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 there is purslane where I live, but I definitely would like to learn what else around my area is edible and safe. Foraging is a skill that I have been putting off because I travel between 2 states for work every week and I haven’t decided which area to learn more about first.
There’s the “universal” edibility test. It doesn’t always work (so I guess it isn’t actually universal?), so I would only try to use it if I was pretty desperate. And even then, it takes a while to progress through.
First, take a little bit of whatever it is that you are trying to eat and rub it on a small spot of your skin, like the inside of your wrist.
If you don’t react in any way after a couple hours, rub a little on your lips.
Wait a couple hours again and then put a little bit in your mouth, maybe chew it a bit and then spit it back out.
After that you can try to take a small nibble.
If you haven’t noticed any symptoms or irritability by that point (with enough time between each step), then it MIGHT be ok to eat. Even things that are safe in small quantities might do awful things to your body if you are relying on them as your sole source of food. And there are things out there that are very bad to take even a tiny nibble of, so like I said, I would only use this as a last resort, like in the event that I would die from hunger anyways, so I might as well take the chance on something that might turn out to be edible.
The responses from readers have amazed me. Who knew so much was available. I live in a rural area and can’t wait to learn what is available. Right now I know about dandelions and wild onions. Can’t wait to learn about edible mushrooms. The book sounds like a winner.
Haven’t foraged much but know morels are edible.
This is one I would LOVE to have, not just for edible because I have learned how to use for medicinal purposes. I used to go ‘shrooming’ as a teen and with bartering, we ate well. The key is to recognize the edible (medicinal) from the toxic plants. Hope this book as great pictures. 🙂
We have Morel mushroom, tansy, spearmint, catnip, ginseng, elderberries, huckleberries,
there are mushrooms but not sure what types they are
Easy to find dandelions, pine nuts, mushrooms and berries: wild blackberry/strawberry/mulberry. Crab Apple, Plum, Apple & Pear trees are easily found around this part – even in the wild! You just have to LOOK!
What native plants are available for foraging in your area? (It is okay to respond saying you don’t know!)
Well let me begin by saying I’m an Italian guy that as a child spent many days with my grandfather Nicolo (as his old Italian buddies called him) and occasionally we would gather some wild mushrooms and here’s what my grandfather taught me about the best way to keep from eating poisonous kinds.
He told me the best way to check wild mushrooms for poison was to start by filling an aluminum pot with water and bringing it to a boil.
Next add the mushrooms to the boiling water but not too long or they become rubbery.
Then remove the pot from the heat and toss in one of those old silver quarters.
Wait a few minutes and if the quarter turned black, the mushrooms were poisonous.
Now there were 3 ways to do things, the right way, the wrong way and my grandfathers way.
So here’s my grandfathers way. Being a frugal, poor Italian immigrant, he would gather the ‘shrooms.
Boil the water and toss in the ‘shrooms.
Pull the pot from the heat and pitch in a quarter, an older silver quarter of course.
And when the quarter turned black, as it always did, he would eat the ‘shrooms, drink the water and put the quarter back into his pocket! He lived to be 96 and never got sick!!!
Honestly speaking I would not trust my mushroom picking ability enough to consume any wild ‘shrooms I collected. I once ate some wild ‘shrooms a friend gathered and after consuming some I became ill, nausea, cold sweats, the room started to tilt!!! I think they may have had some of that “funny” stuff inside because I sure did feel weird!!! So now I stick with store bought.
There are lots of grasses to forage in the California desert, so I am going to have to forage a little farther North. I intend to take a trip a little farther North sometime this spring to see what I can find.
We have purslane, chickweed, dock, and pigweed (an amaranth relative – be careful if harvesting near planted fields because they get sprayed heavily) in abundance. Muscadine (Fox Grape to us) grows everywhere in the woods. There are cattails wherever moisture collects. There is a large supply of pokeweed, blackberries, honeysuckle, wild onions, acorns, persimmons, and my personal favorite dandelion. We have lambs ear, maypops, wild blueberries and huckleberries (these are labor intensive to harvest but are really tasty). I have Jerusalem artichoke (I prefer using it for relish but it is a great substitute for potatoes if you’re diabetic) in my garden but there are wild ones around also. And there is the ever bountiful kudzu (thank you Japan) that is 100% useable. The blooms make great “grape” jelly, the young leaves can be deep fried like potato chips, and the root (if you can dig deep enough) can be ground (or pounded) into a reasonable substitute for flour. The vines make good cordage. There is a good amount of prickly pear available thanks to old home sites in the area. We have plantain, lambs quarter, and many walnut, hickory, and pecan (both hybrids and volunteer small nuts) as well as mulberry, and sycamore (can be tapped for sap and cooked into syrup or just consume like water if needed). If you’re a Euell Gibbons fan there are pine trees for cambium layer strips (if you’re really desperate and leaves for tea (not bad), as well as the pine seeds (it takes a bazillion to do much good). There are a large number of medicinal “weeds” that I cannot name. I just depend on my local “root doctor to direct me although I’m trying to learn. There are a lot of mushroom varieties around but I stay away from them as I can’t distinguish a toadstool from something edible. I’ve seen rodents eat them all without ill effect but I know that won’t work for me. I’m sure I’ve missed something but this is a good representative listing.