Selfsufficientish.com

hello ladies and gents

im trying to get hold of a good field guide for identifying edible and medicinal plants/herbs. can anyone recommend anything in particular?

cheers,
daniele

Hi Daniele
Foodwise (in the UK), a good start is Food For Free by Richard Mabey (published by Collins under natural history). You may also wish to consider seperate books if you intend to make use of wild mushrooms. How To Identify Edible Mushrooms by Patrick Harding, Tony Lyon & Gill Tomblin (again by Collins) is a good alrounder but back it up with a couple of other books for cross-referencing (best to play safe with fungus).

Happy foraging

Also in the UK, anything by Roger Phillips, especially his mushroom book. Very good colour photos throughout. They're not exactly ideal for taking out on walks, being fairly large format (the little Observer books are still good for that) but for mushrooms at least, it's often wise to take a sample and see what the spore pattern looks like overnight for accurate identification. My ex-husband found the book ideal for that - and he used to lead Fungus Forays for the local Wildlife Trust.

Francis Rose 'A wild flower key' is a great book for identifying wild plants. The pictures are really clear.

If you look in the wild food and foraging section - down a few sections from here http://www.selfsufficientish.com/forum/ ... m.php?f=23 you'll see this question has been asked and answered several times in the last few weeks!

I have found this field guide pretty useful though maybe not best for complete beginners (more of a 'I think thats a ...., let me just check my guide' kind of thing..).

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Food-Free-Colli ... 0007183038