Gaye Levy
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The Backdoor Survival Book Festival 4.0 continues, this time with The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms: Helpful Tips for Mushrooming in the Field by Pelle Holmberg and Hans Marklund. As with all of our book festival entries, there is a giveaway but first, a little bit about the book itself.
The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms
This pocket sized book addresses the ins and outs of foraging for wild mushrooms with helpful photos and charts plus plenty of tips to assure your safety when consuming your bounty. It is designed to be carried out in the field with over 120 pages that cover topics such as where to find mushrooms, how to identify, harvest and clean them, and most important, how to prepare them for consumption. Did you know, for example, that you should never eat wild mushrooms raw?
On each page where individual mushrooms are described, there is a photo plus a symbol denoting whether the particular species is edible or not and further, whether it is easy for beginners to identify or difficult to distinguish from a poisonous mushroom. There is a section on how to avoid poisoning (start by eating a very small amount) and plenty of tips for avoiding look-alike mushrooms that can make you sick.
The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms is an excellent reference for learning about mushrooms and for making it easy to identify the good ones while avoiding the bad ones.
The Book Giveaway
A copy of The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms has been reserved for one lucky reader. Here is this week’s question:
What native plants are available for foraging in your area? (It is okay to respond saying you don’t know!)
To enter the giveaway, you need to answer this question by responding in the comments area at the end of this article. The deadline is 6:00 PM Pacific next Wednesday with the winner notified by email announced in the Sunday Survival Buzz. He or she will have 48 hours to claim the winning books.
Note: If you are reading this article in your email client, you must go to the Backdoor Survival website to enter this giveaway in the comments area at the bottom of the article.
The Final Word
I am a lousy forager. It is not that I don’t have the desire but that I fear I may eat the wrong berry, the wrong leaves or the wrong plant and poison myself. Silly, I know, especially when there are so many excellent resources available to educate and to assist the newbie forager in finding safe, geographically appropriate species suitable for consumption.
While I am still a bit nervous about foraging for mushrooms on my own, it will be fun to take this pocket guide out in the field and use it to identify the wild mushrooms in my area. For consumption, however, I think I will stick to wild blackberries for now!
Enjoy your next adventure through common sense and thoughtful preparation!
Gaye
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Spotlight Item: The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms: Helpful Tips for Mushrooming in the Field
When you’re in the wild and you spot a nice-looking mushroom, how do you know if it is safe to eat? This is the perfect book to bring along when foraging for wild mushrooms. Inside its neatly arranged pages are fifty-two edible mushrooms as well as the mushrooms with which they are often confused, whether edible or toxic.
Beautiful photographs adorn the pages with mushrooms in the wild as well as picked, showing them from a multitude of angles. Study these photographs and you will become adept at recognizing edible and safe mushrooms.
Bargain Bin: Today is all about books. Listed below are all of the books in the current Backdoor Survival Book Festival. There are both fiction and non-fiction titles and a bit of something for everyone.
THE BACKDOOR SURVIVAL BOOK FESTIVAL 4.0 – NON-FICTION
Backyard Cuisine: Bringing Foraged Food to Your Table
Home Remedies
Living on the Edge: A Family’s Journey to Self-Sufficiency
Make It Last: Prolonging + Preserving the Things We Love
Make Your Place: Affordable, Sustainable Nesting Skills
The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms: Helpful Tips for Mushrooming in the Field
Good Clean Food
The Amazing 2000-Hour Flashlight
Recipes and Tips for Sustainable Living
The People’s Apocalypse
Go Green, Spend Less, Live Better
THE BACKDOOR SURVIVAL BOOK FESTIVAL 4.0 – FICTION
Going Home: A Novel of Survival (The Survivalist Series)
Surviving Home: A Novel (The Survivalist Series)
Expatriates: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse
The Border Marches
Rivers: A Novel
After the Blackout
The End: A Postapocalyptic Novel (The New World Series)
The Long Road: A Postapocalyptic Novel (The New World Series)
3 Prepper Romances: Escape To My Arms, plus 2 other e-books (your choice)
Prepper Pete Prepares: An Introduction to Prepping for Kids
THE BACKDOOR SURVIVAL BOOK FESTIVAL 4.0 – LAST MINUTE ADDITIONS
The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking
Escaping Home: A Novel (The Survivalist Series)
Living Ready Pocket Manual – First Aid: Fundamentals for Survival
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Shop the Emergency Essentials Monthly Specials
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Emergency Preparedness Items from Amazon.com
Help support Backdoor Survival. Purchases earn a small commission and for that I thank you!
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132 Responses to “BDS Book Festival – The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms”
I know we have dandelions and mushrooms in this area as well as wild blackberry and muscadines. However, not being able to tell which is edible and which is not is a big stopping point in my ability to forage.
Sagebrush is what i see every where. I am from Central Oregon. But i do have to say dandalions is my yards favorite and i hear they are eatable.
Being from Norway, currently living in Georgia (past 20 years) I am somewhat unfamiliar with many of the local plants however, I have spotted several edible berries, flowers, roots and mushrooms in the local parks and while hunting in the area. Makes me miss the abundance of edibles in the Norwegian nature, but that’s the point of prepping… be prepared where you are.
Since I have recently moved to the area, I’m not really sure what native foods are available. Blackberries are really the only thing I can think of. This is something I need to study.
Prickly Pear and Mormon Tea are two in our area. After that, I would have to think deeper
Morel mushrooms are a springtime delicacy here in Kansas. We also have dandelion, clover and wild garlic, I’m sure many more that I haven’t learned about yet.
In my area, the midlands of South Carolina, there are many edible native plants. The most common are dandelion, chickweed and dock weed. Of course there are fruits in the area such as blueberries (my favorite), persimmons, blackberries, maypops, and strawberries (small but good). Near creeks and rivers, there are lots of cattails.
Of the wild non-native plants there is lots and lots of kudzu and bamboo.
“SOME” of the wild edibles in my area that I know of (only a few!) – muscadine grapes, sand plums, cattails, blackberries, pokesalat, Henbit, honeysuckle, wild onions, acorns, and persimmons. I am certain there are many more, if I were smart enough to recognize them!
Who needs a store if/when you have all that around you, Jim. 😉
Well I do know that there is plenty of purslane growing wild around here. And dandelions. But beyond that I don’t know YET what I can forage in my area. Would love to win this book!
I am new to wild foraging but I have been able to identify several plants near my house that are good to eat. Most of them are best used or only available in the spring. Redbud blossoms are tasty and nutritious. Dandelion, wild mustard, chickweed and sheep sorrel are all good greens. Japanese knotweed and cattails come up as young shoots that can be eaten like asparagus. Black walnuts and hickory nuts are close by. I have blackberries and raspberries and last summer I found wild strawberries which are tiny but yummy treats. I wouldn’t want to have to live on them! It gives you a new sense of respect for our pioneer ancestors and what their lives must have been like when you start looking around for something to eat outside of your garden.
Here’s a great way to use those dandelions. Can we say healthy too? The first wine I was introduced to was dandelion wine. Not live on them, as you incorporate them into your meals, you’re just saving money as prices go higher. 😉
//commonsensehome.com/fields-of-gold-its-dandelion-time/