Customer Reviews

Basic Essentials Edible Wild Plants & Useful Herbs, 2nd (Basic Essentials Series)

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

This second edition has color photos. There are detailed recipes and identification tips. We cover Native American medicine, Chinese medicinal uses and modern pharmaceutical uses. The book is called the basic essentials because there are many edible wild plants out there that are not fit to eat! In this book I focused on plants worthy of your cooking efforts.

The book, unlike others, is organized by how you stumble across wild plants: geographic context. Or, more simply, they are organized in the environment that they are found. Thus, plants in wet areas are treated separately from meadow plants. And plants of the forest have their unique section separate from the seashore and mountianous plants. Yes, we have added plants from the seashore and tidal zones as well as my favorites from mountainous areas...We didn't leave the sunbirds out either. There are several desert edible included.

There is a important section on poisonous plants and poisonous look alikes.

There are more recipes, better recipes and lists of my top ten favorite wild plants and my top ten favorite edible flowers.

With color photos and attention to plants that are quality food (vitamin, mineral and phytochemical content) this new field guide is a great value for under ten dollars.

I've used more comprehensive guides than this, but I've never seen so much valuable information together in just 66 pages. In my own experience foraging, I've used several other much larger guides, but I had to use several sources to find all the commonly found edible plants that I've seen hiking through Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. While other guides devote most of their pages to plants rarely seen, this little book is almost completely filled with edible plants you are likely to see on a short hike. It also gives recommended uses, preparations, and warnings. There is also a small section on commonly found poisonous plants. I have not seen the accompanying video. While I'd recommend reading more verbose guides as well, I've seen no other book that gives so much valuable information in so small of a space.

Identify, collect, and eat over 100 plants in North America. Find 35 wild plants growing in your back yard. Discover ancient pharmaceutical uses for common herbs. An appendix catalogs and indexes many poisonous and poisonous look-a-likes.

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The very most important feature of JIM MEUNINCK's book, is that you don't have to scan through hundreds of pages of pictures and small print, to fine the most useful edible plants, and the plants most likely to be encoutered on an outing in the United States.


Many books of this type, have very tiny print, and cram as many possible plant pictures and descriptions on one page as possible, so that they are so encyclopedic, that they are impractical to use. It is difficult to match a plant in the field, to the corresponding plant in the book. JIM MEUNINCK's book is different. There may be only 2 pictures to a page, and the descriptions are more extensive, and the useages of the plant is more extended still. The pictures are extremely clear and well printed, and the colors are genuine.

The book will neatly fit into a day pack. The book is only 87 pages long, has an index and some very important APPENDICES, which covers RECIPES, POISONOUS PLANTs and their "look-a-likes".

This is what the beginner needs. Something that will bridge the gap between books that are too big, and too complicated to use for IDENTIFYING plants in the field.



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