Product Description

A practical guide to all aspects of edible wild plants: finding and identifying them, their seasons of harvest, and their methods of collection and preparation. Each plant is discussed in great detail and accompanied by excellent color photographs. Includes an index, illustrated glossary, bibliography, and harvest calendar. The perfect guide for all experience levels.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7091 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Customer Reviews

Outstanding for the upper midwest
It would be a very difficult task indeed to create a book that really does a good job of treating edible wild plants from all of North America. The books that attempt to do so rely way too much on other written works (which have a lot of misinformation) and way too little on direct experience. Moreover, trying to cover a really broad range of plants means that the plants that are covered are treated rather superficially. Just like the best field guides are usually the field guides for a particular region (when these are available), the best wild food guides have a strong regional bias. My ONLY complaint about The Forager's Harvest is that the author does not spell out his region right up front, I had to infer it from the plants covered (he also mentions that he's based in northern Wisconsin somewhere in the intro). I happen to live in the upper midwest (northern Minnesota), and for that region, this is far and away the best wild edible plants reference I've ever seen.

Selection: He doesn't try to cover everything you might eat if you were desperate, he covers most of the plants you would want to eat because they taste good and have high nutritive value.

Harvesting: He covers where, when, and how to harvest in sufficient detail for each plant that you are unlikely to be put off by a bad experience.

Preparation: Details of preparation are critical. For example I've never seen in any book such detailed directions for HOW to get the starch out of a cattail rhizome.

Overall approach: He drives home the idea that real foraging is real work. You need to study, and you need to put in real time - but if you do so you can expect to have good quantities of excellent food.

All in all, a really outstanding book, unsurpassed for the region.

Excellent book!
This book has great detailed information! It's been very useful to me when I've been out foraging.

Disappointing for California Foragers
We vacation in the Sierra Nevada every summer and I wanted to start learning about foraging in these beautiful forests. Unfortunately, information for this area is sorely lacking in this volume. I'm sure the Indians who inhabited this area found plenty of wonderful plants to eat. Fortunately for them, they did not have to rely on this book. I will have to look elsewhere for a resource on plants of the Sierra.