Florida’s Edible Wild Plants: A Guide to Collecting and Cooking

“Peggy Lantz’s new book combines decades of real-life experience with the heartfelt passion of a true plant lover. Easy to read and hard to put down, Florida’s Edible Wild Plants

combines homespun anecdotes with practical botany and hands-on recipes to offer readers a dynamic handbook for anyone wishing to get to know the plants in their yards in a more intimate and tasty way. “–Emily Ruff, director, Florida School of Holistic Living

“Helps you learn to appreciate the bounty that Mother Nature serves up, from weeds to trees.”–Ginny Stibolt, coauthor of Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida

“An easy way to enjoy the common, healthful, and tasty edible plants growing around you.”–Richard Wunderlin, coauthor of Guide to the Vascular Plants of Florida

Living off the land is a romantic idea, but in practice it can be confusing. So instead we buy nuts someone else picked for us, berries packaged hundreds of miles away, and greens that may or may not contain contaminants.

Fully illustrated with photos and drawings to help with identification, Florida’s Edible Wild Plants demystifies the process of foraging to help you discover the wonder of finding and eating wild plants that may grow right in your own backyard. Peggy Lantz shares her fifty years’ experience gathering and preparing wild edibles and bringing them to her family’s table. Practical knowledge is interspersed with recipes, and Lantz shares her own anecdotes about searching for and finding new plants, as well as serving “weeds” to her curious friends.

From acorns to wild sorrel, from duck potato soup to elderberry champagne, this easy-to-use guide provides general information about the most common wild edibles in Florida that are not only good for you but also delicious. And the tips for preparing them are indispensable. Lantz offers specific advice for locating and harvesting the different edible parts of each plant, whether it’s gathering walnuts in the Panhandle or making jelly from coco plums in the Keys.