With updated production techniques for home and commercial cultivation, detailed growth parameters for 31 mushroom species, a trouble-shooting guide, and handy gardening tips, this revised and updated handbook will make your mycological landscapes the envy of the neighborhood.

    Along the way, he has become a widely influential journalist and social critic, documenting in hundreds of essays for national and regional magazines the crisis in conventional agri-business and the boundless potential for new forms of farming that reconcile tradition with ecology.Logsdon reminds us that healthy and economical agriculture must work - at nature's pace - instead of trying to impose an industrial order on the natural world. Foreseeing a future with -more farmers, not fewer, - he looks for workable models among the Amish, among his lifelong neighbors in Ohio, and among resourceful urban gardeners and a new generation of defiantly unorthodox organic growers creating an innovative farmers-market economy in every region of the country.Nature knows how to grow plants and raise animals; it is human beings who are in danger of losing this age-old expertise, substituting chemical additives and artificial technologies for the traditional virtues of fertility, artistry, and knowledge of natural processes. This new edition of Logsdon's important collection of essays and articles (first published by Pantheon in 1993) contains six new chapters taking stock of American farm life at this turn of the century.

    . . .They have a primal quality against their background of jungle hammock, moss-hung against the tremendous silence of the scrub country. The only ingredients of their lives are the elemental things."--Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, March 1930, in a letter to Alfred S. Dashiell of Scribner's Magazine Except for one extended black family and "one writer from up north," folks from Cross Creek were ornery, independent Crackers, J. T. Glisson writes in this memoir of growing up in the backwoods of north-central Florida. The time spanned the late twenties to the early fifties, and isolation and an abundance of mosquitoes and snakes were their claim to fame. The writer was Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. In her 25 years at the Creek, Miz Rawlings was regarded as "That Woman"--warm, high-strung, and simply eccentric. She drove recklessly, smoked in public, and had "black spells." A Pulitzer Prize did little to change her status. In Cross Creek everyone had space to be a character and every character had a title: the meanest, laziest, most pregnant, or best cat fisherman. Describing day-to-day life in unaffected prose, Glisson's portraits include Charley, the fisherman who did his banking in a Prince Albert tobacco can nailed to a tree; Bernie Bass, who spoke "perfect Florida Cracker without polish"; Old Blue, young Jake Glisson's nuisance hog; Aunt Martha Mickens, the matriarch of all the blacks at the Creek (including Henry, the first critic to pass judgment on Jake's drawings); and especially Jake's father, Tom, the man whose wisdom, boundless optimism, and colorful speech figure prominently in Rawlings's Cross Creek. (Of his famous neighbor, Tom once commented that "when she gets her tail up above her head, her brain don't work.") Glisson's own finely detailed pencil and pen-and-ink drawings illustrate these vignettes, and he explains that the idea of earning his living as an artist first came to him when he saw Rawlings's books illustrated with such vivid pictures that he could smell the sawgrass, sweat, and gunpowder of the Creek. No wonder: One edition of The Yearling--the story of a deer and a boy Jake's own age--was illustrated by N. C. Wyeth, who visited Cross Creek and chatted about drawing ("it's a matter of seeing and practice") while eleven-year-old Jake watched him sketch. Tom Glisson died while his son was enrolled in art school in Sarasota; three years later Miz Rawlings died, and an era ended. Today J. T. Glisson lives four and a half miles from the house where he grew up. When there's a breeze from the south, he writes, he sits on his porch and listens to the soft rustling of palmetto fronds, almost embarrassed by the beauty of his memories. J. T. Glisson has been an illustrator, publisher, and businessman

    Stressing the importance of understanding livestock behavior, Temple Grandin shows you how to develop a respectful working relationship with your animals to promote their health and productivity. With detailed construction plans for animal-friendly facilities of all sizes and dozens of low-stress methods for moving your livestock on pastures, padlocks, and feedlot pens, this guide has everything you need to know to create a comfortable atmosphere for thriving, happy livestock.

    But it is much, much more than that. It is a book of nutritional chemistry and traditional folkways, a fascinating window into both what humans around the world have eaten for centuries and how we can learn from this. Recipes range from the expected-beer, pickles, soy products-to the absolutely bizarre, including a recipe for couscous you probably won't be trying at home. Appendices provide agricultural and nutritional information.

    This complete guide to understanding and improving the soil shows how to begin the process with easy-to-find organic materials. Includes testing soil, making compost, what plants to grow where, container gardening, how to tailor soil to fit the needs of individual plants, and much more. 75 illustrations.

    His intention was not to teach farming but rather to supplement existing good farming practices with a spiritual understanding of the forces of nature. Considered by many to be the most remarkable lectures Steiner ever gave, they contain profound insights into the nature of the farm organism, the plant and animal world, the nature of organic chemistry, and the influences of heavenly bodies. Without devaluing the importance of the chemical constituents of substance, Steiner emphasized the greater significance of the forces that shape or form those constituents of living nature. He identified many of these forces and described specific practices and preparations that enable the farmer to work in concert with them.This new edition, with extensive notes and appendices, brings together all of the material related to the Agriculture Course, including the lectures and discussions, Steiner's handwritten notes, diagrams and illustrations, color plates of Steiner's blackboard drawings, and further agricultural indications by Steiner. Included are several important sections that have not previously been available in English.The biodynamic agriculture movement has grown up from these lectures and is putting the ideas into practice in hundreds of farms around the world.

    Today, greenhouses and sunrooms are real living spaces where gardeners spend as much time with a book and a cup of coffee as they do with a watering can and a pair of pruning shears. In this fully revised edition of a best-selling classic, veteran gardener Shane Smith embraces this new "lifestyle" approach to greenhouse gardening. Through lively writing that balances wit with commonsense advice, Smith draws on his more than 20 years' experience to cover everything you need to know to establish a charming and productive greenhouse.“Exceptionally comprehensive . . . a joy to read.”—Hobby Greenhouse Association

    Farmer and photographer Michael Ableman takes the reader on an unprecedented photographic journey that spans five continents and investigates a tradition that is thousands of years old. 170 full-color illustrations.

    Even such familiar “weeds” as the dandelion have their palliative uses. This informative coloring book, featuring 44 accurate drawings by botanical illustrator Ilil Arbel, focuses on such medicinal plants from around the world as foxglove, belladonna, mayapple, valerian, dandelion, chamomile, quinine, arnica, burdock, tamarind, lobelia, and many more. Each illustration is accompanied by an informative caption outlining the plant's coloration and physical characteristics, geographic distribution, and medicinal uses. Invaluable as an identification guide and pictorial reference, this volume will appeal to colorists of all ages as well as to artists and crafters in need of royalty-free plant illustrations.

    This book is a documentation of the female spiritual elders of these tribes who have been entrusted with handing down the tribal wisdom through the generations.

    During this period, activities and interest in agroforestry education and training have increased tremendously, as in other aspects of agroforestry development. Today, agroforestry is taught at the senior undergraduate and postgraduate levels in many institutions around the world, either as a separate subject or as a part of the regular curricula of agriculture, forestry, ecology, and other related programs. Although several books on the subject have been published during the past few years, there is still no single publication that is recognized as a textbook. This book is an effort to make up for this deficiency. The need for such a book became obvious to me when I was faced with the task of teaching a graduate-level course in agroforestry at the University of Florida five years ago. Subsequently, the Second International Workshop on Professional Education and Training held here at the University of Florida in December 1988 recommended that the preparation of an introductory textbook be undertaken as a priority activity for supporting agroforestry education world-wide. The various educational and training courses that I have been involved in, and my interactions with several instructors and students of agroforestry in different parts of the world, further motivated me into this venture.