Cross-posted by me from my blog:

Learning edible wild plants takes time and effort, there are very few shortcuts. Hopefully I can give you some guidance that will cut out a lot of wasted effort. If you are serious about learning your local edible flora here what you want to do:

The Terrible Secret of Books
I get several e-mails a week asking "what one book is the best guide to edible wild plants?". The quick response is Peterson's Guide to Edible Wild Plants. It is probably the most comprehensive guide to edible plants in North America even though it mainly focuses on the northeast. It has color pictures, line drawings, and habitat info on hundreds of plants.

But I have yet to meet anyone who successfully taught themselves more than 6-9 plants using this book.

There's now such thing as a great edible plant guide. Unless you are already a plant expert it's impossible to teach yourself all your local edible plant from a single book. It's too hard to have clear pictures of every plant in every stage of it's life. For that reason you really need to have multiple reference books. I have over thirty plant books that I use as guides. These aren't all just about wild edibles. They also include wildflower guides, weed guides, tree guides, botany textbooks, gardening books, forestry books, etc... Each book has different pictures and descriptions of the same plants. Once you get some books start flipping through them every chance you get. You want to train you eyes to see specific plants among the Big Green Sea that surrounds you. You don't need to know the name or anything else about the plant at this point, just that you might have seen it in one of your books.

Cross Referencing
Once you've found a plant that might be edible it's time to ID it. Take a bunch of pictures of the plant's flowers, leaves (top and underside), stem, and overall appearance. Compare it to many pictures in your books, match the leaves, it's size and shape, and where it is usually found to similar plants in your books. At this point it's very helpful to understand plant descriptors (sepals, palmate, lobed, etc...) as it makes it easier to search through the books. Don't limit yourself to just using books to ID a plant. The internet is obviously another great resource for figuring out what the plant might be.

Take a Class
The best thing a plant newbie can do is take a class and I'm not just saying that because I teach the subject. A few hours with a good teacher will get you through the first, steepest part of the learning curves. By the end of the class you won't be adrift in the Big Green. You'll be able to pick out many plant all around you that are safe to eat (as well as know which tasty-looking plants are highly toxic!). Once you've been taught a bunch of edible plants, learning more becomes much easier as your "plant eye" will be much stronger. Then when you are on your own looking at a landscape you'll already see plants that you can/can not eat. You'll be left with just a few plants that you don't know, which is no longer overwhelming.

The other nice thing about taking a class is you'll get to see plants in different stages of their life. A particular plant may not be ready for harvest yet, but by seeing a young one you'll be able to go back and follow it's growth. Or if it's past time you may be able to collect seeds to grow your own.

Growing Your Own
One of the best things you can do to learn edible wild plants is to grow your own. Seeds can be either collected in the wild (follow all appropriate laws!) or purchased via the internet. Observing the plant from seedling to maturity is a great way to train your eyes to see it out in the wild.

The Well-Trained Eye
The repeated scanning of your plant books, internet sites, and home-grown plants will have filled your subconscious with key plant-shapes to look for and you'll be surprised at how they suddenly jump out at you! Each time you go out pick a few new plants to research and after a year or three you'll have mastered the all local edibles. You know you are doing it right when you start dreaming about edible wild plants!

-Blast

I enjoyed learning new plants I didn't know were edible, as well as confirming some other I "thought" were edible, but wasn't entirely sure.

PS: The reference blog post is empty for me too isn't loading for me -- anyone else, or am I the only one?

I figure if I can thoroughly teach one plant at a time I am doing well.
I try to adopt a shopping market approach. It is a bit off to explane, but it is about knowing your plant very well.
If you are after carrots in a store you will see them and not notice all the stuff in the store. It is like that in the woods too.
If you know the plant well you even know just where it will be in the store and what section of the produce section to look in, just like in the woods.
I have found that trying to teach lists of plants with their different look alikes just confuses people and they don't retain it anyhow. Especially when I am dealing with people who are not even familiar with the plants they eat everyday because they have only seen them in plastic wrappers in a store.
(I meet lots of people who would not know a carrot from a potato growing in a field.)
I like your idea of growing some of the plants. It would work well with berry canes and annuals fort sure. Habitat matching might be a problem with some of them though. I also like the plant to be accessible enough that they can see it at all seasons, hopefully that they see it and recognize it every day, and use it regularly if possible.

I do the same thing with the dangerous plants and with the mushrooms.
I only bother with about 8 mushrooms, and like with the plants, don't use it if you are not certain that you know it.

I have a book called Foraging New england, that I also blogged. The idea is a great one-instead of listing literally hundreds of plants, it goes over the most commonly found ones in any given area-and its preparation and uses. This is the best guide I have found so far. I dont know if they do guides for every region, but the one for mine is nice-I have learned most of the ones in my local area in just a few weekends.

This subject is very interesting.

However I live in the NW and I would be afraid to step off of the trail. We have so many politically correct people out here they would inevitably ruin any fun I was having.

They lurk behind trees and pounce as soon as you step off the trail and then start whining about how you should stay ON the path. "Don't step on the flora you heathen!"

So as much as I would like to expand my knowledge I will not. I will remain ignorant so as to preserve my PC status.

Thanks anyway.

CO

Chris, I've read 4-5 ethnobotony books but feel they aren't much use for people starting out in edible wild plants. The books are very regional-specific and don't give much information on identifying the plant. For the same reasons I steer novices away from euell Gibbon's books. The only ethnobotony book I've included on my rec-list is Tull's Edible and Useful Plants of Texas and the Southwest: A Practical Guide. It covers all sorts of Native Texan use of local plants (food, dyes, fiber, fish poison, etc). This book is poorly written and hard to use but it's the only one specific for my area.

My recommended references link seems to be flakey. Some people can see the books, others can not. I'm not sure why. I contacted Amazon as it is their widget, but they said "We can see the list so it's not our problem."

-Blast

I was once hiking up in the Adirondacks and plucked a wild apple off a tree. After eating it I returned the core back into the woods with a beautiful overhand toss. Some other hikers FREAKED over this. They berated me while one spent 35 minutes looking for the core. She found it an returned like she was holding the Holy Grail. Then she made a big show of packing it out.

-Blast

My DW and I are going car camping within the next 2 weeks. One of the entertainment items on our agenda will be to take walks with the pocket guides that I have and see what we can find that matches our info.

No, we won't be sampling anything, just familiarizing ourselves.

I wonder if the hiker would have been so quick to retrieve the apple seed if it had been given an even better start in life.

I am with you in liking the Peterson guide Blast.
I have found a few other good guides out there. The Pojar-Mackinnon Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast guide is an excellent example. However, like you say, it is area specific and not likely to be much use in the Arizona desert or Louisiana bayous.

And it is so easy for people starting out to get lost in the sea of green that the carefully arranged pictures of the plant in isolation does not help them, the Latin descriptions in the manuals tend to confuse them at first too, especially the kids.

Being shown the plant in the field (woods) at different times of the year seems to be the best way for me.

I find breaking people out of seeing just greenery and seeing the plant is the biggest step.
It is also why I focus on a few of the most available and distinctive plants instead of using a shotgun approach.
I also find the sense of that plant increases once they have tried it. People go from seeing it as just another bit of greenery in the sea of green to seeing it as both a distinct plant and a plant that is quite common. (in fact a common weed, not scarce at all)

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.