"This full color guide makes foraging accessible for beginners and is a reliable source for advanced foragers." -Edible Chicago
The Midwest offers a veritable feast for foragers, and with Lisa Rose as your trusted guide you will learn how to safely find and identify an abundance of delicious wild plants. The plant profiles in Midwest Foraging include clear, color photographs, identification tips, guidance on how to ethically harvest, and suggestions for eating and preserving. A handy seasonal planner details which plants are available during every season. Thorough, comprehensive, and safe, this is a must-have for foragers in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, and North Dakota.
Part of the Timber Press Regional Foraging book series, this is for foragers in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Ontario, Canada. Lisa M. Rose is an herbalist and forager with a background in anthropology and a professional focus on community health. Her interest in ethnobotany and herbal medicine has taken her to study plants, people, health, and their connection to place internationally. Rose leads foraging plant walks and teaches classes on edible and medicinal wild plants. She forages for her own family, herbal apothecary, and community herbalism practice. Preface: Cultivating a Sense of Place
As a child, I lived only minutes from Lake Michigan. The open fields, woods, sandy dunes, and Big Lake were my playground.
I remember growing up in my mother's garden: Tall stalks of corn, overgrown zucchini bushes, large heads of cabbages-all part of the bounty grown for our dinner table. My mother canned and made preserves from our seasonal garden, but we also had wild foods as part of our harvests. The wild grapes lining the backyard fence were turned into jellies and canned juice. Morel mushrooms in the spring were added to eggs and pasta. Apples were picked off the wild apple trees near our elementary school. Wild foods were a part of my childhood.
I also remember the evening I made my first summer fruit pie. It was a hot and sweaty June summer evening in my college apartment in Grand Haven, Michigan. I made a delicious (but somewhat runny) mulberry pie, with berries I gathered alone on a sandy trail beachside. While the pie may not have been perfect, that memory of picking the berries on the trail and baking the mulberry pie in my hot kitchen remains vivid in my mind.
My culinary abilities grew, and I found myself looking to the trees, hedges, and weeds for my teas and meals at my table. Dandelions, violets, nettles, burdock, and even garlic mustard became commonplace in my recipes, and today wild foods are part of my everyday kitchen life.
As a forager, I have learned to sense and anticipate the subtle changes in the seasons, almost like a sixth sense. On sunny February days that are cold but bright, I can actually hear the sap in the maple trees begin to run. April rainstorms and warmer weather means it's time to go mushroom hunting. On muggy days in June with frequent pop-up thundershowers, I always check on the roses and elderflowers-one round of summer thunderstorms could decimate the delicate blooms that I so love to dry for tea. And nuts falling in the green gulch next to my kitchen window? I try to harvest those walnuts before the squirrels do. I feel empowered with this ability to "read" the wild world around me. I will always have the ability to find food and these skills connect me to the natural world in a deep way.
So many of us are seeking a connection to the land and to each other. Foraging, local foods, and community gardening connect us in a deeper way to the world around us. That feeling of a need for escape into the wild is very real: we desire space and clarity. I believe this is one reason foraging is gaining in
