I got called out for writing a cop out of a post yesterday. My reader raised an excellent point. If we were truly dependent on foraging for our survival, we wouldn’t let a little snow stand in our way. So here is the post you have gotten to read. Enjoy!

Here we see a photo of my favorite patch of chickweed (Stellaria media) (which you may be sick of hearing about before the winter is over).

As you can see in the photo, the chickweed is thriving despite the cold temperatures. It will continue providing us raw salad greens for some time.

In the below photo, notice the beautiful dandelion greens (Taraxacum officinale).

They are in such good shape, I could harvest half of them for greens, and the other half to roast the roots for a caffeine-free coffee substitute.

And here we see a colony of garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata).

I have very mixed feelings about having such a healthy “crop” of garlic mustard, since it is an invasive species that crowds out other native plants. I intended to cull this particular patch by dining on the greens, or making some intensely flavored pesto.

Last but not least, here is a tenacious burdock plant (Arctium minus).

I am hoping this little guy makes it through the winter. Burdock is a biennial, and in its second year of life forms an edible flower stalk which I have yet to sample. (I was able to dig up a nearby first-year back in the fall to sample the burdock root.)

There  you go! Four edible plants that can be found even in the winter. Now that you know what to look for, you can successfully survive by foraging in the snow too!**

(**You know that’s tongue in cheek, right? Don’t actually try this…)