The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants - Books

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
A practical guide to all aspects of edible wild plants: finding and identifying them, their seasons of harvest, and their methods of collection and preparation. Each plant is discussed in great detail and accompanied by excellent color photographs. Includes an index, illustrated glossary, bibliography, and harvest calendar. The perfect guide for all experience levels.

Customer Reviews: Read 21 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Foraging for people who like food, not just plants! January 6, 2009
This book is not just informative, it's inspiring. There are wonderful detailed instructions for plant identification, timing of harvest, and yes, preparation. I've never seen another book that held so much for people who love plants, and who also love food. I've read Euell Gibbons and the Thayer book chooses to focus on a smaller number of plants in order to focus on those that are seriously tasty, nourishing, and easily found. My only complaint is that it's time for the next volume, and the next and the next!

5 out of 5 stars

If you like wild foods, this is your new bible! (note the small b, people! It's just an expression!) December 18, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

Most wild plants guides cover the same three hundred or four hundred plants, cross referenced with all kinds of little graphics to indicate that they are edible, good in salads, canned, jelly, steamed, etc. There is nothing on how to do it, or how to actually gather in quantity, or what to look for, etc. In other words, almost no details which would be pertinent to an avid forager. In my own early learning journey, I struggled often to find an actual, edible food plant guide that really helped me out.

Man, I wish I had had this little baby in my backpack 20 years ago! Well, finally, it's here.

Sure, everyone mentions that there aren't that many plants covered, but you know what? A lot of the other plants that the other guides list are only marginally edible anyway! If someone reads this and masters the gathering and preparing and using of all of them, go a head and complain if you have to. But get the book anyway and get started! There is a world of wild foods outside, on the edges of meadows and swamps and fields, just waiting to be discovered.

Great details, important info on all kinds of products, tools and useful things for gathering, all kinds of stories and everything is laid out very nicely, with excellent photos, too.

If you get this book whether for yourself or for a gift for someone who loves the outdoors, you can't go wrong. It is absolutely the leader among guides for the serious or occasional gatherer. And you can take that to the bank. (Food Bank!) Okay, that was lame. But the book isn't! Go for it!

2 out of 5 stars

Not a keeper for me October 22, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful

While the information included here is extensive for the limited number of plants covered, it wasn't useful for me. As a relative neophyte in this area who'd like to take advantage of plants growing wild in my area, I was disappointed that I was able to recognize only a couple of those presented--plants I was already familiar with. The author is clearly very experienced, but seems to assume that the reader is somewhat experienced as well and wants to extend his current knowledge.

The book contains many photographs, as other reviews have said, and which encouraged me to try it, but I didn't find them as useful as I'd hoped. While photographs are usually more useful than drawings to identify plants, a frequent problem in books such as these is the lack of size reference, i.e. is it likely to be bigger than a breadbox? Showing a photo of a plant leaf or branch doesn't help much if you can't tell if the whole plant is 3" tall or 3'. Showing a close-up shot of the whole plant doesn't help if you can't see it in relation to something of identifiable size, and ideally, also, in its favored location. Additionally, showing a plant with early spring shoots that are great for harvesting doesn't help if you don't know what the plant looks like fully developed so you can identify its location and look for those spring shoots next year.

This particular book is pretty and well put together, and no doubt will be useful to a more experienced forager than I--one who has the included plants available to him, has an idea of what they are already, and wants to learn more about harvesting and preparing them.

5 out of 5 stars

It fills the void! September 20, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

This book is unique in that it fills a big void in the other wild edible books out there. This void is filled mainly by the chapters entitled "Harvest and Preparation Methods for Wild Plant Foods" and "Storing Wild Foods". Thayer wrote this book with his experience and not what he has compiled from other books like so many others. It covers only 32 plants but they are very useful plants and it covers them in detail. I agree with other reviewers in that the book may only cover plants that are more common in the eastern U.S. but the author makes recommendations for other books that will cover what his book does not...and I can vouch that his recommendations are worth while. Great pictures, a useful glossary and the verbal content is not only an enjoyable read but overwhelmingly informative. Despite the fact that this book is a softcover, the quality of the pages and binding will seemingly make it a durable guide for field use and the repeated referencing I intend to give it. Regardless of where you live, if you are a serious forager or survival enthusiast your library should not be without this book!

5 out of 5 stars

Outstanding for the upper midwest August 29, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

It would be a very difficult task indeed to create a book that really does a good job of treating edible wild plants from all of North America. The books that attempt to do so rely way too much on other written works (which have a lot of misinformation) and way too little on direct experience. Moreover, trying to cover a really broad range of plants means that the plants that are covered are treated rather superficially. Just like the best field guides are usually the field guides for a particular region (when these are available), the best wild food guides have a strong regional bias. My ONLY complaint about The Forager's Harvest is that the author does not spell out his region right up front, I had to infer it from the plants covered (he also mentions that he's based in northern Wisconsin somewhere in the intro). I happen to live in the upper midwest (northern Minnesota), and for that region, this is far and away the best wild edible plants reference I've ever seen.

Selection: He doesn't try to cover everything you might eat if you were desperate, he covers most of the plants you would want to eat because they taste good and have high nutritive value.

Harvesting: He covers where, when, and how to harvest in sufficient detail for each plant that you are unlikely to be put off by a bad experience.

Preparation: Details of preparation are critical. For example I've never seen in any book such detailed directions for HOW to get the starch out of a cattail rhizome.

Overall approach: He drives home the idea that real foraging is real work. You need to study, and you need to put in real time - but if you do so you can expect to have good quantities of excellent food.

All in all, a really outstanding book, unsurpassed for the region.

Good Grape Wine Company