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)