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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There are a lot new items that are put on sale each month – be sure to take a look.
Note: I earn a small commission on your purchase making this a great way to support Backdoor Survival which will always be free to everyone.
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”
My favorite wild edible around here is serviceberries. On a good year they’re everywhere, and delicious! I pick tons and freeze them to use all winter. There’s also pine nuts (too much work for me, but tasty!), plus whatever edible weeds grow in my sprinklered yard. It’s too dry for much else.
There are a lot of nuts and berries. There are mushrooms but we don’t pick them because of being unsure of what is safe. There are wild chives, pine needles and dandelions. There are probably a lot more plants around us then we realize. We want to learn more about what is available and start taking advantage of the bounty.
in the Pacific Northwest is like living in a wilderness grocery store we have cocktails and dandelionto see what you’d like bladderwrack And bullwhip kelp. Just takes time to learn. Bill B
Dandelion, chickweed, lambsquarter, red buds, dock, acorns, wild garlic, pecans, walnuts. We have morels, but I’ve never found one!
Dandelion, cattail, clover, chokecherry
plantain,goldenrod,burdock, dandelion, elderberry,wild plum.high bush cranberry,currents,lambs quarters,choke cherry, wild rice,wild blueberry,wild strawberry, morels and many other mushrooms and much more,spruce tips, cowparsnips,.
I could really use this field guide as I have only lived here for a year and a half.
I cant wait till spring,
Just moved to WA from NC, so all I know for sure is dandelion, huckleberries, blueberries, and cattails. I’d like to learn more about this area and what you can eat here. This book would be a great start!
We have butternuts. black walnuts, hickory nuts, acorns, oodles of mushrooms, cattail roots, dandelion leaves (fresh &young), blackberries, raspberries, gooseberries, squirrels, rabbits, frogs, all kinds of fish, and….I live in Iowa, I have said for many years that if it won’t grow here it doesn’t need to grow. It would take more time than I have to list everything- elderberries, wild onions-than I have to give to the subject. I must say of all the SHTF sites I’ve been to, this is one of the 3 ne plus ultra. I know you gotta make money to keep the server running and roof over your head and food on the travel and I don’t begrudge you what you earn. You work hard enough to get it, and you must read incessantly. Maybe more than me, even: my mother said I became a bookworm in 1st grade and got stuck to the library building because I went there so often. We were probably the poorest people in town (Osage, Iowa,) and the library was free. There, you could go all over the world and learn about anything and it didn’t cost a cent. WHAT A DEAL!! Especially for a kid for whom 25 cents to go to the swimming pool was a big deal. I do enjoy your sometimes quirky writing: that tells me you are a real person, and not Microsoft Word set on automatic pilot. And some sites I have deleted because al they have a goofy T-shirts and coffee mugs and foolish bumper stickers and yard signs that immediately draw attention, and the Idea is to keep your profile low, powder dry, knife sharp, and ready to skedaddle in a New York minute. Not to live in full blown paranoia, but Jeff Cooper’s condition “Yellow”—aware of your surroundings and the people near to mid-distance to you. Depending on the circumstances and the area, that can be anywhere from a light yellow, just keeping tabs every so often to a dark yellow requiring increased attention. Orange of course, is the gut saying something ain’t right-get out of here. And Red-have a handgun in your hand, take cover, and try not to have to shoot but if you do make it deliberate and well aimed. You’ve only got so much ammo and each round has to count. He begins his color theorem with white–you are witlessly clueless to what is happening around you, and have no idea that a tornado is just 1 block away. Not insane; you just don’t or are not paying due attention to what’s going on around you at all. So: White, Yellow, Orange , Red. There are others who have just about plagiarized his system but not completely. I’ve thought about this a long time, and four colors are enough-you can shade each one except white to your own standards and still not be overloaded to the point of being unable to function. Asparagus. Chives. Iowa is a great big garden, and it would take too much time to tell of all we have to scrounge for here. And when you get to “big game” we’ve got turkey’s that look like helicopters and deer like the Paleolithic Age Giant Deer. Of course, Iowa was in the Paleolithic age until Marquette and LaSalle arrived by way of the Wisconsin River to the Mississippi River and then Iowa. Indians had little iron from traders and through theft, and some copper brought down from Michigan’s native copper outcrops. Mulberries-5 in our yard and good producers. Ground cherries. Apples in abandoned orchards. Little strawberries. Concord grapes on old fencerows. Grains-oats and red wheat- on fallow land. Not much, though. Quail. pheasants. Gobs of ducks and geese of many varieties . Woodcock. Grouse. Partridge. Game animals in season only, but still there. Unless the entire planet is entirely and irretrievably polluted, or the Yellowstone caldera erupts and the winds are blowing east, this is a good a place as any, and better IMHO than most, having seen much of this country from the seat of a truck. Four wonderful, splendid, enjoyable seasons, and much to do if one removes one’s posterior from said couch and puts one foot in front of the other. After all, you average guys out there couldn’t begin to hold your own against any professional sports player, so why not go out and do something you can participate in. Walk. Bike. Fish. Hike. Make out with your girlfriend of wife. Join a rifle club or other shooting club. Do anything but sit there rooted to the couch with a Coke in one hand and your 5th piece of pizza in the other. I will concede that the Olympics are extra special, and plan some ‘down time” for that.
Vis sic pacem, Parabellum
purslane, nettles, lambsquarter, chestnuts, black walnuts, blackberries, blueberries, morels although i’ve never found any,…
Morel mushrooms and black walnuts are the only things I have been adventurous enough to try so far!