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.
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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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My new eBook, The Prepper’s Guide to Food Storage will provide you with everything you need to create an affordable food storage plan, including what to buy and how to store it. Nothing scary and nothing overwhelming – you really can do this! Now available at Amazon.
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132 Responses to “BDS Book Festival – The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms”
Some of these I have gathered myself. Some are from sources I have not found yet. This is not exhaustive by any means. It is a slow process because the same plant may be edible in one season and not in another. Some require cooking. Some parts may be poisonous. Some cannot be eaten in large quantities. Some have similar looking poisonous counterparts. I have avoided mushrooms for that reason. This book would be good to learn more about them.
Wild Edibles & Medicinals:
TREES: Redbud blossoms, Dogwood (medicinal) Spruce tips, pine inner bark (freshly cut, but damages living trees only in a true survival situation), Other trees inner bark, Honeysuckle (native), Willow Tree leaves – aspirin, Weeping Willow Bark and Leaves medicinal.
NUTS: Black Walnuts, Hickory Nuts, Acorns, Chestnuts, Butternuts.
BERRIES/FRUIT: Blackberries, Blueberries, Raspberries, Strawberries (field), Gooseberries, Elderberries, Apples, Persimmons, Grapes.
GREENS/FLOWERS: Dandelion (food and medicinal)(Leaves & flowers & roots), Plantain (food and medicinal), Doc Weed, Burdock, Curlydoc, Clover, Chickweed (major laxative), Sheep Sorrel, Stinging nettles , Lambsquarter, Milkweed, Milk Thistle, Japanese Knotweed, Quack Grass, Common Reed, Dog Rose, Shepherds Purse, Hedge Bindweed, Bishop’s Goutweed, Hairy Bittercres, Purple Deadnettle, Field Horsetail, Nipplewort.
SHOOTS/STALKS/ROOTS: Cattails, Black-eyed Susan roots – medicinal, Wild Onion, Wild, Garlic, Wild Chives, Wild mustard, Arugula, Jerusalem Artichoke.
MUSHROOMS: Morel. This is the only one I know that grows here.
IRONY: reading a list of wild edibles is like reading the back of a package of weedkiller. We have been killing the wrong plants for generations.
IRONY: The people standing in line for food pantries don’t know that right outside their door was fresh, nutritious, tasty food growing for free and they walked or drove past it for the pre-packaged, chemical laden, genetically altered, empty calories, that causes obesity and diabetes. The rest spend money at the grocery store for the same stuff. Yes, that includes me.
Around here, we have available for foraging dandelions, purslane, morels and wild blackberries. There are probably a lot more things to forage, but those are the only ones that I know how to identify today.
I have a a hard time moving around so I have not been foraging. I have foraged for purslane and dandelion before though. I wish I could learn more. We have lots of acorns…
Hubby is the forager in our family and he’s found the following in our yard: chickweed, purslane, dandelion, cat’s ear, henbit, wild garlic, pony’s foot, and nettles. He’s also found juniper berries on the side of the road near the house. He’s made me tea from the purslane, henbit, and nettles, all quite good.
I know we have walnuts, acorns, mushrooms, poke weed, and wild onions.
I have no idea…that’s why I want the book
Dandelions.
I know we have purslane and chickweed, but I am still uneasy about my ability to discern edibles without a book in hand. I’m with you in that I have a fear of poisoning myself and others. I will continue to study, but may not leap into foraging until necessity presents itself.
In my yard I have currents, elderberries, white and concord grapes, bee balm, wild american cranberries, chives, lemon grass, hosta, chickweed, dandelion, milkweed, wild carrot, blueberry bush, strawberry plants, apple and peach trees, acorns, butternut trees, sumac, raspberries, jerusalem artichoke up the ying-yang (lol), and know where there are lots of fiddleheads, autumn olive berry bushes(lots and lots), quince, cat-n-nine tails,…etc.
What else I DO have in my yard are different mushrooms that grow at different times of the year….and would love to learn if they are edible. By my coop, at an old pine log that sits as a seat, I get clusters of white mushrooms that look similar to the store bought button mushrooms (my chickens would even eat them), and some large, low to the grownd ones….golden in color and kinda flat … turning to a darker red, that grow in a sweeping trail through the back yard after a lot of rain.
There is a lot of good foraging available in central Indiana! We have stinging nettles, poke, purslane, mushrooms, dandelion, plantain, creeping charlie, and lots of others I’m sure!