Welcome to ThinkVail – shop for the best mushroom books for beginners featuring comprehensive field guides and resources to help identify edible mushrooms from poisonous ones and where to find them.
Like all places, when hunting for mushrooms in the high country of Colorado it’s important to correctly identify each and every mushroom before you eat it. These books are ideal for helping the novice forager identify edible mushrooms and gain experience and confidence. Ideal for yourself or to give as a gift to your favorite mushroom hunter.
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The most comprehensive field guide available for North American mushrooms–a must-have for any enthusiast’s day pack or home library. It is the essential, go-to reference source for over 18 million nature lovers.
Features a durable vinyl binding and over 700 full-color identification photographs organized visually by color and shape. A perfect companion for any mushroom foraging expedition.
by The National Audubon Society
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This unique guide is invaluable to novice and beginner mushroom foragers. Unlike others, it focuses only on types that are both edible and delicious. In addition, it presents the eight rules of mushroom gathering in a straight forward fashion. Some of the many mushrooms covered are the cep; the red-cracked, larch, bay, and birch boletes; hen of the woods, chanterelle, trumpet chanterelle, hedgehog fungus, common puffball, horn of plenty, and cauliflower mushroom.
by Alexander Schwab
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This is one of the easiest field guides for mushroom identification and includes more that 1,000 species described in detail. Enjoy more that 700 paintings and drawings with subtle field marks to illustrate important distinctive features.
This portable-sized field guide covers most of the common edible and poisonous species readers are likely to encounter. It takes a new, simple approach to mushroom identification based on key features that do not require a microscope or technical vocabulary. Furthermore, the book groups similar mushrooms on the same page so you needn’t flip between pages to identify a certain mushroom.
by Kent H. McKnight and Vera B. McKnight
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If you’re hunting specifically in Colorado or the Rocky Mountain region then this is the guidebook for you. The Essential Guide to Rocky Mountain Mushrooms by Habitat is the definitive authority for uncovering post-rain rarities and delicious, edible favorites alike. Gorgeous full-color photos highlight the beauty of hundreds of species. Easy-to-navigate entries offer detailed descriptions and tips for identifying mushrooms, including each species’ edibility, odor, taste, and rumored medicinal properties.
by Cathy Cripps, Vera Evenson and Michael Kuo
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This knowledgeable husband and wife team have created a beautiful book with absolutely everything you need to know to make mushrooming a lifestyle choice, from finding, storing and preserving, to cooking with common and unusual species.
Packed with content and lore from more that 20 skilled foragers around the country, it also includes practical information on transporting, cleaning, and preserving their finds.
by Kristen and Trent Blizzard
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Enjoy over 2000 high-resolution photos, including 3 or more photos of each species. There are nearly 500 pages to this complete reference book. This unique field guide offers a simple approach and includes a difficulty factor from 1-10 for each species, a culinary factor from 1-5 (choice, good, mediocre, etc.), and describes “triggers” for the species that fruit when the temperature reaches a specific degree.
by Chris Matherly
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If you’d prefer to grow your own mushrooms, that look no further that to this detailed, comprehensive guide for growing and using gourmet and medicinal mushrooms commercially or at home.
Offers precise growth parameters for thirty-one mushroom species, this bible of mushroom cultivation includes gardening tips, state-of-the-art production techniques, realistic advice for laboratory and growing room construction, tasty mushroom recipes, and an invaluable troubleshooting guide.
by Paul Stamets
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A beautiful book that is great for educators, and mushroom enthusiasts includes a collection of essays with gorgeous photography, time-lapse sequences of mushrooms blossoming and an overall cascading message that mushrooms and fungi will change your life– and save the planet.
Top luminaries show how fungi and mushrooms can restore the planet’s ecosystems, repair our physical health, and renew humanity’s symbiotic relationship with nature.
Contributing Authors: Eugenia Bone, Suzanne Simard, Roland Griffiths, Jay Harman, William Richards, Paul Stemets, Louie Schwartzberg
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This comprehensive field guide has everything you want to know about mushrooms. Offering information on a vast range of two hundred species, including all shapes and sizes and colors.
Includes detailed information such as scientific names, habitats, modes of development, botanical then, culinary uses and more.
by Guillaume Eyssartier and Julien Norwood
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Learn how to properly forage for (and avoid) hundreds of mushrooms, toadstools, and fungi with this beautifully illustrated guide. Allows you to identify over 450 species of fungi from all around the world. Clear, sharp photographs of each kind of mushroom and their cross-sections are accompanied with annotations and descriptions, along with scale illustrations and identification charts .
by D. Adult
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We hope you found this article about the best mushroom books for beginners helpful. How do you identify mushrooms? Do you go with a guide, a friend, a chef or on a foray with a mushroom club? We would love to hear your thoughts, comments, tips and stories regarding your experiences foraging mushrooms. Thanks for sharing and be safe hunting mushrooms, never eat a mushroom you aren’t sure of.
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