can be spaced out over the landscape at this time. Many species of Rosa (rose) retain the hips on the plants over the winter. The flavor improves into the early winter and I generally reserve collecting most of our native species until then. Look for our our most prolific native species in and around the edges of swamps (fun to collect in the winter because the swamps are frozen over). Some shrubs also retain fruits into the winter, especially Viburnum opulus ssp. americana (highbush cranberry). These can be cooked and sweetened to make a nice fruit sauce or jelly. I routinely collect the fresh leaves of several different species of conifer, such as Abies (fir), Tsuga (hemlock), and Pinus (pine) for making leaf teas that are very high in vitamin C. Before the snow gets too deep, several forest plants have delicious fruits this time of year, such as Gaultheria procumbens (spicy-wintergreen). Mitchella repens (partridgeberry) is also good and holds onto the fruits through the whole winter. Robinia pseudoacacia (black locust) holds onto its legumes late into the winter, making it possible for you to collect the fruits and remove the seeds (treat them like small beans and boil them for a prolonged time to render the robinalbins inert, these can make you sick if you eat them raw). Robinia seeds swell up some and taste very much like beans (i.e., you could make baked beans out of these if you chose to). Rhododendron groenlandicum (labrador-tea) holds onto its leaves all year. Find this plant in bogs or on wind-scoured mountain tops. It makes a nice tea. Try the winter buds of Tilia americana (American linden), they are tasty and mucilagenous. I also do some collection of medicinal plants this time of year, including Usnea (old-man's-beard) and Juniperus (juniper). Anyway, just some inital thoughts. Haines
vampirebox		#2	[-]
Posts: 46 (12/09/08 3:19 PM) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	Thank you for such an in-depth answer, that's a lot of information to take in! Appreciate it.

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