Edible Wild Plants for Beginners: The Essential Edible Plants and Recipes to Get Started Kindle Edition

Have you ever been out in nature with a friend, only to watch them nonchalantly pick a leaf or berry, or even unearth a root and begin eating it? When you ask what they are doing, they inevitably seem surprised – saying something like “Oh, this is ____, you can tell by the flowers. Here, try some. It’s good.”Have you ever wanted to be that in-the-know, nature-eating friend? If so, this book is for you.Edible Plants for beginners offers a quick primer on foraging history, some rules of thumb and techniques for the activity, and a fairly extensive set of edible plant profiles and accompanying recipes. There are also appendices on making tinctures and the top ten (most common) poisonous plants in North America, many of which are flower garden mainstays.The information is presented well, and there are copious warnings and best practices to keep greenhorn foragers from endangering themselves with look-alike, out of season and contaminated plants.While this is a beginner’s guide, I wish there were more visuals. Cramming the book with multiple photos of every edible would not be feasible. However, the introductory sections about foraging would have been even more evocative with paintings, drawings or photos of indigenous people gathering edible plants into handmade baskets. Stock photos of forests, urban growth, gardens and other environs would also make the activity of foraging come alive in the pages.While the one photo per edible plant is appreciated, drawings or photos of the different parts of the plants would be great too. It also seems a little ironic that the top ten plants that will poison you don’t even get pictures or drawings. It seems to be taken for granted that the reader will have to use the internet or a more comprehensive book to really get serious – “Edible Wild Plants for Beginners” seems to be relegating itself the status of stepping stone in that way.Disclosure: I received this book at no charge.

Edible Wild Plants for Beginners is a basic book about foraging for food. There's plenty to read about and a color photo from each item which is discussed. However, since many plants which are discussed have more than one edible portion, an accompanying photo of that portion should also be included; hence the 4* review. Only a few plants have photos of all edible portions. The photos offered are very clear and sharp in print form but not as good digitally.The authors make no claim that by reading this book one might become an instant expert. In fact, quite the opposite. They offer a four step "Universal Edibility Test," which, when used correctly, takes about two days to complete the analyzation of any given unknown potentially edible wild food.The book offers recipes and remedies from wild plants. Additionally, there are two appendixes entitled (a) Ten Steps to Making Tinctures and (b) Ten Most Common Poisonous Plants. Resources and references are also available.I also opted for the digital download for an additional 99¢. This medium does not seem to suffer from issues that some other downloads have mentioned. All information including the photographs is there.

This is a good book for the beginner who is looking for easy to identify plants that they can work with. Many of the plants in this book are likely growing right around you or possibly in your yard. Each plant has one clear photo. I recommend checking with other sources for more photos to make sure that the plant you are harvesting is absolutely the one you think it is. There are some herbal recipes in here that I will make but the one biggest complaint I have is that many of the recipes using the plants feature the plant very minimally. For instance, one of the recipes for bay laurel (bay leaves, which are used in cooking) is for lentil and goat cheese salad. It sounds like a delicious recipe, but it only calls for one single bay leaf out of a long list of other ingredients, so I can hardly call that a recipe for bay leaf. There were some other recipes that I would have ever thought of such as chamomile cookies or using cattail pollen in biscuits. If you're looking for herbal uses for these plants, use this book mostly for identification and basic knowledge and get your herbal recipes somewhere else. Most of the recipes are for culinary uses.

Interesting topic.

Brillient, so many plants to eat, of some I was brought up to discard as poisonous but not any more

Great, ate lots of wild plants using this

Very informative