Still frozen, but this is the issue where the planning forager beats the wandering one. Spring comes fast and stupid in Chicago — one warm week and the ramps are gone. Let's be ready.

What I'm reading

• Build a phenology calendar for your patches — Nature's Notebook lets you track when specific plants leaf and flower. Two years of notes and you'll predict ramp emergence within a week.
• The forager's spring scouting checklist — what to look for, in what order, as the soil warms. I re-read this every February.
• Cook County preserves I haven't tried yet — my resolution is one new preserve a month. The full location list is the place to start.

Field note

Spent a snowy afternoon with last year's iNaturalist logs and a paper map, marking the slopes where I saw ramp leaves before they were ramps. Foraging is 70% memory and notes, 30% boots. The notebook is the real tool. Get your scouting list down now — in six weeks there won't be time.

— Jenna