There is some great information on the internet to help give novices the confidence to start foraging for wild food .. so here are some guides and websites to check out.
General advice, recipes and free guides
Sensible foraging tips on picking from Forage London with comments on dog poo, pregnancy, pollution and more http://www.foragelondon.co.uk/sensible-foraging/
Excellent free Edible & Poisonous Berry Guide from folk at Wild Food School. NEVER eat berries you can’t identify – they can kill! http://www.countrylovers.co.uk/wfs/wfsberries.htm
Fergus Drennan is a wild food experimentalist and educator. Excellent website full of recipes and posts about all sorts of wild food. He is a bit of a ‘serious’ forager so as well as great recipes there is lots of more unusual things like how to tap birch sap, making flour from all sorts of seeds and nuts, leaf curd and candying wild foods http://fergustheforager.co.uk/
Wild Food School have an excellent website http://www.wildfoodschool.co.uk/ and also can download a free Urban Foraging Guide http://www.countrylovers.co.uk/wfs/wfsurban.htm they also now have a tropical, riverside and Cornish foraging download on that page too.
Eat Weeds http://www.eatweeds.co.uk/ loads of info and unusual recipes on edible and medicinal plants and they also now do podcasts.
Green Deane has an extensive site at http://www.eattheweeds.com with hundreds of recieps and articles on a range of edible wild food. He is based in Florida so some things you will certainly never see here but the best bit is a feature on the front page to search over 1000 edible plants
Rogers Trees and Shrubs http://www.rogerstreesandshrubs.com/ A really extensive website with descriptions,pictures, leaf shape index and more to help you confidently identify over 500 plant species. Search uses common names as well as latin ones.
Myths and downright untruths
Unfortunately the internet is great for propagating untruths on all sorts of subjects and foraging is no different. I have come across wild food several recipes which don’t work at all but have been extensively reposted so just be aware that all may not be as it seems!
This is a great article from Green Deane with some myth busting about some wild foods http://www.eattheweeds.com/bet-your-life-on-it-myth-busting/
I have done a blog about comfrey and I recommend you read this extensive blog post from Monica Wilde about the research into the safety or otherwise of comfrey http://monicawilde.com/is-comfrey-edible/
Mushrooms
10 poisonous mushrooms to watch out for in Britain when foraging http://bit.ly/1hTrmBF These are great pictures!
A beginner’s guide to foraging for morel mushrooms. http://bit.ly/1jhuxnc
Great website from Mina Said-Allsopp (MushrooMina) She runs fungal forays and wild food walks in the Leeds area http://msitu.co.uk/
Rogers Mushrooms is an excellent website with many detailed photos to help identify fungi. http://www.rogersmushrooms.com/ There is also now a Mushroom app available.