I really appreciated the focus on ethical foraging that this book takes. It's so important to foster sustainable foraging for everyone, but especially for those new to the hobby. A great basic guide that includes up close pictures for ease of identification as well as quirky skills like making acorn flour. A great reference book to add to your bookshelves.

Just what I was looking for. I used to forage years ago, but it's been so long, I could use a refresher! This is a very useful book, in my opinion. It contains info on what to collect and where and when. Offers cautions and advice about collecting and how much to collect. It also offers recipes for using the plants you find. It's actually a very useful skill to have. I hate seeing perfectly good food go to waste; better to harvest it and preserve it. great book,; loads of photos.

This book is a great beginners guide to the world of foraging. It is extensive and cleverly written with a excellent reference section.
Highly recommend,

I received an ARC from Roost Books via NetGalley.

This book is a wonderful addition to the growing collection of foraging books out there. Clear instructions give the reader steps to hunt for delectable roots, shoots, tubers, bark, flowers, and fruits. How to harvest, prepare, and preserve is included for each plant. Even seaweed is included! Plentiful warning is given for certain plants and mushrooms.

The book is wonderfully balanced with recipes to put to good use your seasonal findings. Get ready to have something to search for every season - happy hunting!

The Skillful Forager by Leda Meredith
Essential Techniques for Responsible Foraging and Making the Most of Your Wild Edibles

Having gone out to collect wild edibles a few times from the surrounding countryside with women from the village I was interested to see if any of the same wild things grow locally as the author highlighted in this book AND yes, many are found in both locations. We have sumac trees, amaranth, lambs ears, chicory, dandelion greens, wild garlic and many more out there for the picking...though it is much more fun to go with someone that knows what they are doing.

This book provides useful information from where to collect, safety, laws, feral vs wild, sustainability, tools, parts to eat (and avoid), preparation, use, storage and more while being filled with gorgeous illustrations to assist the novice. There are seasonal lists of plants to look for and where to find them. Chapters are divided up into: tree leaves; roots, tubers, rhozomes & bulbs; shoots & stalks; flower; fruit; seeds, nuts & pods; bark & twigs; sap; mushrooms; seaaweed; and ends with making the most of what you collect including universal recipes, flour. Pickling, making soda and wine. I would love to have this book in my library.

Thank you to NetGalley and Roost Books for the ARC – This is my honest review.

5 Stars

This book is the most helpful foraging book I have read to date. I can think of three people I might buy this book for, to add to their library and I also enjoyed it.

More of a foraging how-to than a cookbook, this is a beautiful book for anyone interested in foraging. Part learning, part reference. Section one reads like a crash course in guidelines, gear, and guidelines for where/when/how to harvest. Part two is about identifying wild edibles, and section three contains a few recipes/ how to preserve.

This book is full of tips and includes a section on re-wilding which I thought was lovely. It’s strange to see some embracing technology and a movement towards 21st-century hunting and gathering.

A few takeaways:

I have often wondered why flowers I pick on a meadow walk wilt so quickly. Now I know to bring a moist towel to wrap around the roots. Foraging flowers and leaves benefit from a damp bag method.

Have you heard of ‘the nut wizard?’ What an amazing tool! Like a broom but with a basket on the end to pick up the fallen crop.

This book includes a seasonal resource guide.

My brother always reminds me of a particular mushroom variety that can overwhelm a dish, with just one mushroom. After reading this book I might suggest pairing it with a foraging cookbook.

This is an excellent resource for foragers to have in their personal libraries, or to check out from the library to expand your knowledge.

As an experienced forager, I've read a lot of foraging books. One thing you must keep in mind is that there is no way that one book could ever possibly be enough to help you learn to forage or cover all of the wild edibles that you can forage, much less teach you how to harvest, cook and preserve them. I've written books on foraging elderberries and acorns and each of those books is well over a hundred pages on only one plant. People who expect an all-encompassing foraging book in one volume are being frankly ridiculous.

All that said, this is an excellent resource to expand your foraging knowledge. The author goes into detail about a number of wild edible plants in different categories (leaves, bulbs and roots, stems, flowers, sap, bark, seaweed, mushrooms, etc.) with a nice assortment in each category. She also gives great charts, seasonal lists and instructions on ways to preserve your wild edibles (drying, canning, freezing, etc.) and basic recipes that are quite useful for how to cook types of wild edibles to make them taste best. For instance, she gives instructions on how to cook up bitter greens to compensate for their bitterness, and great ways to cook any wild mushrooms.

I'm not really a fan of the author's voice. Something about the way she talked rubbed me the wrong way at times. That's on me, though, and I cannot dispute that this is an incredibly helpful and valuable book that is sure to teach any forager some new tricks.

I was able to view a temporary digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review.

Fascinating book, with complete directions for foraging in almost any North-American location. Offers tips on foraging, ways to cook, clear photos and directions for finding and identifying the plants, and common reasons for confusion. Highly recommended for those who would like to forage!

As a beginner, I thought this book was well laid-out. It begins with some sections on safety, sustainable/ethical foraging, and gear, all of which were very helpful. I appreciated the author's focus on giving representative examples and generalizable advice in terms of identification, harvesting techniques, and potential uses, although I can see a point where this advice would be insufficient. The photos that were included were helpful and beautiful.

The author indicates that this book is meant to be used alongside a field guide, so it's not meant to be comprehensive. Instead, I found it to be a helpful resource for explaining some big topics and foraging best practices before digging into the task of learning to identify different species of plants using another resource.

As an amateur forager, I really appreciated that The Skillful Forager began with the ethics of foraging. Too many excited beginners run out into the woods and begin to pick anything they believe may be edible and post photos online for identification help later. While this book isn't an encyclopedia of plant identification, it is a useful guide on the "how to" of foraging and would be appreciated by amateur through intermediate level foragers. I enjoyed how it broke plants into sections and discussed how to use each part. It also has great warnings of poisonous or inedible plants that may be confused with edible ones. The photography throughout the book is gorgeous and is both artistic and informative.

This book had the potential to be spectacular but it felt lacking in details, plant identification techniques, and photography/drawings of the plants. While it was quite good at being clear at stating what plants had similar characteristics but were instead poisonous---so you could avoid foraging those while searching for your intended target---it wasn't great about showing you the difference. Another downside was that it was more for a northern US audience, though of course there were plants that could be found everywhere, many are not available in the south.

I did like the format of the book, breaking it down into edible plant parts. I think that is helpful so you can have an idea of how you would use a particular plant or if you were in the mood to make something you could thumb through and see what plant parts may be available for you to forage.

I did appreciate that the author talked about the tools required for foraging and how to get your foraged materials home.

Paired with other in-depth foraging books this would be a good beginning for those venturing into foraging.

There's something so intriguing about foraging but I've always been nervous about it since I just don't know enough about what plants (and what parts of those plants) are edible. With this book, would I be completely comfortable identifying safe plants alone? Not in all cases, but I do think there's a lot of useful information here. The reader is given information on finding and identifying, harvesting, preparating and even preserving a variety of wild edibles. I was happy to see the author also stresses sustainable harvesting repeatedly. No book can contain all the information and the author does suggest using this book along with other field guides.

Thank you to Leda Meredith, Roost Books and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this book. All comments are my own, unbiased opinion.

We always get asked about Foraging and the willingness to try it because it sounds very adventurous and dangerous (to some people) so I always am on the lookout on some foraging guides for our patrons. I am familiar with Leda's work and experience so we were excited to see that she has a new book on foraging coming out soon.

In the The Skillful Forager Leda Meredith examines new finds out in the wild corresponding with the seasons. We found a lot of new edibles such as rose hips, cattails, wild lillies and much more. But the skillful forager goes beyond listing the wild edibles that exist but Leda Meredith takes it one step further and examines ways to retrieve these edibles and prepare these edibles to eat and get the nutritional benefits that these wild edibles carry. Of course, Leda Meredith also shares some classic combinations also that can transform a simple dish to make it more colorful, and of course more delicious.

I can not wait to use this book as a potential candidate for our cooking demo that we do every month and this book got me more excited to eat more healthier and discover more wild edibles that exist in this world. I also loved the pictures, colors and layout of this book because I had the high expectation being a nature book that it will be colorful and that the colors correspond with one another and they certainly do. This will definitely find its place in our TX section of our Adult Non-Fiction collection and that is why we are more than happy to give this book. 5 stars!

While this book was packed with lots of great information on the techniques, rules and ethics of foraging, it was still missing quite a bit. It was like this book was trying to be everything to everyone, and ended up not really being anything except a high-level introduction with a handful of really in-depth specifics (how to make acorn flour, for example?). The info on identifying various wild edibles was pretty sparse, and there were only one or two pictures of only a few plants throughout the entire book. There were drive-by mentions of other plants, but without any other real information on them. Good thing I read this while in the vicinity of WiFi, as I referenced Google as often as this book! And honestly, this book didn't really make me want to try many of the foraged edibles - there weren't many descriptions of tastes/textures beyond "hey cook this or it will be inedibly bitter" or "some people eat this part of the plant but I find it mucousy" (barf!). I guess if I'm ever lost in the woods I might remember some of this info, but likely I'll eat the wrong thing, having not seen an actual photo of it, and die.

Foraging has become incredibly popular of late, as people try to get in tune with nature and the rhythms of the earth. But you can’t just go out and start pulling things out of the ground or off a bush. Meredith explains the many do’s and don’t’s. You may need permission from a landowner, you will need to know what you want to harvest, you will have to consider if the area has been sprayed with pesticides, the time of day/year to gather, be able to identify poisonous plants and you will need to leave enough for the birds and animals who rely on these foods for their survival. Recipes are included. This is an informative book for a beginner and includes recipes that will appeal to more seasoned foragers.