Gifts for Gardeners (and Budding Foragers)

Plenty of garden-focused blogs post lists of gifts for gardeners for the holiday season.  I haven't put up such a list before, partly because I am not a big "shopper," but this year I am giving it a try.

This year's list has a theme, though, because people who know that, in addition to growing good food, I also do some foraging (an extension of gardening...) ask about mushrooms pretty often. If you or someone you know has an interest in, but zero knowledge of, hunting for wild mushrooms or growing mushrooms at home, this shopping guide is for you.

Having excellent teachers and guides is very important, because eating the wrong mushroom can be fatal. Knowing the potential danger does not deter all people, which explains why the very first items on the gift list are about education.

A year's membership in a local mushroom club is a great gift, along with the promise to go along on guided "mushroom walks" with the club. There are knowledgeable people in the clubs, and on the guided walks, to get anyone's education off to a good start. In the Atlanta area, that club will be the Mushroom Club of Georgia. This group offers monthly meetings, classes, workshops, and guided walks. The Morel walk in March is usually a members-only event, which is a definite perk. If you are not in the metro-Atlanta area, look online for your nearest mushroom club.

Books and tool for mushrooming. PHOTO/Amygwh

 For mushroom-ID help on your mushroom walks/hunts, a basic guide like the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms is also useful. This is the book that many local foragers seem to always keep handy for reference. The pictures are very good, and descriptions include information about edibility for each kind of mushroom in the book.

Using a mushroom-growing kit at home to  become familiar with the growth habits of mushrooms is another great way to help get ready for foraging season. A kit to grow oyster mushrooms like this one (linked) is especially good because you are likely to see oyster mushrooms "in the wild". Careful observation as these grow at home could help flatten the mushroom-identification learning curve by a little bit.

Oyster mushrooms grown on straw. PHOTO/Amygwh

I have grown portobello mushrooms in a purchased kit and oyster mushrooms as part of a mushroom club workshop. Both brought good food into my kitchen, and both were easy. Anyone who already has tried a couple of kits and is looking for a different challenge might want a copy of the book Mycelium Running. It contains a long section about growing many kinds of mushrooms in many ways.

This book also includes information on the benefits of adding the old mushroom-growing substrate to gardens, which is a great "crossover" to my more major interest in growing good food.

Oyster mushrooms in the wild. PHOTO/Husband of Amygwh

A last item on the shopping list for a budding mushroomer is a folding mushroom foraging knife. I know that this may seem like an unnecessary thing, and it is, but the curved blade really does help in harvesting mushrooms, and the little brush at the end is great for cleaning dirt and leafy debris from wild-harvested mushrooms. Putting pre-cleaned mushrooms into your basket or bag makes the kitchen-prep work at home much easier.


Some of my garden-writer friends have their own Christmas shopping lists, too. Those lists will be linked here as soon as they are available:

See Marianne's list at The Small Town Gardener.
See Kathy's Gift Ideas for Garden Cats at her Cats in Gardens blog.
The Washington Gardener's Holiday Gift Guide
Top 10 Books for Gardeners, also from the Washington Gardener

Happy gardening!

Gardening Books I Have Loved - Culinary and Salad Herbs

I didn't grow up with gardening. I always loved to be out-of-doors, and I loved plants. When I went to college, still loving plants, I studied botany.

All through my adult life, I have been lucky enough to encounter wonderful books about plants and gardening that have helped me along the way. Some of these books were not strictly "how to" books. When they were, they tended to be for regions of the country (or the world) that have very different conditions than where I live, so the instructions don't 100% work in my yard.

Instead of using them as instruction manuals, as I found them and absorbed what they had to offer, these books engaged my imagination, made me laugh, and showed me new ways of viewing gardening and plants.

This is one of those books:

Culinary and Salad Herbs: Their cultivation and food values with recipes, by Eleanour Sinclair Rohde. 1972, Dover. A republication of the original 1940 book published by Country Life Ltd, London, England.

My first gardening book. PHOTO/Amygwh

My Great Uncle Balfour, a man I had met only a few times in my childhood, lived in the same town where I was in college. One day, when I had walked across town to visit and share a pot of his Darjeeling tea, he gave me this book. He was going blind from macular degeneration and could no longer read, but he loved plants, too.

When his sight had begun to fail, using information from this book, he had replanted most of his garden with herbs. He didn't need to see the herbs to find the right ones for use in the kitchen. Scent was all the guide he needed.

Folded into the book are a couple of sheets of paper, with handwritten notes about the herbs in Uncle Balfour's garden. One sheet contains a seed list. In 1974, he paid 15 cents for a packet of sweet marjoram seeds.

The handwritten notes are a family treasure, but the book itself was a revelation. At that point in my life, I had no idea that people ate dandelions and purslane, but there they were, described in the book as though their use in the kitchen was commonplace. This was news! The book includes recipes for herb teas, herb cheeses, and herb vinegars. It also includes this astonishing bit of information about making a salad:

"James II's head cook considered that there should be at least thirty-two ingredients, and a 'brave sallet' contained more than that, for it was the decorative centerpiece of the table."

For someone whose experience of salad had, up to then, consisted of iceberg lettuce combined with bits of carrot and tomato, topped with some Green Goddess dressing, this requirement strained the brain. However, the rest of the book helped me see possibilities for the other 29 ingredients.

This is the very first gardening book I ever read, and it shone a light on my path forward into both gardening and using my own herbs and vegetables in the kitchen. Anyone else, new to gardening and loving plants, could do worse than to start with a regionally-inappropriate little book like this one.