In this article, you’ll learn the top tools and supplies that are essential for foraging!
I’ve divided this into several sections based on the context within foraging.
The recommendations I’m giving here are based on my experience foraging and processing wild food and herbs for over a decade!
I don’t want you to think of this as a list of prerequisites to start foraging; rather, I want to give you a complete list of tools that are suited for different tasks.
As you find yourself needing to accomplish various foraging tasks, you can come back to this article to find the perfect tool for the job!
Some of these tools, to me, mark the difference between a handful of wild food and buckets-full! I think you’ll find it very informative.
Throughout the article, you’ll find links to the products that I personally use and recommend.
In each section, I’ll give you the full list of tools that pertain to them, followed by longer explanations of why and how I use them.
Gathering
These are tools that you will use in the field to efficiently gather wild food and herbs! Below is the list, and the explanations follow after!
Basket
Foraging inherently requires a gathering container of some kind. While many people may turn to a grocery bag of some kind, you really want to invest in a good rigid basket.
Why?
Because having a gathering container with structure means that it won’t squish all of your harvest together as you gather more of them!
Woven baskets can be expensive, but the one I recommend below is an amazing entry-level item for anyone!
Foraging wild elderberry with my favorite basket
Hori-hori
A hori-hori or “digging knife” is a must-have for digging roots and tubers. Plus, they’ll save you from using your pocket knife for digging and dulling the blade! I take my hori-hori with me everywhere I go. You never know when you’ll need it!
Gathering dandelion roots with my hori-hori
Fixed-blade knife
Speaking of pocket knives, they work great for EDC applications, but I find a lot of foraging tasks, like harvesting inner bark, are best done with a sturdy fixed blade!
The Morakniv has always been my go-to. You won’t find a better bang for your buck than this. I recommend the orange one to help prevent you from losing it in the field!
Gathering slippery elm inner-bark
If you want to learn more about gathering inner bark from wild trees, click here!
Binoculars
This is another incredibly underrated foraging tool, particularly for scouting new spots.
Using binoculars, I can pick out productive hickory stands from afar. If I’m out on the water, I can see good American lotus (Nelumbo lutea) locations and even Paw Paw (Asimina triloba) patches from hundreds of yards out.
Binoculars aren’t just for hunters; foragers benefit from them as well!
Tarp (and paracord)
A simple tarp is another of the most underrated foraging tools out there! Nothing can beat it for quickly gathering large amounts of fruit or nuts from tall trees! I use them for Mulberry (Morus), Black Cherry (Prunus serotina), or Muscadine (Vitis rotundifolia) every year.
You want to combine this with a rope and throw stick.
I’ll just find a decent-sized stick for throwing high in the branches and attach a bit of paracord to it so I can shake the branches of the trees or vines to coax the fruit off.
This simple combination allows me to forage things that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach!
I actually recommend a heavier canvas tarp over the lighter synthetic ones. Trust me, if you’ve ever tried tarp harvesting on a windy day, you’ll be glad you got the heavier one!
You can get paracord from any hardware store, or buy large amounts here (again, I recommend getting a bright color so you don’t lose it)
Wild mulberries gathered with my foraging tarp!
Nut roller
These make gathering wild nuts a breeze. With a nut roller, I’m able to gather hundreds to even thousands of wild nuts in a small amount of time. I have two. One for sizes around acorns and hickory nuts, and another for black walnuts, which are much larger!
Berry Rake
I feel like I’m still looking for my long-term option for this tool, but below you’ll find the one that I am using right now.
Processing
I found this section was largely overlooked in a lot of the other articles online, which I think is a shame!
Wild food processing is my favorite part of foraging.
I’ve spent many hours with dozens of different species. Here are the tools that I absolutely rely on!
Five-gallon bucket
A classic five-gallon bucket is not only a great, sturdy basket for gathering but also my go-to container for wild food winnowing!
I get food-safe buckets and then write “wild food” on them, so I never use them for anything else!
You can get these at any hardware store near you.
Powerful blender
You can’t avoid the need for a solid blender with foraging. From processing wild herbs to making wild flour to extracting wild starch from fibers, there are too many uses to count!
There are plenty of cheap blenders out there that won’t be able to take much of a beating when it comes to the various purposes you’ll need them for.
I recommend investing in a good Vitamix. They’ve been able to handle every heavy task that I’ve thrown at them with stride! (And I’ve thrown a lot at them.)
I also strongly recommend getting the stainless steel canister to go with your blender.
For my ultra-heavy blending tasks, like making hickory milk, a stainless-steel blending canister is a necessity. This turns my Vitamix into a tank of a blending machine!
If you don’t use a stainless-steel canister, you risk chipping microplastics off the inner wall of the plastic container. Not something we want to do!
Blending hickory milk with my Vitamix blender
Food processor
Believe it or not, for many tasks, a blender is too powerful, but a food processor is just right! Take knocking the spice coating off of sumac fruits or getting American lotus seeds out of the shell.
A food processor is strong enough to achieve those tasks without pulverizing the material we don’t want into tiny bits, allowing us to filter them after!
This tool is as important to me as my blender.
A food processor is the perfect tool for making wild sumac spice!
Foraging filters set
This set of mesh filters is one of my favorite processing tools ever. I cannot recommend them enough. I use them for processing tasks for a myriad of wild foods.
From sorting elderberry stems from the berries to sumac seeds from the spice to making extra fine wild flour to cleaning wild seeds, I never seem to run out of applications for them.
Do yourself a favor and get these! You’ll use them all the time.
These filters catch elderberry stems great!
Conical sieve
This conical sieve filter is really great to either use on its own or hold a fiber filter (like the nut bags below) in place. It can hold much more volume than a standard sieve, making it better suited for large processing tasks.
Using my conical sieve for squeezing out the liquid from acorn flour
Box fan
I use this to add consistent airflow for winnowing all kinds of things like acorns, lotus, curly dock, lamb’s quarter, and more! It’s also great for adding some speed to the drying process for acorns, black walnut, hickories, and more in the autumn.
The one I use is pretty heavy-duty, but it’s relatively quiet, portable, and has lasted me years and is still going strong!
More Specific Tools, But Still Really Helpful!
These next tools aren’t used quite as broadly as the ones above, but for the things I use them for, they work better than anything else!
- Nut Milk Bags
Until recently, I hadn’t used these very much. However, they performed exceptionally well for filtering out my hickory milk and straining the water from my leached acorn flour.
I have these dedicated milk bags for foraging tasks, so I always know they’re good to go for the next task!
Using a nut milk bag to filter hickory milk
- Jelly Bags
I use these extra-fine jelly bags to filter some flours and starches. Two wild foods I use these bags for in particular are cattail flour and kudzu starch. - Steam Juicer
Why use a steam juicer? For the price, they’re one of the best ways to juice very large amounts of fruit. Further, steam juicing provides inherent sterilization that you don’t get with cold juicing.
I have two wild foods that I use this for every year: Elderberry (Sambucus) and Muscadine (Vitis rotundifolia). Nothing works better than it! The final product is a nice, concentrated juice that is ready for drinking, making jelly, or syrup! - Clamp Food Strainer
This is an upright crank food strainer that is mainly designed for processing things like apples for applesauce or tomatoes for salsa. However, it is also the fastest tool for processing hundreds of American Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana)!
The one trick is that you do need to cut the grape spiral that comes with it to allow the large American persimmon seeds to get through. I’ve done this, and it works great.
If you process hundreds of wild persimmons each year like me, you can’t go wrong with this tool!
Processing wild persimmon pulp with my clamp strainer
- Walnut Cracker (Grandpa’s Goody Getter)
This single tool has completely changed the way I’m able to process wild nuts. With foraging for Black Walnut (Juglans nigra), it’s really important to look specifically for wild black walnuts with thin shells unless you have one of these nutcrackers.
This tool can break open the thickest of shells with ease and does so in a way that makes it extremely easy to access the nuts inside.
With hickory nuts, it’s even more difficult to get large pieces out! However, this nutcracker breaks open the nuts easily and evenly, allowing me to get far more whole nut pieces out than with any other tool!
This is an extremely high-quality product that you can pass on to your great-grandchildren. I cannot recommend it enough for wild food. Trust me, I’ve tried the other cheaper ones so you don’t have to—this is the one you want!
You can save $10 by using my code, “feral24” at checkout!
Getting huge pieces of walnuts with my Grandpa’s Goody Getter
Preservation
There is really only one broad tool you need for preservation, and that is a dehydrator. The other main method of wild preservation that I often employ is fermentation, but that carries a whole other set of tools—I’ll dedicate a separate article to that sometime for you!
Dehydrator
From wild nuts to herbs, fruits, and more, you’re going to need to dry things! With some things, passive drying is possible, but with others, it isn’t. Plus, a dehydrator requires far less space than passive drying for many things.
It’s hard to go without a dehydrator as a forager!
I’ve found having a dehydrator results in far fewer losses of my harvest. It’s always available to preserve things quickly if I need it to.
One thing that you’re going to want to pair with your dehydrator is a compatible silicone mat. These I use for drying finer foraged goods, like flour and starch!
Elderberries ready to dehydrate
Identification and field study
These are tools to help you identify and discover new wild species around you!
- Loupe
A loupe is a compact magnifying glass, perfect for taking to the field to observe small details in plants and mushrooms! Remember, small details show big differences when identifying something new.
For instance, you can use a loupe to identify the two short stamens on a flower, indicating it to likely be in the Mustard family! (To learn more about recognizing wild food and herb plants by their families, click here!)
These are also extremely helpful for winter tree identification as well.
I carry one with me everywhere I go! - Ruler
When reading field guides (we’ll talk about those further down), you’ll very often see units of length used in the description, like “this plant has leaves 3-5 inches, that plant has leaves 4-6 inches.”
Rather than always trying to guess at these, I find it very helpful to be able to definitively know the length of a specimen I’m observing to be confident of its identity.
You can get a simple ruler (I like this one which comes with a 6-inch ruler, a better size for the field), or if you’re really into botanical observation, you can get an electronic ruler to get exact measurements (I use mine all the time)!
Learning
Foraging is a continual learning process. Below are a few items you can check out to help guide you!
If you’re new to foraging, you can also check out my How to Start Foraging Guide!
Field Guides
You need a good field guide for your region. You need one. New ID applications are extremely helpful tools, but they are NOT replacements for the fundamental skills of plant and mushroom identification.
I recommend using ID apps as a supplement to your identification knowledge. This is how I personally use them.
If you are in Central or Eastern North America, you cannot get a better field guide than Sam Thayer’s Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants. (Trust me, I’ve tried all the others.)
Get my Foraging App
This is the one tool that I wish I had when I started foraging. It provides you with timing windows for the flowers, fruits, and vegetables of dozens of amazing wild edible species, completely tailored to your local area!
If you want to know what species to forage, when to find them, how to gather them, process them, distinguish them from lookalikes, and more… Check it out!
I am confident that it will supercharge your foraging journey and save you years of learning on your own!
Foraging Experience Books
There is another kind of book that I think is equally important to a good field guide: a forager’s experience book. When I first read The Forager’s Harvest by Sam Thayer, it changed my life, truly.
This book comprises extensive plant profiles of several important wild food species (compared to short entries in a large field guide). It not only taught me how to identify and find the plants described but also how to utilize them in meaningful amounts and how to actually bring large amounts of wild food into my diet and life.
The book also talks about the mindset of a wild food forager, which will really transform your perspective of what foraging can be to you!
No matter where you forage, you’ll benefit from Sam’s books. I’m also including another book of this style in my list—you may have heard about it before!
Final thoughts
I want to emphasize: don’t worry about buying all these things at once!
Keep this article saved, and when you come across a difficult task with your foraging journey, come back to it.
It’s likely that one of these tools can make the job a whole lot easier!
