There are some good foraging guide books for the whole of North America, as well as other continents, but even better are edible plant guides that are local to your area. Here are a some that I like.
In the U.S., the northeast and the southwest are very different with regard to native plants, so why not a edible plant book that focuses on that area? Lucky for us, Timber Press had put together a foraging guide books series with regional experts in foraging. Yeah!
Even better, their book for the Northeast is authored by Leda Meredith, who has been on our podcast. Neat.
I have the Northeast Foraging book, and have browsed the rest of these in bookstores and online, and I give them all a thumbs up. I have met some of the people at Timber Press and what’s not to like about a group of people who publish cool helpful books. I picked up my copy of Northeast Foraging at Oblong Books in Millerton, NY. If you are in the Berkshires, go there, buy books, then get coffee around the corner.
This isn’t some half baked set of edible plant books, its a curated cast of authors with local knowledge of what grows near them and what you can eat. Plus, how you can use them in the kitchen. Its not all just some leaves you toss into salad, though that’s all good with me.
I was thumbing through Leda’s book on Northeast Foraging and its interesting that I landed on the Garlic Mustard section, which I just wrote about. And I learned from her that you can also harvest the seeds later in the summer to store for a winter snack. Always learning something.
Please consider buying these books from an independent bookstore, you can order from them online, find yours here.
Here are the links to each book on Amazon, (we get a referral fee on Amazon purchases)
- Midwest Foraging
- Northeast Foraging
- Pacific Northwest Foraging
- Southeast Foraging
- Mountain States Foraging
- California Foraging
- Southwest Foraging
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