Basket notes · plate index
A foraging notebook from the pine forests of the Varėna district: boletus and chanterelle seasons, bog berries, drying, salting, and what to leave standing.
Varėna, Alytus CountyLithuaniaNotebook kept since 2019
Five long entries, each one written up at the kitchen table out of the notebook and a wet basket. Newest first.
Plate VWhat not to pick
The ones left standing: look-alikes I will not risk, species I quietly stopped taking, and the places where picking anything at all is a bad idea.
Plate IVWeather and folklore
Kitchen rules about the moon, the rye and the mosquitoes, checked against six years of walks: which ones held up here and which quietly did not.
Plate IIIKeeping
How the autumn baskets become winter food here: threading and drying boletus, salting milk caps in a crock, and the failures that taught the method.
Plate IIBerries and bogs
Two berry harvests three months and four kilometres apart: a hot July ridge, an October bog that floats, and how to get both of them home whole.
Plate IMushroom seasons
Chanterelles from late June, boletus after the August rains: how the two runs differ here, and why the calendar matters less than the nights.
The forage year
Drawn from the notebook rather than from a book. The bars are this ground between the river and the railway line, and a reader two districts away would be misled by every one of them.
Months with a plate in the index:JFMAMJJASOND
Inside the cover
Larchwood Foragers is a private record of one patch of pine forest in southern Lithuania: when things fruit, what the weather did first, and how the year was kept, written down so that each season starts from notes instead of from a feeling.
Write the rain down before you write the basket down.
Identify at the table in daylight, never among the trees.
Take less than the patch can spare, and leave the moss flat.
One good year proves nothing; keep the empty days too.