Botany for Foragers: Leaf or Leaflet?

By Harvest McCampbell

Leaf or Leaflet? is now live

and available on Substack

with a free subscription.

Many books and articles do not provide enough botanical information to confidently make an accurate identification. Plant identification apps are rarely trained on botany and are frequently wrong. Social media sites can be helpful, but you often find that folks don’t all agree on the name of the plant you are hoping to identify. Even iNaturalist hosts photos of a variety of different plants that are purported to all be the same species. Should the plant you are interested in have toxic relatives or look-a-likes, inexact identifications can be dangerous.

Your best defense is to learning some basic botany for foragers. Not only will it help keep you safer, but it’s fun, and it will help deepen your observations of nature. And that’s good for your soul. Check it out here: https://biodiversepress.substack.com/p/leaf-or-leaflet

If you want to read a very scary story about a home school group that had mistaken poison hemlock for wild carrots, check out my post on Wild Cress as well. The story is included there as a cautionary tale. https://biodiversepress.substack.com/p/wild-cress-cardamine-hirsuta

Thanks! May all your foraging adventures be happy!

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Harvest McCampbell is an author, nature writer, and a retired naturalist and master gardener with a healthy list of publication credits in the small press category. She has also been a long-time member of the Facebook Willapa World and Conservation - Willapa & Beyond committees. She has been our lead writer and editor on our self-generated posts for the last five or six years.

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#Foraging #BasicBotany #SafeForaging

Introducing: Wild Food Is Everywhere

by Harvest McCampbell

Wild Cress is the first post in a new Substack blog focused on wild food and nature. While the blog is subscriber supported, Wild Cress should be available free of charge through April 5, 2025.

The Wild Cress post includes information on when and where this little plant can be found, it’s flavor and nutrition profile, how it can be used, where it shouldn’t be gathered, and how to ensure that it will come back next year.

If there is a subscribe banner across the top of the post, it will block most of the navigation bar. But a tiny bit of it pokes out from under the banner, and you can grab that and use it to scroll down in the usual way. https://biodiversepress.substack.com/p/wild-cress-cardamine-hirsuta

Harvest McCampbell is an author, nature writer, and a retired naturalist and master gardener with a healthy list of publication credits in the small press category. She has also been a long-time member of the WillapaWorld and Conservation - Willapa & Beyond Facebook blog and group committees. She has been our lead writer and editor on our self-generated posts from the beginning.

Harvest, like many other seniors, is concerned about ‘disruptions’ to Social Security, food, and housing benefits. She has decided that creating some alternative income streams, right now, is important. We want to applaud her efforts, and continue our partnership with her. So we are bending the rules about self-promotion and personal anonymity.

We hope you’ll sign up for a free subscription so you can check out her new Substack post. If you enjoy it and find it useful, please know that supporting Harvest’s work with a paid subscription to her blog also supports her work with Willapa World.

Thanks for your consideration.