Growing up on a farm in Midwest, I learned a lot of plant identification. Didn’t “eat the weeds” there cuz … LOL … it wasn’t done AND one had to watch for areas sprayed with herbicides. In my young adult years, I expanded the I.D. and how to use common ones…trying cattail roots, wild ginger/onion, Lamb’s Quarters, pine needles tea, etc. Learned from books or by asking the elderlies in different places.
We’ve lived in a lot of regions. Midwest, Tropics, high Rocky Mts. I’ve collected books on wild edibles and medicinals. DH is also interested in the medicinals. Some reference books I have:
Nat. Audubon Society Field Guide: Wildflowers – Western Region and Eastern Region. Edible Native Plants of the Rocky Mts by H.D. Harrington. Peterson Field Guide – Rocky Mt Wildflowers. Dept. of Game/Fish: Winter Guide to Rocky Mt Browse Plants (1956). The Way of Herbs by Michael Tierra.
Also have a few for the tropics regions…not currently useful.
I use those and a lot of websites for I.D. and ideas on use. [be CAUTIOUS of ideas for ingesting wildcrafted things] I have articles saved to my laptop on a dozen different tree species. I.D.ed our sticky pines and all the others.
Marjory Wildcraft at GrowNetwork has informative articles like: https://thegrownetwork.com/pine-trees-food-medicine/
Best on-line I.D. I’ve found for pine trees is this one. It is for trees of the southern Rocky Mts but some of these trees grow elsewhere too. Quote from author: “This guide will also serve for most of the trees of the northern New Mexico, eastern Utah, and the Black Hills, and much of Wyoming including Grand Teton and Yellowstone Nat. Parks. The forest populations in those regions differ some from Colorado of course, but there is much in common. ”
http://www.westernexplorers.us/ColoradoTrees.html
I want to print some of these that I downloaded. In case I can’t SEE my computer files some day. I can’t seem to memorize this stuff as well as younger years so references are mandatory now.
OldMtWoman …edited to add the 2nd link [hope it works]
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This reply was modified 8 months, 3 weeks ago by
OldMt Woman.