We all grew up thinking chemical smells like bleach and ammonia signaled "clean." But as Deirdre Imus reveals, some of the chemicals we use to maintain our homes are doing us and our families much more harm than good. In Greening Your Cleaning, the first in her Green This! series, Deirdre shows how cleaning house the environmentally responsible way can be as effective and often cheaper than the more traditional, toxic, means. This volume includes: Simple, efficient cleaning methods for every room of the house Spotlights on everyday products (all purpose cleaner, glass/window cleaner, laundry detergent) and the toxic ingredients you should be wary of Summaries of the latest research on the toxic effects of ordinary chemicals Resource lists of widely available "green cleaning" products and retailers Filled with tips and testimonials, Greening Your Cleaning will show you how to streamline your cleaning products and practices, and how easy it is to make "living green" your way of life.

    John Kallas makes it fun and easy to learn about foods you've unknowingly passed by all your life. Through gorgeous photographs, playful, but authoritative text, and ground-breaking design he gives you the knowledge and confidence to finally begin eating and enjoying edible wild plants. Edible Wild Plants divides plants into four flavor categories -- foundation, tart, pungent, and bitter. Categorizing by flavor helps readers use these greens in pleasing and predictable ways. According to the author, combining elements from these different categories makes the best salads.

    Organizational expert Cassandra 'Cas' Aarssen, the guru from YouTube's ClutterBug channel, reveals her tips, tricks and secrets to a clean and clutter free home in just 15 minutes a day. Aarssen, spends her time organizing other people's homes, teaching college workshops on organization, and creating weekly videos and blog posts. Cas offers diy Pinterest type tips to people like you who are interested in how to get rid of clutter and how to organize your home. Organized person on the outside: The secret to her success? She's a giant mess on the inside, but an organized person who can teach you how to get rid of clutter and organize your home once and for all. Simplify your life: In her debut book, Real Life Organizing, Cas walks you through the steps you can take to create a beautiful, organized, clutter free, and almost self-cleaning home ─ a DIY Pinterest home. Simplify your life. You do not have to get rid of all of your things, you do not have to be a yoga loving minimalist, and you do not have to radically change your lifestyle or personality in order to simplify your life and have an organized home. The truth is that you do not need to actually be an organized person to live like an organized person. Organize home: Through her years of experience as an industry expert, Cas has uncovered easy and inexpensive tips, tricks and solutions that allow her to maintain a clean, organized and functional home with minimal effort. After you've read Real Life Organizing, you too will be able to live a more organized life without having to give up your sanity. In Real Life Organizing: Get a Clean and Clutter-Free Home in Just 15 Minutes, you will learn how to: - Create a Household Management Binder - Make a -Kids Cupboard- in your kitchen - Create an IN/OUT system - Organize paperwork based on your unique style - Create a Kitchen Command Center - Organize your holidays with a gift closet - Build the best toy organizing system - And, enjoy a diy Pinterest home

    She had never before considered making her own peanut butter and pita bread, let alone curing her own prosciutto or raising turkeys. And though it sounded logical that "doing it yourself" would cost less, she had her doubts. So Reese began a series of kitchen-related experiments, taking into account the competing demands of everyday contemporary American family life as she answers some timely questions: When is homemade better? Cheaper? Are backyard eggs a more ethical choice than store-bought? Will grinding and stuffing your own sausage ruin your week? Is it possible to make an edible maraschino cherry? Some of Reese's discoveries will surprise you: Although you should make your hot dog buns, guacamole, and yogurt, you should probably buy your hamburger buns, potato chips, and rice pudding. Tired? Buy your mayonnaise. Inspired? Make it. With its fresh voice and delightful humor, Make the Bread, Buy the Butter gives 120 recipes with eminently practical yet deliciously fun "Make or buy" recommendations. Reese is relentlessly entertaining as she relates her food and animal husbandry adventures, which amuse and perplex as well as nourish and sustain her family. Her tales include living with a backyard full of cheerful chickens, muttering ducks, and adorable baby goats; countertops laden with lacto-fermenting pickles; and closets full of mellowing cheeses. Here's the full picture of what is involved in a truly homemade life -- with the good news that you shouldn't try to make everything yourself -- and how to get the most out of your time in the kitchen.

    Yet here is a book that goes back to the future--celebrating traditional but little-known French techniques for storing and preserving edibles in ways that maximize flavor and nutrition.Translated into English, and with a new foreword by Deborah Madison, this book deliberately ignores freezing and high-temperature canning in favor of methods that are superior because they are less costly and more energy-efficient.As Eliot Coleman says in his foreword to the first edition, "Food preservation techniques can be divided into two categories: the modern scientific methods that remove the life from food, and the natural 'poetic' methods that maintain or enhance the life in food. The poetic techniques produce... foods that have been celebrated for centuries and are considered gourmet delights today.""Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning" offers more than 250 easy and enjoyable recipes featuring locally grown and minimally refined ingredients. It is an essential guide for those who seek healthy food for a healthy world.

    But while conventional products say they'll make you more beautiful, they contain toxins and preservatives that are both bad for the environment and bad for your body--including synthetic fragrances, petrochemicals, and even formaldehyde. In the end, they damage your natural vitality and good looks.Fortunately, fashion writer, nutritionist, and beauty maven Julie Gabriel helps you find the true path to natural, healthy, green beauty. She helps you decipher labels on every cosmetic product you pick up and avoid toxic and damaging chemicals with her detailed Toxic Ingredients List. You'll learn valuable tips on what your skin really needs to be healthy, glowing, and youthful.Julie goes one-step further--and shows you how to make your own beauty products that feed your skin, save your bank account, and are healthy for your body and the environment, such as: - Cleansing creams and oils - toners - facials - under eye circle remedies - anti-aging serums - lip balms - scrubs - exfoliators - clay and cleansing masks- moisturizers - acne treatments - makeup remover - teeth whiteners - shampoos, conditioners - fragrances - sun protection - bug repellants - baby products - and much more!With her friendly, thorough, and helpful advice; fabulous beauty recipes; product recommendations and ratings; Toxic Ingredients List; and a complete appendix of online resources, Julie Gabriel gives you all the information you need to go green without going broke and become a more natural, healthy, and beautiful you.

    Updated with the latest biointensive tips and techniques, this is an essential reference for gardeners of all skill levels seeking to grow some or all of their own food.

    Dunwoody is a character based on the author's great grandmother and other traditional Southern women who believe in the importance of making a house a home.

    Yet while heat from sunlight and ventilation from breezes is free for the taking, few modern architects or builders really understand the principles involved.Now Dan Chiras, author of the popular book The Natural House, brings those principles up to date for a new generation of solar enthusiasts.The techniques required to heat and cool a building passively have been used for thousands of years. Early societies such as the Native American Anasazis and the ancient Greeks perfected designs that effectively exploited these natural processes. The Greeks considered anyone who didn't use passive solar to heat a home to be a barbarian!In the United States, passive solar architecture experienced a major resurgence of interest in the 1970s in response to crippling oil embargoes. With grand enthusiasm but with scant knowledge (and sometimes little common sense), architects and builders created a wide variety of solar homes. Some worked pretty well, but looked more like laboratories than houses. Others performed poorly, overheating in the summer because of excessive or misplaced windows and skylights, and growing chilly in the colder months because of insufficient thermal mass and insulation and poor siting.In The Solar House, Dan Chiras sets the record straight on the vast potential for passive heating and cooling. Acknowledging the good intentions of misguided solar designers in the past, he highlights certain egregious--and entirely avoidable--errors. More importantly, Chiras explains in methodical detail how today's home builders can succeed with solar designs.Now that energy efficiency measures including higher levels of insulation and multi-layered glazing have become standard, it is easier than ever before to create a comfortable and affordable passive solar house that will provide year-round comfort in any climate.Moreover, since modern building materials and airtight construction methods sometimes result in air-quality and even toxicity problems, Chiras explains state-of-the-art ventilation and filtering techniques that complement the ancient solar strategies of thermal mass and daylighting. Chiras also explains the new diagnostic aids available in printed worksheet or software formats, allowing readers to generate their own design schemes.

    Using the methods of 'horizontal thinking', this book teaches readers how to set up a home so efficiently and logically that it seems to clean itself.More than a how-to book, 'The House That Cleans Itself' also looks at what God has to say about cleanliness and order, and how He can inspire order in every reader's life in a fresh and unique way. For added fun, some of the tips Mindy uses come from research for her popular novels, 'The Trouble with Tulip, Blind Dates Can Be Murder' and 'Elementary, My Dear Watkins'.

    This handbook—packed with engaging checklists, simple recipes, practical strategies, and educational infographics—is the ultimate tool for reducing food waste. From a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council come these everyday techniques that call for minimal adjustments of habit, from shopping, portioning, and using a refrigerator properly to simple preservation methods including freezing, pickling, and cellaring. At once a good read and a go-to reference, this handy guide is chock-full of helpful facts and tips, including 20 "use-it-up" recipes and a substantial directory of common foods.

    You Grow Girl is a hip, humorous how-to for crafty gals everywhere who are discovering a passion for gardening but lack the know-how to turn their dreams of homegrown tomatoes and fresh-cut flowers into a reality. Gayla Trail, creator of YouGrowGirl.com, provides guidance for both beginning and intermediate gardeners with engaging tips, projects, and recipes -- whether you have access to a small backyard or merely to a fire escape. You Grow Girl eliminates the intimidation factor and reveals how easy and enjoyable it can be to cultivate plants and flowers even when resources and space are limited. Divided into accessible sections like Plan, Plant, and Grow, You Grow Girl takes readers through the entire gardening experience: Preparing soil Nurturing seedlings Fending off crittersReaping the bounty Readying plants for winter Preparing for the seasons ahead Gayla also includes a wealth of ingenious and creative projects, such as: Transforming your garden's harvest into lush bath and beauty products Converting household junk into canny containers Growing and bagging herbal tea Concocting homemade pest repellents ...and much, much more. Witty, wise, and as practical as it is stylish, You Grow Girl is guaranteed to show you how to get your garden on. All you need is a windowsill and a dream!

    All the information meets these criteria: It is something that anyone can do, without special training. It can be done with relatively few supplies or with stuff you can make yourself. It has been tried and tested—either by the author, the military, doctors, or other homesteaders.

    From quick fixes to bigger commitments and long-term strategies, Ed will help you make changes in every part of your life.And if you think living green has to mean compromising on aesthetics or comfort, fear not; Ed's wife, Rachelle, insists on style–with a conscience. In Living Like Ed, his environmentalism and her design savvy combine to create a guide to going green that keeps the chic in eco-chic. From recycling more materials than you ever thought possible to composting without raising a stink to buying an electric car, Living Like Ed is packed with ideas–from obvious to ingenious–that will help you live green, live responsibly, live well. Like Ed.

    Fresh Food from Small Spaces fills the gap as a practical, comprehensive, and downright fun guide to growing food in small spaces. It provides readers with the knowledge and skills necessary to produce their own fresh vegetables, mushrooms, sprouts, and fermented foods as well as to raise bees and chickens--all without reliance on energy-intensive systems like indoor lighting and hydroponics.Readers will learn how to transform their balconies and windowsills into productive vegetable gardens, their countertops and storage lockers into commercial-quality sprout and mushroom farms, and their outside nooks and crannies into whatever they can imagine, including sustainable nurseries for honeybees and chickens. Free space for the city gardener might be no more than a cramped patio, balcony, rooftop, windowsill, hanging rafter, dark cabinet, garage, or storage area, but no space is too small or too dark to raise food.With this book as a guide, people living in apartments, condominiums, townhouses, and single-family homes will be able to grow up to 20 percent of their own fresh food using a combination of traditional gardening methods and space-saving techniques such as reflected lighting and container "terracing." Those with access to yards can produce even more.Author R. J. Ruppenthal worked on an organic vegetable farm in his youth, but his expertise in urban and indoor gardening has been hard-won through years of trial-and-error experience. In the small city homes where he has lived, often with no more than a balcony, windowsill, and countertop for gardening, Ruppenthal and his family have been able to eat at least some homegrown food 365 days per year. In an era of declining resources and environmental disruption, Ruppenthal shows that even urban dwellers can contribute to a rebirth of local, fresh foods.