Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places Review
I found this book to be very useful and am very glad I bought it. There's a lot of useful information here that i didn't expect. Every plant seems to have a story and I enjoyed everyone of them so far. There's a list of minerals and vitamins for some plants which surprised me. I had no clue dandelion leaves contained b12 and also burdock roots. I thought i could only get that from animals. There's also a list of the medicinal benefits of some plants. I haven't tried the recipes yet but I'm sure there good. Before getting into the plants there's a good intro to preparing, how to categorize identifying characteristics, medical terms, and even an outlook to keep in mind while foraging.
Being a beginner forager I thought this was a great book for me. The drawback is there's no colored pictures, but I easily just look it up on the internet. So far I've found a picture for every plant that I was looking for and there darn good pictures too. With all the plants listed this book would have probably cost a fortune to buy if it had colored photos. I don't think someone can buy this book and go out into the wild and just start foraging on the book alone. He makes it easy to know what to look for by categorizing the plants and listing them by seasons and geography. So studying and getting familiar with the plants someone wants to find first before going I believe is the best way to use the book. I've identified about 20 plants so far and am excited to identify more.
thankyou wild man
Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places Feature
- ISBN13: 9780688114251
- Condition: New
- Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places Overview
Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places shows readers how to find and prepare more than five hundred different plants for nutrition and better health, including such common plants as mullein (a tea made from the leaves and flowers suppresses a cough), stinging nettle (steam the leaves and you have a tasty dish rich in iron), cattail (cooked stalks taste similar to corn and are rich in protein), and wild apricots (an infusion made with the leaves is good for stomach aches and disgestive disorders).
More than 260 detailed line drawings help readers identify a wide range of plants -- many of which are suited for cooking by following the more than thirty recipes included in this book. There are literally hundreds of plants readily available underfoot waiting to be harvested and used either as food or as a potential therapeutic. This book is both a field guide to nature's bounty and a source of intriguing information about the plants that surround us.
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Customer Reviews
This book is truly the BEST! - S. Maher - East Coast
Learning about wild edibles is my lifelong hobby and I'm a huge fan of Steve Brill. I am absolutely overwhelmed with delight over his book "Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants". Out of all the wild edible books I've read, this one is truly the BEST! I was expecting the usual field guide giving the basic drone of information, but was so delighted to find his book is so much more exciting than that. It's very entertaining and in some parts very funny to read, because Steve not only includes the hard facts about the plants, but also about their place in history, folklore, medicinal purposes, instructions on how to prepare the plant to make it edible, safe and palatable plus full recipes; he also throws in some very funny stories from his personal experiences. I find that I've been able to learn much more and much faster from his book rather than any other wild edible book because all this extra interesting information sticks in my memory better. With other wild edible books, I always had a hard time remembering one plant from the next as all the basic field guide information would just eventually blend together in my memory. But with his book, I'm able to retain the information better because I can remember the stories that relate to the plants. If you were to only read one book in your life about wild edibles, then this should be the one!
Best all-around foraging book - Daniel Barwick -
I have a large shelf of foraging books, having collected and used them for some time. This one is the best I've found. Every foraging book is a compromise: comprehensiveness forfeits portability, low cost forfeits color illustrations, brevity leaves out some plants, and so on. This book is not particularly portable, but it isn't bad either. I cover it with book tape for durability. The drawings are simply the best available, bar none. Yes, there are no photos, but any beginning forager should bring a crosscheck book anyway, so this book complements any book that has photo illustrations. Most importantly, this book is focused on safety - the author knows that most people using it will be unsupervised, and he takes great pains to point out possible mis-identifications, far more thoroughly than any other foraging book I've got. I use this as my primary reference, with a photo book as a cross check, and it's perfect. It's just gravy that this is also the most enjoyable-to-read foraging book I've read. This book is clearly an extension of the author's personality, and the clarity of the book doesn't suffer just because he likes to tell stories and goof around a little. This book is not only a useful tool for identifying plants - it's also a history, biology, and culinary lesson.
What happened to the colors? - Original Settler - Eureka, MT, US
If a person wants to just read about edible and medicinal plants, this book is ok. If a person wants to look for and identify plants, this book is as useless as teats on a bull. I'm suprised that people haven't been poisoned by wrong colored plant thinking it was medicinal. Nice pencil drawings, however. Don't take this book out in the wild or in your backyard.
*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Sep 07, 2010 13:08:05
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