Books (WILDCRAFTING)

In a stressful, chaotic world, many of us are turning to nature for a sense of serenity and happiness.

While the idea of the wild outdoors is enticing, though, our busy lives and our location can cause us to become detached from nature. Down to the River and Up to the Trees will show you how to connect with the natural world around you, whether you live in the city or the countryside.

From getting to know the local wildlife, to foraging and creating naturally-sourced masterpieces, Down to the River is brimming with practical information, intriguing quotes and inspirational ideas. Discover how to carve your own spoon; to be able to tell if the moon is waxing or waning; or try forest bathing (surrounding yourself with trees). Learn how to make yourself at home amongst the animals and plants on your doorstep, in harmony with your surroundings. There is space too for you to record your thoughts and findings, whatever shape they take.

A clear, concise guide to more than 130 edible and medicinal plants and funghi that grow wild throughout the west coast of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest states.

The coastal Pacific Northwest of North America is home to a multitude of edible and medicinal plant species, marine plants, and edible mushrooms. This compact, full-colour forager's guide offers clear photography, descriptions, safety tips and warnings, and traditional culinary and medicinal uses for every type of wild-growing flora species in the region, including:

• Bigleaf Maple--used to make a delicious west-coast maple syrup;
• Yellow Morel Mushroom--a favourite of foragers but not to be confused with the false morel, which is poisonous;
• Sea Asparagus--perfect in a salad or as an accompaniment to seafood; and
• Evening Primrose--an introduced species to the region, used to treat a variety of ailments.

Practical, user-friendly, and safe, Edible and Medicinal Flora of the West Coastis an indispensable guide for beginner and experienced foragers alike.

Incredible Wild Edibles, 36 plants that can change your life, by Samuel Thayer

Incredible Wild Edibles covers 36 of the best edible wild plants in North America: fruits, berries, nuts, shoots, leafy greens, root vegetables, culinary herbs, teas, and syrups that boast exceptional flavor and nutrition. The plants chosen represent every habitat and every region in North America, from the northern forests to the southwest deserts, from the largest cities to the wildest mountains. Rather than cover hundreds of species in brief accounts that leave the reader unsure of how to proceed, Samuel Thayer encourages readers to thoroughly learn one plant at a time. Each of these traditional foods has a rich culinary and cultural history—a wholesome past that is still relevant for our health and happiness today. The text is fully accessible to the novice, but remains botanically accurate and has the in-depth information that seasoned foragers crave.

Sharing the wisdom of a lifetime of daily foraging, the author answers all of the reader’s questions about each plant: How do I identify it? What might I confuse it with? Where can I find it? What part do I use, and when is it ready to be picked? How do I gather and prepare it? How can I be sure to harvest it responsibly? This discussion is accompanied by more than 350 color photos showing all the key features for identification, including potentially confusing species. Photos also depict the exact parts to use and the proper stage for collection. All of this is delivered in a familiar but authoritative tone, along with humorous anecdotes and insights from extensive real-life experience with each plant covered in the book.

Incredible Wild Edibles contains an index, bibliography, illustrated glossary, range maps, and foraging calendar. This third volume in Thayer’s Forager’s Harvest series has no overlap of the plants covered in the first two volumes.

Samuel Thayer is an internationally recognized authority on edible wild plants who has authored two award-winning books on the topic, Nature’s Garden and The Forager’s Harvest. He has taught foraging and field identification for more than two decades. Besides lecturing and writing, Samuel is an advocate for sustainable food systems who owns a diverse organic orchard and harvests wild rice, acorns, hickory nuts, maple syrup, and other wild products. He lives in rural northern Wisconsin with his wife and three children. 

The Forager's Harvest: A guide to identifying, harvesting, and preparing edible wild plants. By Samuel Thayer

A guide to 32 of the best and most common edible wild plants in North America, with detailed information on how to identify them, where they are found, how and when they are harvested, which parts are used, how they are prepared, as well as their culinary use, ecology, conservation, and cultural history.

Samuel Thayer is an internationally recognized authority on edible wild plants who has authored two award-winning books on the topic, Nature’s Garden and The Forager’s Harvest. He has taught foraging and field identification for more than two decades. Besides lecturing and writing, Samuel is an advocate for sustainable food systems who owns a diverse organic orchard and harvests wild rice, acorns, hickory nuts, maple syrup, and other wild products. He lives in rural northern Wisconsin with his wife and three children. 

Sam Thayer was born in Wausau, Wisconsin, where he first learned to gather wild food in vacant lots, backyards, city parks, and at the edge of town. Later, his family moved to rural southern Wisconsin, and then to Madison. Sam's first presentation on edible wild plants was to his seventh grade science class, demonstrating the foods that he collected regularly on his three-mile walk to school. He began "survival camping" at fourteen and led his first wild food walks when he was 19. After graduating from high school, he moved near the south shore of Lake Superior and built a rustic log cabin on an abandoned farmstead, chasing his childhood dream of "living off the land" while working part-time at a variety of jobs.

Since 2000, when he won the Hazel Wood National Wild Foods Cooking Contest, Sam has been teaching regularly on edible wild plants, giving workshops across the United States. In 2002 he was inducted into the National Wild Foods Hall of Fame at North Bend State Park in West Virginia. His first book, The Forager's Harvest, has won a Midwest Book Award, IPPY Book Award, and was a finalist for the USA Book News Best Books 2007 award. It has been a steady Amazon category best-seller and has sold more than 100,000 copies. His second book, Nature's Garden, has received similar acclaim and sold over 75,000 copies. Incredible Wild Edibles was released November 1, 2017.

He currently lives in the woods of northwestern Wisconsin with his wife, Melissa, their daughters, Myrica and Rebekah and son, Joshua. Along with speaking and writing, he is also a maple syrup producer, wild rice harvester, owns a small organic orchard, and has been revitalizing a lost tradition of making hickory nut oil.

Besides wild food foraging, Sam is an all-around naturalist with particular interest in reptiles, amphibians, bird watching, botany, and mammals. His passion for wild food extends to studying the origin of cultivated plants and the socio-economic history of the human diet.

To learn more about Sam visit his website: www.foragersharvest.com

In this engaging and eye-opening read, forager-journalist Becky Lerner sets out on a quest to find her inner hunter-gatherer in the city of Portland, Oregon. After a disheartening week trying to live off wild plants from the streets and parks near her home, she learns the ways of the first people who lived there and, along with a quirky cast of characters, discovers an array of useful wild plants hiding in plain sight. As she harvests them for food, medicine, and just-in-case apocalypse insurance, Lerner delves into anthropology, urban ecology and sustainability, and finds herself looking at Nature in a very different way. 

 Humorous, philosophical, and informative, Dandelion Hunter has something for everyone, from the curious neophyte to the seasoned forager. 

A new method for the practical identification and recognition of trees -- and an important supplement to existing botanical methods.

The book is in two parts: Pictorial Keys and Master Pages. The Keys are designed for easy visual comparison of details which look alike, narrowing the identification of a tree to one of a small group -- the family or genus.

Then, in the Master Pages, the species of the tree is determined, with similar details placed together to highlight differences within the family group, thus eliminating all other possibilities. The details of the Oak trees on this plate are an example of the system.

All of the more than 1500 photographs were made specifically for use in this book and were taken either in the field or of carefully collected specimens. Where possible, details such as leaves, fruit, etc., appear in actual size, or in the same scale.

Catkin Bearing Plants of British Columbia by T. Christopher Brayshaw

This book is the most comprehensive work on alders, birches, oaks, poplars, willows and other catkin-bearing plants in British Columbia. Dr. T.C. Brayshaw describes all 67 species—and many subspecies and varieties—each accompanied by a detailed line drawing and a distribution map. The book also includes diagnostic keys to the families, genera and species.

The Medicinal Forest Garden Handbook by Anne Stobart

Practical information on growing, harvesting and using medicinal trees and shrubs sustainably in a temperate climate, whether for self-sufficiency or profit

The author draws on her direct experience of creating a medicinal forest garden in the UK to provide supplies for herbal medicine in practice. She provides advice on the design of new planting projects which can meet the needs of different users from small gardens to smallholdings and agroforestry.

Includes:

• How medicinal trees can contribute to health and the environment

• Practical advice on designing with medicinal trees and shrubs using permaculture principles, as well as their propagation and establishment

• Combinations of woody and other layers of medicinal plants suitable for creating a medicinal forest garden or inclusion in other growing projects

• Management for a sustainable harvest including coppicing and pollarding of medicinal trees and shrubs

• Key medicinal constituents of woody plants and research studies into their effects

• How to harvest and preserve products from medicinal trees and shrubs effectively

• Recipes for making a range of herbal health care products

• Detailed monographs on medicinal trees and shrubs, providing fully referenced information about their medicinal potential and uses, alongside cultivation and harvest details.

Anne Stobart is an experienced consultant medical herbalist and herb grower and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. She is co-founder of Holt Wood Herbs, where she has transformed a conifer plantation into a medicinal forest garden. Anne has worked extensively in education, including leading a professional herbal medicine programme at Middlesex University in London, UK.

Acorns & Cattails. A modern foraging cookbook of forest, farm & field. By Rob Connoley

The culinary do-it-yourself era is in full swing! Many chefs and cooks are seeking a deeper connection with their food through foraging, farming, and hunting, leading many to cast aside the casserole for modern spins on familiar foods.

In Acorns & Cattails, nationally acclaimed chef Rob Connoley offers more than one hundred recipes featuring ingredients that any home cook can forage, grow, or hunt. Each recipe shares modern flavor and texture pairings that will excite professional chef and home cook alike. The comforting mesquite chocolate chip cookie, the indulgent pork belly poppers, and the haute hackberry rabbit paté launch homespun do-it-yourself dishes into modern classics.

In addition to learning to cook foraged and farmed foods, readers will explore the basics of wild plant harvesting (including identification and ethical best practices) while enjoying humorous anecdotes from Connoley’s years of remote gathering. Photographer Jay Hemphill also presents stunning images that capture the bounty of North America.

Wildcrafted Fermentation. Exploring, transforming, and preserving the wild flavors of your local terroir. BY Pascal Baudar

Wild krauts and kimchis, fermented forest brews, seawater brines, plant-based cheeses, and more

One of the most influential tastemakers of our time invites you on an extraordinary culinary journey into the lacto-fermentation universe of common wild edibles. Used for thousands of years by different cultures all around the world, lacto-fermentation is the easiest, safest, and most delicious way to preserve food. And nature provides all the necessary ingredients: plants, salt, and the beneficial lactic acid bacteria found everywhere.

In Wildcrafted Fermentation, Pascal Baudar describes in detail how to create rich, flavorful lacto-ferments at home from the wild and cultivated plants in your local landscape or garden. From sauerkrauts and kimchis to savory pastes, hot sauces, and dehydrated spice blends, Baudar includes more than 100 easy-to-follow, plant-based recipes to inspire even the most jaded palate. Step-by-step photos illustrate foraging, preparation, and fermentation techniques for both wild and cultivated plants that will change your relationship to the edible landscape and give you the confidence to succeed like a pro.

So much more than a cookbook, Wildcrafted Fermentation offers a deeply rewarding way to reconnect with nature through the greens, stems, roots, berries, fruits, and seeds of your local terroir. Adventurous and creative, this cookbook will help you rewild your probiotic palate and “create a cuisine unique to you and your environment.”

The Wildcrafting Brewer by Pascal Baudar

Primitive beers, country wines, herbal meads, natural sodas, and more

The art of brewing doesn’t stop at the usual ingredients: barley, hops, yeast, and water. In fact, the origins of brewing involve a whole galaxy of wild and cultivated plants, fruits, berries, and other natural materials, which were once used to make a whole spectrum of creative, fermented drinks.

Now fermentation fans and home brewers can rediscover these “primitive” drinks and their unique flavors in The Wildcrafting Brewer. Wild-plant expert and forager Pascal Baudar’s first book, The New Wildcrafted Cuisine, opened up a whole new world of possibilities for readers wishing to explore and capture the flavors of their local terroir. The Wildcrafting Brewer does the same for fermented drinks. Baudar reveals both the underlying philosophy and the practical techniques for making your own delicious concoctions, from simple wild sodas, to non-grape-based “country wines,” to primitive herbal beers, meads, and traditional ethnic ferments like tiswin and kvass.

The book opens with a retrospective of plant-based brewing and ancient beers. The author then goes on to describe both hot and cold brewing methods and provides lots of interesting recipes; mugwort beer, horehound beer, and manzanita cider are just a few of the many drinks represented. Baudar is quick to point out that these recipes serve mainly as a touchstone for readers, who can then use the information and techniques he provides to create their own brews, using their own local ingredients.

The Wildcrafting Brewer will attract herbalists, foragers, natural-foodies, and chefs alike with the author’s playful and relaxed philosophy. Readers will find themselves surprised by how easy making your own natural drinks can be, and will be inspired, again, by the abundance of nature all around them.