Deep winter. The "nothing grows" season — except it does, if you stop looking for green and start looking at bark, buds, and last year's fruit still clinging on.

What I'm reading

• Winter tree ID by bud and bark — foraging in January is really tree identification in January. Learn five barks now and next spring's harvest gets twice as easy.
• Rose hips after the frost — the wrinkled red hips on wild multiflora rose (an invasive — harvest freely) are sweetest after a hard freeze. Vitamin C bomb, great tea.
• Spicebush twigs for winter tea — snap a twig, smell citrus-allspice, steep it. The easiest hot drink in the cold woods.

Field note

Busse Woods, single digits, everything crunching. Picked rose hips off a multiflora thicket with gloved hands and made tea that tasted like a memory of summer. Winter foraging is less about food than about having a reason to be outside when nobody else is. That's reason enough.

— Jenna