The Midwest offers a veritable feast for foragers, and with Lisa Rose as your trusted guide, you'll learn how to safely find and identify an abundance of delicious wild plants.  “This full color guide makes foraging accessible for beginners and is a reliable source for advanced foragers.” — Edible Chicago    The plant profiles in  Midwest Foragin g include:  Clear, color photographs  - Identification tips  - Guidance on how to ethically harvest  - 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. “Lisa Rose is exactly the sort of person you want to teach you how to forage for wild food. Her calm, warming voice and extensive plant knowledge make you want to dash out your back door to discover what edible delights lie just beyond.” —Hank Shaw, James Beard Award–winning author of Hunter Angler Gardener Cook “This full color guide makes foraging accessible for beginners and is a reliable source for advanced foragers.” — Edible Chicago “Useful for beginners and those searching close to home...Introducing these species to kids would be a fun backyard teaching moment for parents.” — Iowa Press Citizen “The Timber Press foraging series offers another set of books with high quality photography. . . . also available as handy Kindles.” — American Herb Association Quarterly “A must-have for anyone who likes to forage...a remarkable piece of work, offering beautiful photos and hundreds of tips about when, how and where to harvest edible plants.” — Grand Rapids Press ​ “With 115 plants included, Midwest Foraging covers a lot of ground and is a good first choice for a beginning forager in the region covered. For more experienced folks with a larger library this is a valuable companion to include with your other field guides.” — Permaculture Podcast “I love this book… A trustworthy reference book to what is safely edible… A great addition to anyone’s foraging toolkit.” — Little House in an Old Town With this savvy guide you’ll learn what to look for, when and where to look, and how to gather in a responsible way.  An A-to-Z guide for foraging year-round - Detailed information for safe identification - Collecting tips for sustainable harvesting - Tips for preparation and use 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 a