The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms Review
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The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms by Pella Holmberg and Hans Marklund is a great resource for any wild food forager.
While no book can take the place of an experienced guide, this pocket guide should provide you with the information you need to forage safely for mushroom varieties that are new to you.
Fall is typically prime season for many mushroom varieties, so I am looking forward to taking this book out with me more later this year. I shared it with my neighbor last week, and if the weather cooperates this fall (you need rain for mushrooms, and it’s been a dry summer), we’re going to go investigating in their woods to see what we can find.
How The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms is Organized
The book begins with an introduction and discussion of what exactly mushrooms are and where they are likely to be found. It then continues with a thorough explanation of proper picking, cleaning and preparation.
The authors also note that mushrooms contain fiber, important minerals, antioxidants and vitamins B and D in significant amounts. Not bad for a “free” food. This book focuses on varieties that are suitable for cooking (edible varieties), but also gives mention to potentially inedible look-alikes, if any.
Given that the authors hail from northern Europe, so too are the mushroom varieties featured in the book generally found in northern forests.
Each mushroom is categorized from 1 to 4, with 1 being the easiest to identify with only edible mushrooms that look similar, to 4 being those that are edible but could be confused with poisonous lookalikes.
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You can stick with the #1 mushrooms (or beginner mushrooms) when you are just starting out and nervous about your identification skills.
In the interest of thoroughness, the authors also offer a detailed description of the potential symptoms of mushrooms poisoning. Stay safe, folks.
The bulk of the book is filled with two page spreads of52 edible mushrooms featuring detailed photos of the mushrooms in studio conditions, including cross sections, and photos of the mushroom in its natural habitat.
Each entry provides a description with distinguishing features, a guide to preparing and preserving, and a description and photo of look-alike mushrooms.
I particularly appreciate the extremely detailed photography with horizontal and vertical cross sections of the mushrooms. As anyone who has done any amount of foraging can tell you, good photos make or break a guide book. These qualify as good photos.
The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms is a useful addition to the library of any northern wild food forager, and the photos are beautiful enough that it would make a good “coffee table book” as well.
This post originally included a giveaway, which has now ended.
I am so excited we ate wild asparagus this year from our new property (well the road by it) and I recently read a book about backyard foraging and have discovered some cones of berries we’ll be harvesting to make sumac-ade as they suggest. We also found (thanks to a neighbor’s advice) a HUGE patch of wild blackberries that we’ve picked out of. I am excited to learn more and more about this way of eating! And we found sunchokes we’ll be digging this fall too 🙂
fantastic book! i will be buying this even if i don’t win.
I would like to learn which ones can be eaten around our area and this book would be awesome. We have a few around and would love to eat them if they are ok to do so.
🙂 Thanks
Would love to win this and learn about mushrooms. Currently eating lambsquarters in my breakfast smoothies and snacking on purslane.
This book is so exciting! My family and I already do a lot of natural edibles, but have always shyed away from mushrooms. This book may be what we are looking for. Thanks for sharing!
I’ve gone mushrooming with more experienced mushroomers for morels. FUN! Then my friends and I used to go hunting for wild asparagus and wild strawberries that grew around where we lived! I would love this book.
I love mushrooms this would be a great addition to my foraging books. My husband is finally coming around to eating fungus as he puts it. LOL
I would love to get a copy of this book..we live in a rural country area with lots of woods and when growing up my dad picked some bad mushrooms and was very very sick from eating them..
I have always wanted to gather mushrooms but was afraid I would poison us. This would be a great help.
I would love to be able to tell which mushrooms are edible!
What a wonderful book to have. We have all sorts of mushrooms growing on our farm. I have no idea which are edible and which are not. This book would be a wonderful to learn from.
I have foraged wild mushrooms for nearly 30 years. What I see in the description looks to be one of the best examples of a forager’s field guide I have seen.
My goal for this year is learning all I can about foraging and edible wild plants. This would be awesome.
My father-in-law used to take my sons out and go mushroom hunting. We canned them. Since he passed, I do not see the mushrooms anymore. I miss that. I want to learn what to look for so we can pick them again. My kids know what to look for but I don’t. I want to learn! I tried to sign in through Facebook through your link but it would not let me. I will find you in Facebook and try that way in a few minutes.
Yippee for this giveaway! I am excited about this book. Thanks so much for bringing it to my attention.
I have only found morels once in WI – maybe with guidance I can find them & more again.
This book looks awesome! Thank you for sharing it!
We would love to have this book. How often when we are out hiking we see mushrooms growing wild but have no knowledge of what is poisonous. We really hope to win!
Had no clue that there was another season besides Spring for mushroom hunting. Makes sense though.
This book looks awesome! My boyfriend and I are avid foragers, and could really use a guide like this.