Winter foraging is mainly about locating plants to harvest from in a different season. The lack of foliage and undergrowth allows for better visibility of some characteristics.
A few plants are still edible in the coldest weather. But I promise I won’t sing the praises of chickweed *every* single week until spring arrives. (OK, maybe I will for a several weeks though.)
We start the new year with staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina), a short tree or tall shrub I mentioned back in July. The female members of this species produce edible red drupes with a sour coating. The coating is water soluble so the drupes can be soaked in water to produce the base for “sumac-ade”. I tried making this myself, but it didn’t seem very flavorful, perhaps because the excessively rainy summer had washed the flavor away.
Remember, if the plant has white berries, it may be poison sumac rather than staghorn sumac, and is (surprise, surprise) poisonous!
Once the leaves have fallen, the female sumac shrubs are particularly easy to spot because the drupes cling to their bare branches throughout the entire winter.
Here are some staghorn sumac recipes from one of my favorite foraging authors, Leda Meredith (author of Northeast Foraging, one of my “go-to” foraging books):
Obviously these instructions won’t do you much good until later this summer … but by then you will know exactly where all the female staghorn sumacs are.
Except the ones alongside busy, fume-filled, dangerous highways. Leave those for wild birds!
In Search of the Lean Six Life 
“Drupe” is my vocabulary word for today: “a fleshy fruit with thin skin and a central stone containing the seed, e.g., a plum, cherry, almond, or olive.”
Hmmm, maybe I need to start building a glossary somewhere on this site!
[…] already posted about finding female staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) during the winter, since the lack of leaves on surrounding trees made it easier to […]
[…] inundated with last year) actually wash away the flavor. I even staked out a possible location for sumac over the winter, but that photo was taken from a car […]