Growing Wild

By: Vickie Shufer

Published by Skyhorse, 2026-04-07

Learn to grow an abundance of food and medicine with minimal maintenance! Transform your landscape from an ordinary lawn or meadow into one that nourishes you throughout the year. Growing Wild goes beyond foraging. It’s about working with nature to create ecosystems for the community of plants, animals, and humans. It’s about bringing the plants you want to forage into your landscape and giving them a place to grow. You will be guided through the process of determining what plants to grow, the growing conditions, harvesting and processing techniques, and how to use them for food and medicine. Recipes are included to get you started on your journey. With food prices escalating, more people are taking an interest in growing their own food, but maintaining a traditional garden takes a lot of work. There is an ongoing battle with the weeds and the insects. Nature insists on covering the earth with plants wherever there is bare soil, and with the plants come insects. By mid-summer the traditional gardener is overwhelmed. This is when the wild garden is thriving. The wild garden is a forager’s garden and requires little maintenance. Chapters include: Reasons for Growing Wild Restoring Wild Plant Communities Planning: Before the Beginning Earth Time Creating Habitat Natives in the Landscape The Forest Landscape Naturalized Aliens The Harvest The Wild Apothecary Growing Wild is about blending the wild plants into the landscape alongside the cultivated herbs and vegetables. It’s imitating the way Nature grows plants—in patches, not rows. Instead of straight rows with a monoculture crop, there is a range of different types of plants that mingle together and help each other. A forager’s garden produces more and more each year with less work. It restores a stable ecosystem that can look after itself, with habitat for wildlife, food, and people and medicine for everyone.