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.

Larchwood Foragers is one household's notebook about a few square kilometres of pine forest in the Varėna district, where the sand runs deep, the trees are almost all pine, and the Merkys is never far away. We have picked here since 2019 and written it down since the first autumn: what came up, what the rain had done the week before, which patches produced and which ones quietly stopped producing. It is a record of one small place rather than a guide to the region, and that difference matters more than it sounds like it should.

The notebook exists because memory is a poor instrument for anything that happens once a year. A season comes round, leaves a strong impression, and by the following July that impression has rearranged itself into whatever makes the better story at a table. Written down, a wet August in 2021 stays a wet August. Six years in, the pages are more useful than anything I was ever told, and most of what they contain is dull: dates, hours walked, rainfall, weights, and one line for the decision that followed.

Nothing here is a key and nothing here is advice. I do not publish coordinates, I do not name the families whose ground I cross or the people who taught me, and I am an amateur who has thrown away a full crock through simple carelessness. If you forage, learn from somebody standing beside you in your own forest with a proper book in their other hand, and treat anything written by a stranger on the internet, this included, as somebody else's weather, somebody else's soil and somebody else's year.