Reddit reviews Nature's Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants

Definitely pokeweed, as sprashoo said. Do not eat the berries, stems, or roots at all - cooked or raw. The leaves can be eaten like salad greens, but they have to be rinsed and boiled several times before they're safe. Not sure if this one is worth the trouble, although some may disagree.

As far as finding edible plants, there are lots of websites. Edible Wild Food is a good place to start.

I also really like the foraging books by Samuel Thayer: Nature's Garden and The Forager's Harvest.

I am in southcentral PA and have been able to find many of the plants in Thayer's books. He goes into great detail about each plant and mainly only covers ones that actually taste good.

My personal recommendation is that if you want to get really into foraging then you need to pick up the three books that I consider the foragers holy books:

Wild Edible Plants by John Kallas

The Foragers Harvest and Nature's Garden by Samuel Thayer

Both of these books focus on North American foraging (but I assume that's OK with you considering that your books are US based).

I believe that John Kallas is from Oregon and as such many plants are based around that area and just generally west of the Mississippi. I have been able to find some of the plants that he listed in the book (I am from SE part of US), but some are not native/introduced so I will never find them while walking around.

Samuel Thayer is from Michigan area if I remember correctly and so his books focus on my side of the country. His two books are identical in style, but Nature's Garden was written after and contains more plants in number compared to his first. They are both fantastic resources to own.

The reason I prefer these three books is because they do not skip important information and contain many pictures, harvest date ranges, look-alike information, recipes/procedures, and a lot more. These books go out of their way to make sure you forage confidently and with plenty of information.

If you want to get into this hobby, as I have too recently, now is the perfect time to pick up these books and start getting familiar with plants because spring is right around the corner.

Hope this helped and good luck!

edit: grammar

There's a lot more to foraging than just identifying the plant. Plants look different at different parts of the year. Also there are many plants that only have certain parts that are edible some of the time. Processing and making these wild edibles into a meal is another big part of of the puzzle. It can take years to really learn even a couple dozen plants deeply.

If you want to learn how to identify plants using pattern recognition I recommend the book Botany in a Day Its really well organize and easy to learn from.

I recommend this book too. It has a number of wild edibles that are very common and goes into great depth about how to identify them and when to harvest, how to process and even recipes. I also recommend the you tube channel Eat Your Weeds

They say that if you are as sure you know what a plant is as you are in identifying an orange then you can eat it. If you aren't absolutely sure then take the plant to someone who is.

One thing that I think is really cool about learning plants is once you learn to recognize a plant you begin to see it everywhere. I love foraging and identifying plants. Its a great hobby and the knowledge is really empowering. Good luck, have fun.

I agree on keeping one's gold and silver, and I plan to purchase a firearm soon as well. It's better to diversify. In case you didn't want to exchange only USD for bitcoins, however, that is another available method. Oh and speaking of foraging, I bought this book recently and find it's a really great resource in case anyone reading this is interested in finding out more about the topic.

I really wasn't sure what you were arguing with your initial comment, but I think I have a better idea now that you've elaborated. As far as addressing your concerns, you can buy food using bitcoins. Many retailers accept it directly and the number is increasing every day. You can also use Gyft to buy giftcards for Whole Foods, Target, etc if you want to buy groceries. Gas is one area that hasn't taken off just yet, but there is a gas station (I think in Pakistan, probably not helpful to you just yet) who started accepting it recently, and I think there is one in CO as well. More will definitely follow.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0976626616/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1492774864&sr=8-2&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=foragers+harvest&dpPl=1&dpID=61U1VSDqxoL&ref=plSrch


100% of the plants found in that book are found in IL.

If you're in the US check out Nature's Garden and The Forager's Harvest to get started.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Foragers-Harvest-Identifying-Harvesting/dp/0976626608/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1331302035&sr=8-2

http://www.amazon.com/Natures-Garden-Identifying-Harvesting-Preparing/dp/0976626616/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331302035&sr=8-1

I have this book. It is amazing, with pictures, uses, how to prepare the food, etc. I highly recommend it.

Note that most gathered wild plants need some significant processing to really make it nutritious enough to be worth gathering.

For example, you can gather cattail rhyzomes (shoots down by the roots where the cattail plant is pushing out to spread), and eating them might fill your stomach, but if you mash it to break all the cell barriers, then dry it into flour and cook it, it's a fantastic source of starch.

Many wild edibles can also be somewhat poisonous. You often have to select certain parts of the plant at the right time of year, or wash the plant (like acorns) to remove toxins, or it has to be cooked before it can be eaten.

Getting into identifying, collecting and processing wild plants would be a fantastic New skill!

I do not have that skill, so this is about the extent of my knowledge. I do live in the Midwest though, and I think you would find this book interesting and practical (note that most foraging is regional).

Nature's Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants https://www.amazon.com/dp/0976626616

It strongly emphasizes safety and absolutely certain identification of the whole plant, which shouldn't scare you off, but like working with firearms, if you follow some basic procedures rigorously, you can forage safely for food sources others around you don't even know exist.

Anyway, besides just experimenting with wild food, part of your preparation can be working on tools and methods of efficiently processing the food.

Sam Thayer has an excellent write-up of the history of Krakauer's ever-changing theories about Chris McCandless' death in his book Nature's Garden. I highly recommend you check out the book; it's an amazing book for wild plant identification as well. With apologies to the author, I'll basically be paraphrasing him here, but I'll abbreviate the parts before 2015, as it seems like you know about them already.

Krakauer abandoned his ODAP theory in 2015, when he updated his conclusions to say, in his own words, that "ODAP was not present in H. alpinum seeds" (source). Note that this was the fourth time that he abandoned one of the hypotheses he had purported for Candless' death:

-First hypothesis: McCandless ate H. mackenziei accidentally. Purported by Krakauer from 1993 to 1996. See "Death of an Innocent," 1993, Outsize magazine. H. mackenziei has been shown to lack any toxins at all (Treadwell and Clausen, 2008).

-Second hypothesis: McCandless ate H. alpinum, but H. alpinum contains the toxic alkaloid swainsonine. Purported by Krakauer from 1996 to 2007. See "Into the Wild."

-Third hypothesis: McCandless ate H. alpinum, but the seeds were moldly, causing him to get sick. Purported by Krakauer from 2007 to 2012. From interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2007. (See https://www.adn.com/voices/article/krakauer-goes-further-wild-over-mccandless-starving-death-alaska/2013/09/14/)

-Fourth hypothesis: McCandless H. alpinum and it contained ODAP, causing lathyrism. Purported by Krakauer from 2012 to 2015.

In 2015, Krakauer changed his theory to say that H. alpinum contains a toxic amino acid called L-canavanine and that this is what led to McCandless's death. This theory was published in a paper, which you can read online.

However, as Sam Thayer points out, while the chemical analysis that showed that L-canavanine has a concentration of 1.2% (weight/weight) in H. alpinum seeds appears to be solid, there are problematic assumptions in the paper relating this concentration to Krakauer's death.

-The authors say "there is evidence that H. alpinum seeds constituted a significant portion" of McCandless' diet, when in fact, the only evidence are the handwritten words "potato seeds" and "fault of pot seed" and the photo of a bag of H. alpinum loments. There is no other evidence to suggest that these seeds were a major part of his diet.

-The authors labeled a photo of H. alpinum loments as "Hedysarum alpinum seeds...estimated dry weight 600g" and refer to loments as "seeds" throughout the paper. However, seeds and loments are not the same thing as seeds; they are large legumes that contain small seeds within. Foragers do not eat the loments; they only eat the seeds within. As the authors are citing the weight of the loments (Sam Thayer, as an experienced forager, estimates the dry weight of the seeds to be less than 250g), it seems entirely possible that the study was done on the presence of L-Canavanine in the loments (the non-seed parts are not eaten), rather than the seeds themselves.

-Rosenthal and Nkomo concluded in "The Natural Abundance Of L-Canavanine, An Active Anticancer Agent, in Alfalfa, Medicago Sativa (L.)" that with alfalfa sprouts, where canavanine constitutes about 2% of the weight of the fresh sprout, "one could not reasonably eat sufficient alfalfa sprouts, even if one consumed nothing else, to achieve equivalent canavanine consumption" as the animals which attained SLE (systemic lupus erythematosus)-like symptoms. Sam Thayer's argument is that a concentration of 1.2% would not be enough for McCandless to develop SLE-like symptoms.

I've left out a few more of Sam Thayers arguments. Not all of them are rock-solid (some seem like he's speculating in order to refute Krakauer's just-as-bad speculation), but in all, I found them pretty convincing. Not to say that Sam Thayer is necessarily correct in all of this (I am neither a doctor nor an expert forager), but I was more inclined to believe his theory (which is simply that McCandless starved, plain and simple, because there was no game to be had and he used the game he had found very inefficiently and poorly) than Krakauer's. Again, I highly recommend Thayer's book, which goes into this topic in almost obsessive depth.