That makes a lot of sense from a biology/brain point of view. Engaging sense other than just the student's eyes should help build/reinforce metal connections, making it easier to retrieve the data at a later time. I need to have a chat with the head of the Houston arboretum about their "no picking plants" policy to see if I can get it officially waived for my classes.

-Blast

I like the idea of planting, growing, and observing.

My wife will send me to the garden to get some <fill in the herb> and 15 minutes later come out to show me what I'm searching for. You'd think after 25 years I'd recognize thyme.

i'm looking for an edible wild plants class/guide in the san francisco bay area. any referrals would be much appreciated!

Hi all,

Yes, as I've started on this learning path I've also noticed that no single book can really give you a picture of what the plants look like.

What I've started to do is go through every plant in the Peterson's Guide and find 12-24 pictures of the plants from google images. I try to get as many varied pictures (of different parts and in different states as possible).

For me this works wonders! Plus you get the chance to verify that each one actually is the plant its labeled as.

Anyone want to play along? We can divide up the book and make it faster.


When I'm done I plan on making a visual basic program to quiz me on them (edible parts etc).

-NIM

I wonder how much fragile flora and fauna the apple-core recoverer destroyed to find what would have ended up on the forest floor eventually anyway?

I find learning wild foods from books intimidating, but I can remember the two or three things I was shown in the woods by a person in vivo 40 years ago to this very day.

Arthur, you might be able to get in touch with Christopher Nyerges.
http://www.christophernyerges.com/
He will likely know people in San Francisco since he is a teacher of primitive skills and wild food gathering around the Los Angeles area.

I think I mentioned this one other time, but a colleague of mine has made a 3 dvd set of wild plants of the midwest. From his website :

10 yrs in production!

A 3 volume DVD set. Nearly 100 plants. Gives visual identification,
edible, medicinal, and utilitarian uses of plants and trees

Each volume has an easy to use "Usage Index"

Gives Latin, common, and general Native American
name translations, Approximately 3 1/2 hours in length

The only DVD set of its kind in the midwest region

Many of the plants extend from Texas to Canada

Useful for professional ethnobotanists, botanists, herbalists, as well as avocationals interested in plant identification and usage

The DVDs have excellent images (he's an award-winning professional photographer) and cover a wide variety of plants. Main drawbacks are dvd format - hard to take in the field - and it's a little spendy ($39.95 + $5.00 US shipping). I asked him about the possibility of a book, he just rolled his eyes and said never again. This was a labor of love and not a money-making endeavor. Which leads to the disclaimer: No financial connection, although I consider Rick and Doris friends.

A couple of the books I have found helpful in foraging:

Botany in a Day - not an edible plants book or a field guide, but it gives you a great overview of learning plant families by common features(i.e. anything with a square stem and opposite leaves is in the mint family), which makes identifying plants a lot easier. This book also has some basic info on medicinal components of plants, and does have some info on edible uses of plants.

All The Rain promises and More - this is an excellent mushroom field guide the northwest, but many of the species are common elsewhere, and you can learn a lot about mushroom hunting in general from this book. Contrary to popular beleif, eating wild mushrooms is very safe as long as you use your brain and are careful(in other words don't eat something unless you are absolutely sure what it is). FYI mushroom season is just getting underway, so now is a great time to start learning.

The Foragers Harvest - Covers relatively few plants, but in great detail, at least several pages per plant, from ID to harvest to preparation. Definitely worth reading.

One thing I've found helpful is to use a local flower or other plant guide to identify the plants, and then look those up in a separate edible plants book or online. There are a lot more guides to flowers and plants than there are books that focus on edibles, so this can really make identification easier.


I have the Petersons guide but it is the least useful guide I own, and I own a lot of field guides. I do not find it helpful in identifying plants, and there is very little information on how to use the plants. The one nice thing about it is that it covers a great many plants, but what use is a long list of plants if you can't identify or properly use them?

I have a whole bunch of different books on the subject, including "God's Free Harvest" by Ken Larson and Elias and Dykeman's "Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants." I have one book ("The Official Pocket Edible Plant Survival Manual") that contains information that I haven't seen anywhere else.

It says, for example, that you can eat Maple and Birch leaves.

It's considered a good rule of thumb that you should only eat YOUNG leaves and that you should never eat old and wilted leaves. I haven't seen any other source of information where it says that you can eat Maple and Birch leaves, so I'm not quite sure that I can trust my pocket edible plant survival manual. I'm wondering if anyone has tried boiling and eating young Birch leaves. The inner bark of the Birch tree is said to be edible, and the sap of the Birch tree is said to be sweet just like the sap of the Maple tree.