A Practical Guide to Edible & Useful Plants: Including Recipes, Harmful Plants, Natural Dyes & Textile Fibers

This excellently documented catalogue introduces the layman to food gathering, advocating the superior flavor and nutritional value of wild plants and encouraging the cultivation of multiple-use, native plants in impoverished areas and as a petroleum substitute. Plants have yielded dandelion wine during the Depression and mescal cough medicine for the Apaches, among a host of contemporary products that range from insecticides to chewing gum. Encyclopedic descriptions of various species identify regional location, blooming season and plant characteristics. There are time-consuming recipes for yucca laundry soap and such dishes as sweet goldenrod jelly, fried cholla, tumbleweed and bacon, mesquite pan bread, acorn waffles and pesto. Sections that comprehensively treat poisonous plants, vegetable dyes and basket weaving are parent-oriented in their emphasis on precaution and recreational possibilities. Tull coauthored Texas Parks and Campgrounds Guide. Illustrations. (May)