More than fifty years on, The Fat of the Land remains an important and inspiring book and retains its power to make us think carefully about our own lives.

    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.

    Full of information and camaraderie, this book explains how to grow common vegetables and herbs and add unusual ones that bring variety to the garden. Line art throughout.

    A guide to 32 of the best and most common edible wild plants in North America, with detailed information on how to identify them, where they are found, how and when they are harvested, which parts are used, how they are prepared, as well as their culinary use, ecology, conservation, and cultural history.

    What started as a yearning—"to live on a piece of land, closer to nature; to work outside with my body as well as my brain; to leave behind the world of briefcases, computers, corporate clients, and non-opening windows"—has become a life "more full, more varied" and often "more demanding and exhausting, but always more real." Stewart sells everything he grows directly to consumers and restaurateurs, and in doing so has developed loyal and growing ranks devoted to his Rocambole garlic, herbs, heirloom tomatoes, and other organic produce. Now, in It's a Long Road to a Tomato, Stewart presents interlocking, complementary essays, addressing his mid-life development as a farmer; some of the nuts and bolts and how-to's of organic vegetable growing and selling in an urban market; humorous and philosophical stories about domestic and wild farm animals and the natural world; and some of the political, social, and environmental issues surrounding agriculture today and why it matters to all of us.

    "Urban Homesteading" is the perfect back-to-the-land guide for urbanites who want to reduce their impact on the environment. Full of practical information, as well as inspiring stories from people already living the urban homesteading life, this colorful guide is an approachable guide to learning to live more ecologically in the city. The book embraces the core concepts of localization (providing our basic needs close to where we live), self-reliance (re-learning that food comes from the ground, not the grocery store; learning to do things ourselves), and sustainability (giving back at least as much as we take). Readers will find concise how-to information that they can immediately set into practice, from making solar cookers to growing tomatoes in a barrel to raising chickens in small spaces to maintaining mental serenity in the fast-paced city environment. Full of beautiful full-color photographs and illustrations, and plenty of step-by-step instructions, this is a must-have handbook for city folk with a passion for the simple life.a"

    Stretch the resources of your small backyard garden further than ever before, without devoting hundreds of hours to canning! This informative and inspiring guide shows you not only how to construct your own root cellar, but how to best use the earth’s naturally cool, stable temperature as an energy-saving way to store nearly 100 varieties of perishable fruits and vegetables.

    The plants then pump the water back out in the form of beauty, food, shelter, wildlife habitat, timber and forage, while controlling erosion, reducing down-stream flooding, dropping utility costs, increasing soil fertility, enhancing the soil carbon sponge, and improving water and air quality.This dramatically revised and expanded full-color second edition builds on the information in Volume 1 by showing you how to turn your yard, school, business, park, ranch, and neighborhood into lively, regenerative producers of resources. Conditions at home will improve as you simultaneously enrich the ecosystem and inspire the surrounding community.Learn to select, place, size, construct, and plant your chosen earthworks. All is made easier and more effective by the illustrations of natural patterns of water and sediment flow with which you can collaborate or mimic. Detailed step-by-step instructions with over 550 images show you how to do it, and plentiful stories of success motivate you so you will do it!

    This book contains detailed information about each vegetable, including its botanical classification, flower structure and means of pollination, required population size, isolation distance, techniques for caging or hand-pollination, and also the proper methods for harvesting, drying, cleaning, and storing the seeds.Seed to Seed is widely acknowledged as the best guide available for home gardeners to learn effective ways to produce and store seeds on a small scale. The author has grown seed crops of every vegetable featured in the book, and has thoroughly researched and tested all of the techniques she recommends for the home garden.This newly updated and greatly expanded Second Edition includes additional information about how to start each vegetable from seed, which has turned the book into a complete growing guide. Local knowledge about seed starting techniques for each vegetable has been shared by expert gardeners from seven regions of the United States-Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast/Gulf Coast, Midwest, Southwest, Central West Coast, and Northwest.

    Exploding the tenets of industrial agriculture, Jackson, a respected advocate for sustainable practices and the founder of The Land Institute, seeks to integrate food production with nature in a way that sustains both.Foreword / Richard C. Edwards --1. The problem --2. Visions and assumptions --3. Science and nature --4. Nature as measure --5. Becoming native to our places --6. Developing the courage of our convictions

    216-page Softcover.Introduction to Permaculture is an updated and revised version of the first two permaculture books, Permaculture One (Mollison and Holmgren, 1978) and Permaculture Two (Mollison, 1979), and replaces them. New material by Bill Mollison and Reny Mia Slay has been inserted, along with excerpts from Permaculture: A Designers' Manual and information taken from permaculture design courses taught by Bill Mollison (1981, 1986) and Lea Harrison (1985). Some of the illustrations in this book have appeared in Permaculture Two and Permaculture: A Designers' Manual.

    It is made up of fruit and nut trees, fruit bushes, perennial vegetables and herbs. It can be tailored to fit any space, from a tiny urban back yard to a large rural garden.A close copy of a natural ecosystem, it is perhaps the most ecologically friendly way of gardening open to us.It is also a low-maintenance way of gardening. Once established there is none of the digging, sowing, planting out and hoeing of the conventional kitchen garden. The main task is picking up the produce!This highly practical, yet inspiring book gives you everything you need to know in order to create a beautiful and productive forest garden,including:* Basic principles* Layout* How to choose plants* Details of over one hundred plants, from apples to mushrooms* the most comprehensive account of perennial and self-seeding vegetables in print* A step-by-step guide to creating your garden* Full details of an example garden, and pictures of many moreForest gardening is an important element of permaculture. This book explains in detail permaculture design for temperate climates and contains much of interest for anybody wanting to introduce sustainable practices into their garden.

    She’s a farmer. It’s “as big as a B-size potato.” As her bombarded land turns white, she and her husband Martin huddle under a blanket and reminisce: the one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds; the eleven-inch rainfall (“that broccoli turned out gorgeous”); the hail disaster of 1977. The romance of farming washed away a long time ago, but the love? Never. In telling her story of working the land, coaxing good food from the fertile soil, Atina Diffley reminds us of an ultimate truth: we live in relationships—with the earth, plants and animals, families and communities.A memoir of making these essential relationships work in the face of challenges as natural as weather and as unnatural as corporate politics, her book is a firsthand history of getting in at the “ground level” of organic farming. One of the first certified organic produce farms in the Midwest, the Diffleys’ Gardens of Eagan helped to usher in a new kind of green revolution in the heart of America’s farmland, supplying their roadside stand and a growing number of local food co-ops. This is a story of a world transformed—and reclaimed—one square acre at a time.And yet, after surviving punishing storms and the devastating loss of fifth-generation Diffley family land to suburban development, the Diffleys faced the ultimate challenge: the threat of eminent domain for a crude oil pipeline proposed by one of the largest privately owned companies in the world, notorious polluters Koch Industries. As Atina Diffley tells her David-versus-Goliath tale, she gives readers everything from expert instruction in organic farming to an entrepreneur’s manual on how to grow a business to a legal thriller about battling corporate arrogance to a love story about a single mother falling for a good, big-hearted man.

    Gardeners know it is the best way to feed the soil, while others look to composting as a way to dispose of grass clippings, autumn leaves, and tree trimmings. The Rodale Book of Composting edited by Grace Gershuny and Deborah L. Martin offers:* Easy-to-follow instructions for making and using compost* Helpful tips for apartment dwellers, suburbanites, farmers and community leaders* Ecologically sound solutions to growing waste disposal problems

    Hailed by The New York Times as a poet of farming, Slow Food activist Masumoto weaves together stories of family and farming, life and death, to reveal age-old wisdom that is fast disappearing--and urgently needed.