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Books NOT to Buy

9/5/2023

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Just a heads up to those interested in foraging for edible or medicinal plants. There are new guides that are cheap and seaminly nice that can be found on Amazon and elsewhere. They are written by AI and have potentially deadly information in them.  There are at least a half dozen different versions of these, all with different authors.  

I picked up one for $5 this summer and was pretty horrified when I got it. The mushroom section talks about edible mushrooms but offers NO photos. There are a couple of bad images of a couple of items and NO IMAGES of the others all. These types of books can very easily be deadly.

Stick to Peterson's Field Guides and other reputable sources, please.  I personally use a minimum of 5 sources for any ID that I do.  That will include books like Peterson's, apps that I have installed on my phone, collections from university websites, wildflower.org and more.  Further, before eating any wild plant, EVEN if you have a positive ID, it is important to take other safety measures into consideration.  (I have a few listed HERE.) 

Here is a recent article on it:
https://fortune.com/2023/09/03/ai-written-mushroom-hunting-guides-sold-on-amazon-potentially-deadly/?fbclid=IwAR1yZ7p9Q8E24C3dzKzB-QBqniul0LMTCFFapsJs59CxQ5maUVaQL37VJwc

If you hit a paywall you can use https://12ft.io/ to bypass it.
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    SCA Forestry

    This page is dedicated to my project and research related to SCA Forestry Guild activities and my expanding medieval apothecary. Here I will build out a 14th Century English men's kit and have some adventures in the woodlands!

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