The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants | 
 enlarge | Author: Samuel Thayer
Publisher: Forager's Harvest Press
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 2834
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6 x 0.7
ISBN: 0976626608
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.303
EAN: 9780976626602
ASIN: 0976626608
Publication Date: May 15, 2006
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 Not a keeper for me October 22, 2008
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 just 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 is not an impossible task. Any good landscaping book or nursery catalog gives enough information about a great number of plants to enable you to identify them fairly easily, know their habits, needs, uses and any cautions.
This particular book is pretty and no doubt useful to a more experienced forager than I-- one who has the included plants available to him, knows pretty much what they are already, and wants to learn more about harvesting and preparing them.
 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!
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.
Excellent book! August 24, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book has great detailed information! It's been very useful to me when I've been out foraging.
 Disappointing for California Foragers August 15, 2008
3 out of 11 found this review helpful
We vacation in the Sierra Nevada every summer and I wanted to start learning about foraging in these beautiful forests. Unfortunately, information for this area is sorely lacking in this volume. I'm sure the Indians who inhabited this area found plenty of wonderful plants to eat. Fortunately for them, they did not have to rely on this book. I will have to look elsewhere for a resource on plants of the Sierra.
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