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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature, Food, Reference, Survival, Gardening, Plants

369 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 15, 2006

Reviews

[KA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fewer foods but more in-depth than Edible Wild Plants. The author is hilarious and so readable. He's been hooked on wild foods since he was 6, and he always supplements what he reads with personal experimentation. For instance, whereas authors of other wild food books just repeat the nonsense about wild parsnip being poisonous, he questions the received wisdom, checks the science, and tries it for himself. The outcome: he proves that wild parsnip is the same species as garden parsnip, debunks all the myths, and does so with a sense of humor. On the tenacious myth that a species is good for you if tended but poisonous when growing wild, he writes, "How do parsnips know if they are bing cultivated? Do they sometimes get confused and mistakenly kill gardeners when poorly tended?" (287). His frequent thanks to God, the giver of all this bounty, is touching, too, especially coming from someone who lives much as our pre-agricultural ancestors did 10,000 years ago - he eats only what he hunts and gathers from the wild.

P.S. The belief that parsnips are poisonous probably originated with the rash some people get from the oil of its leaves. However, the root is what you eat, and if you wear gloves when harvesting, you're fine.

I like mine roasted with a little butter and maple syrup. Yum.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

All of Sam Thayer's books are outstanding. Buy them direct from his website, as it is worth every penny and he deserves the credit he gets for such amazing work.

[Sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up along with some recipe books at the library, since I know there's a foraging movement of sorts here in Ye Olde Baye Area.. but just got really excited about having it because I brought in a big harvest of greens and snap peas from my garden! I know I know, a garden is cultivated.. but it's food I got outside in the dirt, and that's closer to foraging than going to the farmer's market or picking up my CSA box. So. Foraging education, begin! PS, this book covers a whole bunch of regions, so wherever you are, something in it will be useful to you. Poor souls who don't live in Ye Olde Baye Area Magicland of Plenty...

Update: Thinkin' about buying this book.. I'm going to check out the library again to see if there are any more specific books for my region that are as useful with tips and an awesome glossary and endearing stories. The plants may not all be available here, but I think this book is a really great all-around guide to foraging - how to look, what to look for, what can be used on a plant and how to use it, how to harvest it sustainably, what tools to use, and a thorough botanical glossary. A totally awesome random find!

[Arabesque · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doesn't have too many plants in here but that is probably because it goes very into depth with the ones it does have.

[Karen GoatKeeper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Those are just weeds lining the roads, invading your garden. Pull them up and toss them out.
Except, before there were gardens, many of these 'weeds' were food. Which ones? Which parts are edible? The author has foraged these 'weeds' all of his life, has lots of fun and interesting stories about them and supplies the reader with instructions on how to be a forager and get some useful food from those plants you used to pull and toss.
As the author lives in the northern Midwest, some of the plants aren't found in more southern areas. Many of them are. After reading this book, it is very tempting to go out and sample some of these plants.
The book is well organized with many good photographs of the plants along with identification hints. The stories of the author's experiences with these plants makes the reading fun.

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great resource!

[Ami · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned a heckuva lot about wild foods, but the thing I loved most about this book was the author's straightforward, no-nonsense voice. Thayer states that he has narrowed the breadth of plants in the book so that he could give increased depth, and also ensured that he has not included any plant which he has not personally eaten over 50 times. Apparently, there is a wealth of MISinformation in wild edible literature, which makes me a bit hesitant, and I'm sure Thayer would say, "rightly so"! He establishes a standard of "contradictory confidence"--you must be willing to contradict anyone, even a botanist, who would say that the plant you've identified is not so. You must be wiling to bet your life on it, because that's pretty much what you're doing. I am pretty skeptical of my knowledge, and because of that I've kept myself safely not eating much of anything, but I'm really enjoying this first step of research & what I'd call a preliminary identification. David & I go hiking, take pictures or samples of plants, then later try to identify them. I wouldn't eat anything I wasn't 100% about, but I think it's important to start identifying, at least. Also, it's good to see a plant throughout the course of its life, to identify it in the different stages of growth. I hope to eventually attend some local wild food events, or maybe find some local folks who can show me in person, and if I get really interested in a plant I'll probably be taking it to Cooperative Extension.

For now, I'm still enjoying "hunting"--we got lost in a state forest on our ostrich fern fiddlehead hunt! Fun!

[Gytha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I put this on my AMZN wishlist after Po's Pon mentioned it on his blog and Nick gave it to me for Christmas, and I ripped through it. Skipped through some, but read enough to find out that the tree I've been wondering about on my shorter run loop is a butternut tree and I can't WAIT until it drops those weird sticky green footballs again, because they sound awesome. And we have tons of milkweed growing in the flood-irrigated pastures along the route as well, so maybe we'll get some premission from those landowners when the time comes. I love the thoroughness of each section, he really seems to cover all the bases in a very readable way and I have confidence that I won't accidentally eat dogbane and not milkweed.
Not the most exhaustive collection of edible wild plants, but an excellent resource with information on storage as well as harvesting, love it.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

the conversational tone works very well for this guide book. it has made foraging in my area (which is the same latitude in MN while the author wrote this book in WI) as easy as foraging for actual food can be. berries and fruits are not much of a focus for this book, but rather foods that you could potentially make a meal out of. reference to poisonous look-a-likes is addressed quite well. my favorite part of the book is the two page chart giving you the time-frames you can expect the various plants to be at their harvestable stages. a little overwhelming at first when using it, but a great resource overall.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very clear and concise. Full of information. Doesn't require pairing up with a field guide like some foraging books, though it wouldn't hurt, either. It's helpful to me that this man's homeland expertise is within a 100 mile radius of my own midwestern living space. (I once read a really great seasonal survival book in which most of the plants didn't apply to my knowledge needs because they grew mainly in the U.K.)

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been foraging this year and this book makes me wish I'd had it in early spring. It's been a busy first year for me: Making my own maple syrup in April, harvesting dandelion flowers/greens and wood sorrel in spring, foraging mugwort/bergamot/yarrow/nodding onion/linden leaves in the summer, picking wild plums/wild apricots/aronia berries in late summer, and now black walnuts/butternuts/hackberries/and mushrooming in fall. If I was going to write a book on Foraging, I'd write it like this.

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thayer's guide to edible plants is a fantastic resource for expanding one's knowledge for foraging. I have learned more about foraging from Mr. Thayer than anyone else, and have never even met the guy. If you want to forage, buy all of his books. It will be the best investment you ever make towards your foraging.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to learn about foraging and start looking at the world around you as edible start here. This book is not tiny but I read it very quickly upon buying it. Once I opened it up I wanted to know all the information it contained. Also this is the type of book I keep for reference not just to read and pass along.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic resource for the upper Midwest. I'm finding so many of these plants right in my neighborhood! I'm waiting eagerly for grapes and sumac. Hoping to find wild rice. I'm even thinking about trying milkweed - I always thought it was poisonous, turns out no!

[Norris Thomlinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've bought, checked out from the library, and flipped through more than a dozen foraging guides, but as soon as I started looking through this one I knew it had value way above and beyond any of the others and that I had to buy it. Why? The details! I love details! And this book has them!

The book starts with coverage of general topics related to foraging, such as safety in identification and sampling; differences of harvest, timing, and use of different plant parts (leaves, roots, seeds, etc); processing and storage techniques; and the shortcomings of most of the foraging literature to date. After extensive coverage of these sorts of topics, with a lot of useful information I haven't seen elsewhere, Thayer spends 32 chapters detailing 32 plants (a few more actually, since he covers some closely related plants together in the same chapter). For each plant, he includes multiple high-quality color photos of the given species plus lookalikes where applicable, gives a detailed description of multiple parts of the plant highlighting key identification traits, lays out the range and habitat, and describes his personal experiences (and sometimes information from existing literature where useful) harvesting, preparing, eating, and storing the plant. Very few books I've seen rely primarily on the author's personal experiences, and of those, even fewer go anywhere near as in-depth as Thayer does.

Thayer lives in Wisconsin, so we in the Pacific Northwest might not find all the plants he describes in the wild here. But we will find more than half of them out here, and of the rest, I have several on my list to deliberately cultivate (including Ramps (Allium tricoccum), Spring Beauty (Claytonia sp.), ground bean or hog peanut (Amphicarpaea bracteata), and Groundnut or hopniss (Apios americana)...maybe also wild rice). So the book has great relevance all around. So far the book has helped me immensely in harvesting wapato (Sagittaria latifolia), describing the best way to muck about in the swamp so as to actually get lots of tubers, not freeze my butt off. And the book's descriptions of processing small seeds has helped me a lot with amaranth and dock harvesting.

My only complaint about the book is that it doesn't cover enough species! But Thayer is working on that, with a second book due out in a year or two. In the meantime, I'll just content myself with rereading the details to pick up all the info I missed the first time or two through!

(See my blog "Permaculture, Perennial Polycultures, and Resistance" if you're curious for my accounts of foraging and growing various wild edibles.)

[Jordan Hogness · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only book on foraging, a nascent interest, that I have read thus far. I appreciate this book for several reasons: a) clear photographs and descriptions of plants, b) an extremely knowledgeable author, c) a focus on the lesser known edibles, and d) some pretty humorous prose. I am somewhat disappointed at the lack of recipes; however, the author justifies this as follows: a) most of his recipes use several wild ingredients, while most readers will be gathering a single one at any given time, and b) he assumes that most readers will know their own tastes and will be skilled enough at cooking to put together their own dishes once familiar with the wild ingredient(s). Fair, I suppose.

The author resides in Wisconsin, and the plants he profiles are somewhat influenced by location (which is great for me, being in Minnesota). However, he deliberately chose to profile plants that have fairly wide North American ranges.

[Carly O'Connell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strongly considering buying myself a copy, as this was such a useful reference. I'm also simultaneously reading Nature's Garden by the same author. I find both books equally good, just covering different plants.
From berries to flowers to roots, from ferns to wapato, to butternut, Thayer covers quite a range of plants. I almost skipped the intro to get right to the practical stuff but I'm glad I went back and read it. Thayer outlines his general approach to foraging and gives valuable advice like "if you need to use a book to identify a plant, you are not ready to eat it." You must be absolutely sure of what it is before you risk putting it in your mouth. The intro also contains some useful general knowledge about harvest, preparation, and storage.
The individual plant entries each start with a short anecdote followed by a description, range and habitat, and notes on harvest and preparation,

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent reading. Detailed and tried and true. Thayer only suggests what he has tried “dozens if not hundreds of times.” Very different from the compilations by other authors. If I wrote a book along the same lines of tried and true experience (at least a dozen or more eats), my forage items would be the basics: mallow (leaves and seeds), dandelion (all of it), stinging nettle (leaves), nanny berries, raspberries, strawberries and false strawberries, lamb’s quarters, grape leaves and fruit, poor man’s garlic, maple seeds. This book gave me more info on the basics and added many new plants that I was able to find and try right away in the summer and fall. It’s winter now. I can’t wait for spring to add (from my yard) burdock, chickweed to my longterm experience, and mullein from my neighbor’s yard, hopefully. Also can’t wait to go ricing! The details on wild rice foraging in this book are so fascinating, like a book of its own. I bought my own copy to have with me forever.

[OneDayI'll · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loving it. Since moving to a more rural area I have studied everything I can about wild plants and foraging. This book starts off with humor as well as facts. In the 5 steps of identifying plants, step 5 asks, "assess contradictory evidence: Do you really have it? Are you sure? Are you willing to bet your life? Would you proclaim it in front of a group of botanists?" Showing both the seriousness and humor of the author. There are many plants that look alike, only some are edible more than once. (The running joke among foragers is all plants are edible, some only once.) There are good visuals, cautionary information, uses, and more all in a compact guide book. Granted, you'll still want to ask knowledgeable locals (and museums and hunting groups would be good starting points) before actually eating anything you've found. But there is literally forests of food surrounding us and I enjoy learning more about this skill set.

[AlitaConejita]

The plants covered are thoroughly covered, from how to identify, to where to find, to how to prepare, and any concerns about look-alikes and such. But there weren't that many plants in the book overall. I was hoping to use this book as a reference guide. Essentially - see a plant (for example the bealai plants growing on my land that I used google lens to identify and are not in this book), look through the book photos/descriptions to identify, and determine if edible. This book is for the opposite. Essentially - read about an edible plant in the book, look for/find it, and prepare it for eating. So, for me, this book has very limited use.

[Brad Belschner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book on foraging I've ever read--tied with his sequel. :-) Unlike most foraging books, Thayer makes a point to ONLY speak from experience. He staunchly refuses to repeat advice gleaned from other books without having tested it firsthand. Consequently, this book is reliable, practical, fun, and just generally awesome.

[Cathy Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not exhaustive, but the author is clear what his intention is and he sticks to that. I was surprised to learn that some of what I thought I knew was not true. I will be more cautious. Highly recommend this for anyone who wants to understand the subject. This is the first book to get to be safe in learning the practice of foraging.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent reference for edible wild foods which covers some wild plants that are commonly harvested among people who do such things and some that are not. I've long wanted to attend one of Thayer's sessions at the Midwest Wild Harvest festival here in Wisconsin, but short of being able to do that, this book is a great reference.

[Paul Klammer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very practical book that may be the best first book for folks interested in local terroir, and foraging. I am looking forward to applying what I learned, beginning with milkweed, nannyberry, and acorns. If you don't have a knowledgeable and experienced friend who can accompany you as you beging your foraging experiences, I doubt you can do any better than starting with this book.

[Leilah Thiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is legitimately worth it for the cattail information alone. I've never seen a book be so thorough in covering how you do the processing, let alone talk about how best to process it. The introduction ranting about foraging authors talking about plants they don't have personal experience with is just a bonus. 😂 But it's accurate! Highly recommended.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here is a detailed book for those who are interested in eating wild plants. He is cautious and informative. He also points out in the last chapter books full of misinformation which appear to be the majority. My advice is join a club and learn from the experts.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decent book, but feels almost like a half biography...or like you're reading an online recipe blog just trying to find the damn recipe. Talks about foragable items you might not find in other books.

[Bree · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great reference book with lots of images. I appreciate the fact that Thayer acknowledges the contributions that indigenous folks made to foraging, but I do wish he’d given the names of specific tribes more often rather than just referring to “the Native Americans.”

[Skyler Layne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read, very informative field guide. I recommend to anyone new to foraging or even those that have been doing it for quite some time as it contains useful information about identifying and usage as well as harmful look a likes.

[Ellie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very thorough information on the plants included, with excellent photos of different stages of growth. However, the author’s tone was unpleasant to read. It felt condescending and difficult to connect with, and did little to foster a curiosity of foraging.