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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132 Responses to “BDS Book Festival – The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms”
We started hunting several varieties of mushrooms two years ago. We have learned a lot about trees because of it! We have wintergreen, plantain, purslane, dandelion, pansies, spearmint, oregano, violets, and many other plants we harvest. Elderberry flowers and berries are good. We have maybe spotted ginseng, but are going to check again this summer and confirm. We are hoping to expand into berries this year, we really don’t know many of those. We have never roasted chickory, or tried cattails, but may when the season permits. Red clover and bee balm make a great tea. I don’t care for wild grapes personally – too much work – but the intention is to try using grape leaves in my pickles some time. We love to find our food, and hope to keep expanding our knowledge as much as we can.
Our area of coastal Oregon is blessed with many wild edibles. Today, if I had felt the need, I could have made a wild salad and a hot tea….salad out of dandelion greens, clover, sorrel and early wood violet. Tea would have been evergreen bough tips mixed with wild blackberry leaves. Berries abound during the summer, with evergreen, Himalaya, and tiny little blackberries; red and blue huckleberries, salal berries, salmon berries, blackcap raspberries and thimble berries. Wild apples, hazelnuts, Oregon grape. mushrooms, morel and shaggy mane. Cattails in the ponds, frogs, squirrels and wild rabbits. deer and elk. I really think a person would need only a short course in wild foods, or a field guide, and not go hungry here.
I know very little about what can be foraged in my area. I have been trying to get any information on it, but I think that i am looking in the wrong places. The only one that I know is the dandilions.
I am not very informed on this topic, however I am pretty sure the Walnuts and such are safe.
I don’t know what’s available in my area, but I’m willing and eager to learn.
in central Florida we have dandelion and wild blackberries!
Southwestern Ontario is a fertile area. There is everything from wild fruits & berrys to herb. Useful flowers like Camomile and Chicory grow every where. The stream beds lush with Cattails and wild garlic and leeks. Maples grow in abundance for maple sugar, wild chestnuts, acorns and walnuts too. There is so much variety here it’s impossible to list it all. The down side is we are in the great lakes snow belt so unless you hunt the winter offers far less and is best left for the wild life which needs it to survive our harsh winters. It also means one must harvest and preserve to enjoy the bounty. i have always wanted to learn mushrooms but haven’t been able to find a course to learn what ones are safe locally.
This dry area of Central Texas really has quite a few wild edibles, but they are seasonal, so one would have to gather and preserve (probably by drying) to make any of them useful in a survival situation. The yummiest would be agarita berry, then wild mustang grapes. All cactus is edible, but the tiny, hair-like thorns are a problem. Our yard has plantain in the spring, which makes a medicinal tea, and a wild flower called Green Thread which makes a nice tea. Down the road from us are Yopon Holly trees, the leaves of which can be roasted and made into a coffee drink complete with caffeine. Green Briar vines are under lots of trees here, and the tender tips can be eaten as well as the large bulbous root. Puffball mushrooms grow in our yard after a rain. As a last resort, grey lichen also grows on most of the live oaks. And, can’t forget acorns, which are easier to deal (bigger by far) with if they come off a Burr Oak, rather than the little, bitter acorn from the live oaks.
prickly pear cactus… a plenty
Some dandelions volunteered in my kale patch. I harvest some of each, even in the middle of the winter, for a salad.