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How to make Cattail Pollen Pancakes. Fergus The Forager. Storing Wild Plants - Foraging. Wild Plants Used for Medicine and Food. Learning wild plants used for medicine, food, and tools is also known as the study of ethnobotany (how people utilize plants).

Wild Plants Used for Medicine and Food

Edible and medicinal plants can provide healthy alternatives to highly processed foods and pharmaceuticals, bringing greater health into our lives. To effectively use wild plants, one must learn basic plant identification skills, especially for poisonous plants, as well as proper collection and preparation methods. This section of the online library provides articles on wild plants used for medicine, food, and utilitarian purposes. Articles often include references to excellent books, resources, and classes. We hope you enjoy these resources that can help you discover ways to bring wild plants into your life. Wild Edible. Foraging for wild food is a great way to experience the natural world and connect with something ancient and primal within ourselves.

Wild Edible

And in many ways, it can be a more healthy alternative to the assembly line foods we find at the grocery store. Not only is wild food much richer in essential vitamins and minerals, but foraging also provides much needed exercise. It's a combination of hiking and gardening. Before diving into the salad bowl that surrounds us, it's a good idea to be aware of some basic guidelines that will ensure that foraging remains safe and sustainable. Proper Identification. Videos On Foraging & Wild Foods. Wild Food School. Wanted to know more about foraging for wild foods in an urban or metropolitan environment, well the will help you get on the right tracks.

This Foraging Guide in PDF format covers about 50 plants, trees and shrubs which have something to offer the urban forager, with images of about 20 main edible species. The format is designed to allow you to print out the pictures on standard 10 x 15 cm. photo paper and then bind them together (with or without laminating the pages). Just print out all the ODD pages numbers and then repeat the process with the EVEN pages.

Correctly printed out you will find plant picture and text side by side like the example below. Top 10… Foods To Forage. Thanks to modern agricultural methods, foraging – once a part of the majority’s daily life – has faded away, replaced by regular trips to the supermarket instead.

Top 10… Foods To Forage

Recently, however, there has been a revival of interest in raiding nature’s larder thanks to increased awareness of the health benefits of wild food, not to mention the TV exploits of Bear Grylls, Ray Mears and co. But it foraging is about more than just food. It gets us out into the countryside and helps to cultivate an intimate appreciation of nature, re-establishing a connection severed by modern urban life. But for the beginner, foraging should come with a health warning as it’s easy to mistake a deadly fungus for an innocent field mushroom. While wild food is generally good for you, taking precautions and getting some tips and advice from experienced foragers is essential. Mushrooms Neither animal nor vegetable, mushrooms are a type of fungi and the largest living organisms on Earth, some reaching three miles in length.

Food Foraging. Forgotten Plants. Foraging With the "Wildman" Wild Food Summit. Eat wild stuff and not get poisoned. Let's play pretend for a moment.

Eat wild stuff and not get poisoned

Are you with me? Let's pretend you can't go down to the supermarket for food to eat. In fact, let's pretend that there is not a supermarket for one hundred miles in any direction, and you don't have any food with you. In this pretend land, you are stranded in the wilderness. Perhaps your GPS navigation unit directed you to detour onto a closed mining road in the middle of nowhere, and you didn't have the sense to second-guess it until your rental car got stuck in seasonal mud, and you decide to head out into the woods instead of following the road back. Foraging Articles. Identification of Edible Plants. Copyright © 1998,2004 by Robert Wayne Atkins, P.E.

Identification of Edible Plants

All Rights Reserved. Find Wild Edible Plants. We owe a lasting debt of gratitude to the desperate soul who “discovered” the oyster or stewed that first possum.

Find Wild Edible Plants

In the early, hit-or-miss days of foraging, our ancestors learned the hard way about the laxative properties of the senna plant, and to eat only the stems of rhubarb and not the poisonous leaves. Through trial and the occasional fatal error, we sorted the edible from the inedible, the useful from the harmful. After World War II, when American agriculture was fully conquered by industry and supermarkets full of frozen foods popped up across the land — yes, like weeds — foraging came to be regarded as uncouth, probably unhealthy and certainly out of step with modern times. Why then, a half-century later, do we find purslane — a vigorous, succulent “weed” once routinely cursed by gardeners — on the menu of nearly every fine dining restaurant in the country?

Kerri Conan blogs for The New York Times, and keeps a sharp eye on food trends. Wild Medicinal Plants Archives. Attention Wild Food Aficionados: Fall foraging forges forward, and by that alliteration I mean to say that foraging for wild food “has not yet ended” this fall, so don’t put away your scissors or your plastic knives or your bare hands just yet!

Wild Medicinal Plants Archives

Just yesterday I came across some fabulous fall dandelion greens in the Colorado high country despite its notoriously short growing season. They were growing amidst the deep, down-trodden grass at the base of willows lining an old mining road, and some were nearly as long as an arm! Up here, anywhere the miners and their mules once trod is a good place to look for dandelions.

At the very least these early travelers toted the seeds along by accident. Continue reading. Hunter Gathering. It must be said that while there are many wild foods that are edible, not all of them are worth bothering with.

Hunter Gathering

Some however, are just about the most delicious, scrumptious morsels you will ever get your hands on. The Cep (alias Porcini or Penny bun) is the very pinnacle of fine wild food. It is difficult to truly describe the overwhelming pleasure that sweeps the soul on discovery of a perfect Cep. First, a glimpse of the round cap poking through tufts of grass looking like a freshly baked straight-out-of-the-oven crusty bread roll. Edibility of Plants. The information on this page is presented in an older format.

Edibility of Plants

We have vastly expanded our edible plants information with far more information, and far more plants. You can find this information at our new site Wildcrafting.net Plants are valuable sources of food because they are widely available, easily procured, and, in the proper combinations, can meet all your nutritional needs. Absolutely identify plants before using them as food. Foraging Guide App. (Cheap) - Edible Wild Plants of Temperate N. America & the UK. Now FREE!!

Foraging Guide App. (Cheap) - Edible Wild Plants of Temperate N. America & the UK

Image page of the Rose profile. Useful Wild Plants Home. Wild Edible & Medicinal Plants. Free Wild Plant Identification eCourse. You are out in the forest and looking at the glorious plant life surrounding you. Whether you are a beginner and have never identified one plant, or a Botany professor at a university, you might appreciate this refreshingly simple approach to plant identification. I remember lovingly (and sometimes screamingly) that my college classes in Systematic Botany required me to become acquainted with that local Washington Flora that we plant dorks call “Hitchcock and Cronquist”.

I always felt a contradiction of rapt fascination and obsession, alternated with profound burnout, when trying to navigate this enormous dichotomous key! In addition, my observation skills as an ethnobotanist were refined , foraging for wild foods, fibers and medicine. After many years of this love affair with plants, I learned a new way to proceed in my plant identification journey that added a much-needed holistic element.

Living Off the Land: 52 Highly Nutritious Wild-Growing Plants. Digg HJ: Organic is awesome, but there is nothing quite like wild growing foods. Quite simply, foods that grow wild have the absolute highest life force energy and nutritional and medicinal benefits available. Despite major advances in growing methods in the last few hundred years, humans still cannot replicate the wisdom of Mother nature exactly. How To Find & Enjoy Wild Foods. Lately I’ve been mining the Mother Earth News archive disks for bits of relevant wisdom—which are abundant there. James E.

Churchill’s advice on foraging and preparing wild foods from one of the earliest issues, September/October 1970, couldn't be more timely right now. Free food is abundant—and could be growing between the cracks in your sidewalk! Chicory "Anyone who lives in the settled regions of the United States should be close enough to chicory to be able to gather all they want," Churchill wrote. 5 Invasive Plants You Can Eat. The logic of eating wild plants is obvious; the logic of eating invasive wild plants is even more so.

Culling aggressive species that have a negative impact on native plants, while avoiding the environmental pitfalls of agriculture? And free, local and abundant? Yes, please. Invasive plants are non-native species that can thrive in areas beyond their natural range of dispersal. Poisonous Plants 1. Successful use of plants in a survival situation depends on positive identification. Edible and Medicinal Plants. Wild Food Foraging. Eat Wild: Free-Range Food & Facts. Poisonous Plants 2. Plants basically poison on contact, ingestion, or by absorption or inhalation. Self-reliant living in the 21st Century. The Fantastic Four. Top 10 Invasive Species You Can Eat.

Eat The Weeds. Plant Identification. Guides To Wild Foods. Wild Foods For Survival. Foraging By Location. Foraging By The Seasons. Wild Root Vegetables. Foraging From Trees. Edible Flowers & Their Recipes. Wild Greens. Wild Food Recipes. Edible Weeds! Popular in Food & Drink Next time you're about to yank an offending plant from your immaculate garden of perennials, think twice: you just might be looking at dinner. Free dinner. Oh, I know what you're thinking: damn hippies! Always eating anything and everything that grows under the sun. Leafsnap, a new mobile app that identifies plants by leaf shape, is launched by Smithsonian and collaborators  The Smithsonian Institution, Columbia University and the University of Maryland have pooled their expertise to create the world’s first plant identification mobile app using visual search—Leafsnap. Huckleberries. There’s nothing like the taste of fresh huckleberries in the summertime.

Lucky for us in the Pacific Northwest, we have three species of huckleberries to choose from: black huckleberry, red huckleberry and evergreen huckleberry. ForageSF.com. Wild Food Girl. Edible Water Plants: Aquatic Vegetables. Water Spinach Ipomoea aquatica Ipomoea aquatica is a semi-aquatic tropical plant grown as a leaf vegetable. Its precise natural distribution is unknown due to extensive cultivation, with the species found throughout the tropical and subtropical regions of the world.