There is a really good Peterson Field Guide to Wild Edibles by Steven Foster.

I just ordered five books on wild edibles:

1) Early Uses of California Plants (California Natural History Guide)
2) Edible and Useful Plants of California (California Natural History Guide)
3) The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants
4) Edible and Medicinal Plants of the West
5) Botany in a Day: The Patterns Method of Plant Identification

I have many more on my list, including Peterson's Field Guide (I have the Peterson's Guide to Birds!).

I'm still looking for places to order wild edible seeds (flowers/plants), bulbs, and roots ....

I love the edible plants as well as medicinal plant book from peterson. There is overlap (obviously) between the two books. I have the eastern medicinal plants book and I believe there is one for the west but can't comment on that specifically.

I like Steve Brill's book a lot too. His website may be of interest to you - linked in below.

As far as plants, decide which ones you want to plant and look for sources for that plant. You'll find them no sweat. The only caveat is that a number of wild edibles not native to North America are many times labeled "noxious" or "invasive" weeds. You do not have to plant these. They probably grow around you already.

Raintree Nursery (in Oregon) specializes in "edible landscaping." They do carry a number of native food plants such as service berries.

FataMorgana

Here is a link that might be useful: Steve Brill

Some good seed companies I ordered from last year or looked at were Everwilde, Horizon, Prairie Moon, JL Hudson, Easywildflowers, Alplains, and Sand Mountain. Some of the natives are hard to germinate, require chilling, smoke treatment, etc. I didn't get a single Prairie Turnip, Psoralea esculenta, to grow. Some of the companies have plants as well. But I did get a Psoralea physodes, used for tea, and a few Geum urbanum with an edible root. This year I'm planning to try a few different Agastaches, native mint family plants with aromatic leaves used in cooking and tea. They may not last as long in the garden as mints, but the mints may be more invasive. Most of the mints are imported, as are Oreganos, Thymes, but they make excellent edible plants and are very tough and easy to grow. I also found out that money plant, Lunaria, a common biennial that self-sows freely, is edible. The tiny alpine strawberries are easy to grow from seed and not big producers of fruit but keep making some all growing season for me. They are cute in the border, too.

A really excellent native edible is Aronia. There are several different sizes of plants and they make excellent berries easy to harvest and very high in antioxidants.

Wow! Thanks so much for all the information. I sent an e-mail to Raintree Nursery and Steve Brill. Will contact the seed companies and start ordering lots of seeds soon ....

Here is a great website that gives a list of native plants per state. Along with pictures and some pretty good information. Pasted below.

As far as purchasing seed for natives, prairie moon is a good one and so is trade winds fruit store.

Here is a link that might be useful: wildflowers.org

Hi,

I'm new to this forum, so hello everyone. I'm a small space gardener and native plant lover in MA. I'm glad to hear you are interested in native edibles, Jim; I've found them to be really fun. When I was twenty I tried to eat a lunch of all wild foods every day for about 6 months--not enough calories, I suspect, given what I was eating, but it was a great experiment.

There are probably better field guides, but for the excitement of reading and getting involved in wild foods I love Euell Gibbons's books. There was a series, beginning with Stalking the Wild Asparagus, I believe. He was a wild food advocate and genuine eccentric, as far as I can tell. He used to go into the woods with boy scouts and just find food for a few days at a time. I remember one of his books dealt specifically with the arid west, though I didn't check where you were out west.

Gibbons's staple was always cattail hearts. It was the starchy thing that he started with before going off to find freshwater clams or something more difficult. I didn't have cattails at the time of my experiment with wild foods, but since the nature class at the school where I teach brought some in, and I found them easy to eat, better than most wild foods.

Sunchokes are tasty, raw and cooked, though you can have too much of their characteristic chestnut flavor quickly. Poke weed is good, but must be double boiled, which is irritating. It tastes very much like spinach. I also love the non-native purslane, both raw and in stir fries; eating it helps take care of it as a weed, which it is here. In fact, it really incentivizes weeding to know which ones are edible and use them. I pretty quickly cleared out all of my dandelions when I was eating wild foods and had to move on to other yards. Fiddlehead ferns are popular in my area, though I haven't tried them yet. Folks compare them to asparagus.

-hope that helps. I'd be curious what you find tasty.

Welcome Raysinet!

Jim - One of the books that your ordered, The Forager's Harvest, has a sequel by the same author called Nature's Garden. The first book covers 30+ plants in detail and the second book covers an additional 40+ and just came out in 2010.