Reddit reviews The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants
We found 13 Reddit comments about The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Winner of the 2006 Midwest Book Award!218 color photos, demonstrating each edible part in the proper stage of harvest, plus showing important identifying featuresStep-by-step tutorial to positive plant identificationPhotos and text comparing potentially confusing plantsThorough discussion on how to gather and use the 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.
Seconding u/theUnmutual6's recommendations, in addition to u/BlueSmoke95's suggestion to check out Ann Moura's work. I would like to recommend Ellen Dugan's Natural Witchery and her related domestic witchery books. Ellen is a certified Master Gardener and incorporates plants into much of her work.
Some of my favorite plant books!
Plant Science:
Foraging & Field Guides:
Herbalism:
Ethnobotany:
I also encourage y'all to look into fungi as well. I work with both plants and fungi and I think they bring a fascinating and fulfilling aspect to my work. Plus, hunting for mushrooms is super fun! I can recommend field guide books for folks who are interested, they just tend to be very region-specific so I'm not going to list all of them here.
For general fungus reading I recommend the following:
Sam Thayer's books, especially The Forager's Harvest.
It's not a huge guide, and only covers a dozen or so plants, but it's a real botanist-level course in beginning plant identification. Some people would say it's the best guide out there right now.
A great way to get started is with online resources, because there you can find a lot of different pictures of the same plant, to help you nail down an identification of edible plants. And you can't be too careful with edible plant identification. Steve Brill (who is also a good book author) has a wonderful website.
Also, there are people on YouTube with extensive wild plant identification channels.
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
This is a really good guide. http://www.amazon.com/The-Foragers-Harvest-Identifying-Harvesting/dp/0976626608
Honestly, small game won't make much difference. There's around 25 million deer in the country. There's around half that many hunters estimated by state fish and game departments, certainly a low estimate of the number of people willing to shoot animals once they start starving.
That means all animals -- even those that are actually poisonous -- will be utterly eliminated in populated areas by the time your stored food runs out (even if you only have a couple months of food stored).
Animals will move back into the depopulated areas once the hunting pressure drops with massive human die offs, but with the large rural populations hunting too, it's going to take years before hunting near cities will be remotely viable.
In short, my argument is that unless you have two years of food stored and land to start farming seriously within a year (with two years stored because you are likely to fail that first year), hunting will either be incredibly difficult with all animals disappearing (if food production or distribution is disrupted leading to human starvation) or ridiculously easy (if some pandemic takes out most humans leaving plenty of food for the rest for years).
I just don't see a scenario where studying what specific animals can safely be eaten in what way is likely to be useful.
Eating plants is a different story. There are a hundred million gun owners who know how to shoot at a squirrel is they're starving. Almost nobody knows you can harvest and eat cattail rhizomes or boiled amaranth, and knowing how to safely prepare and eat local plants while you struggle to build and maintain crops could be critical to survival in a widespread famine.
I'd recommend getting this book. It focuses on the Midwest, but some plants are more widely distributed and I absolutely love the low risk approach to positive plant identification (and the warnings about failure to follow proper plant identification protocols).
The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants https://www.amazon.com/dp/0976626608
The Forager's Harvest appears to be in the same vein as well.
Stalking the Wild Asparagus is a great inspiration and a classic, but I'd recommend at least pairing it with The Forager's Harvest for an updated foraging manual. Great list- glad to see Seymour on there!
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
Are we talking story type books or 'how to' books?
If 'how to', here's a couple to get you started:
The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants - Full colored pictures of edible plants found in the wild
Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills - I haven't picked up this book yet but it's been quoted in a few SHTF books I've read as a point of reference.
http://www.amazon.com/Foragers-Harvest-Identifying-Harvesting-Preparing/dp/0976626608/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377479697&sr=1-1
Easily the best book on the market concerning foraging. Maybe you guys could go camping or geocashing and look for edible plants. At the very least it should make for an interesting and potentially useful read for someone who likes the outdoors and food.
Along a similar vain, this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Knew-Cleaning-Made-Easy-ebook/dp/B008GWMH0K/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377479881&sr=1-4
is an interesting read about how to clean various stains with everyday house hold objects.
For a book with more personal experience collecting and cooking wild edibles I always suggest Foragers Harvest. It's all first hand experience.
*edit because mobile