It is the most complete source of step-by-step information about growing, processing, cooking, and preserving homegrown foods from garden, orchard, field, or barnyard. This book is so basic, so thorough, so reliable, that it deserves a place in every home whether country, city, or in between. Carla Emery started writing The Encyclopedia of Country Living in 1969 during the back-to-the-land movement of that time. She continued to add content and refine the information over the years ad the book went from a self-published mimeographed document to a book published by Bantam and then Sasquatch. The 10th Edition reflects the most up-to-date and the most personal version of the book that became Carla Emery’s life work. It is the original manual of basic country skills that have proved essential and necessary for people living in the country and the city, and everywhere in between. The practical advice in this exhaustive reference tool includes how to cultivate a garden, buy land, bake bread, raise farm animals, make sausage, can peaches, milk a goat, grow herbs, churn butter, build a chicken coop, catch a pig, cook on a wood stove, and much, much more.

    A new literary classic, Second Nature has become a manifesto not just for gardeners but for environmentalists everywhere. "As delicious a meditation on one man's relationships with the Earth as any you are likely to come upon" (The New York Times Book Review), Second Nature captures the rhythms of our everyday engagement with the outdoors in all its glory and exasperation. With chapters ranging from a reconsideration of the Great American Lawn, a dispatch from one man's war with a woodchuck, to an essay about the sexual politics of roses, Pollan has created a passionate and eloquent argument for reconceiving our relationship with nature.

    In the last half of The Resilient Gardener, Deppe extends and illustrates these principles with detailed information about growing and using five key crops: potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and eggs.In this book you'll learn how to:-Garden in an era of unpredictable weather and climate change-Grow, store, and use more of your own staple crops-Garden efficiently and comfortably (even if you have a bad back)-Grow, store, and cook different varieties of potatoes and save your own potato seed-Grow the right varieties of corn to make your own gourmet-quality fast-cooking polenta, cornbread, parched corn, corn cakes, pancakes and even savory corn gravy-Make whole-grain, corn-based breads and cakes using the author's original gluten-free recipes involving no other grains, artificial binders, or dairy products-Grow and use popbeans and other grain legumes-Grow, store, and use summer, winter, and drying squash-Keep a home laying flock of ducks or chickens; integrate them with your gardening, and grow most of their feed.The Resilient Gardener is both a conceptual and a hands-on organic gardening book, and is suitable for vegetable gardeners at all levels of experience. Resilience here is broadly conceived and encompasses a full range of problems, from personal hard times such as injuries, family crises, financial problems, health problems, and special dietary needs (gluten intolerance, food allergies, carbohydrate sensitivity, and a need for weight control) to serious regional and global disasters and climate change. It is a supremely optimistic as well as realistic book about how resilient gardeners and their vegetable gardens can flourish even in challenging times and help their communities to survive and thrive through everything that comes their way -- from tomorrow through the next thousand years. Organic gardening, vegetable gardening, self-sufficiency, subsistence gardening, gluten-free living.

    Learn to build your bed, select the right plants, and so much more. Simple guides will have even the greenest gardeners serving up freshly picked vegetables in no time.Raised-Bed Gardening for Beginners includes: Raised-bed gardening 101—From constructing a planting box to mixing and maintaining soil, step-by-step instructions make getting started easy. From greenhouse to green thumb—Help your garden thrive with detailed suggestions for crop rotation, partner planting, and seed starting. Perfect picks—Full profiles—plus growing and harvesting tips—for 30 popular and beginner-friendly plants make choosing the right ones for your garden a cinch. Take your gardening to the next level with Raised-Bed Gardening for Beginners.

    Straw Bale Gardens teaches gardening in a way that isn’t only new but is thoroughly innovative and revolutionary to home gardening. It solves every impediment today’s home gardeners face: bad soil, weeds, a short growing season, watering problems, limited garden space, and even physical difficulty working at ground level. Developed and pioneered by author and garden expert Joel Karsten, straw bale gardens create their own growing medium and heat source so you can get an earlier start. It couldn’t be simpler or more effective: all you need is a few bales of straw, some fertilizer, and some seeds or plants, and you can create a weedless vegetable garden anywhere—even in your driveway.Karsten’s step-by-step guide offers all the information you need to make your own straw bale garden today. In this lushly photographed volume, Karsten shares all of the secrets he has developed over years of teaching eager students the miracle of straw bale gardening. You’ll learn how to locate and choose straw bales, then how to condition and plant them for the earliest possible start. You’ll master Karsten’s methods for combating plant pests and maximizing space by applying the principles of vertical gardening to his straw bales. Whether it’s seedlings or seeds, veggies or flowers, there is practically no limit to the plant varieties that will prosper in a straw bale garden—and with Karsten’s breakthrough gardening guide, you can do it all yourself.

    Martin, general garden-building skills (from "Do I need to dig?" to "Where do I dig?") and specific techniques (from "How do I plant a seed?" to "How much should I water?") are presented in growing-season order—from garden planning and planting to growing and harvesting. Many other need-to-know topics like soil, compost, seeds, pest control, and weeds are explained in simple language to ensure success, even on a small scale, on the first try. More than 100 common garden terms are defined, and Smart Starts sidebars offer doable projects to build confidence and enthusiasm for expanding a garden when a gardener is ready. A flower, vegetable, and herb finder highlights easycare plants with good track records. Plus, there are no-dig garden methods, simple garden layouts, and tips and hints inspired by the most popular page views on OrganicGardening.com.With a "no question is unwelcome" approach, a troubleshooting section lessens frustrations and encourages experimentation. Rodale's Basic Organic Gardening is everything a beginning gardener (or one who's new to gardening organically) needs to get growing and keep a garden going strong all season.

    And few things taste more delicious than fruit picked straight from the tree or bush and eaten when perfectly ripe, perhaps still warm from the sun. This is fruit the way nature intended, not fruit that has been flown in from hundreds or thousands of miles away or stored in climate-controlled warehouses before being sealed in plastic for supermarket shelves. What could be fresher, tastier, more local, and more seasonal than fruit you've grown yourself, in your own garden or allotment, picked at just the moment when it's at its most perfect?This book shows just how easy it is to grow your own fruit. You don't need a huge garden or a dedicated orchard. It's possible to get a perfectly good harvest from plants grown in containers on balconies or patios and from even the smallest of town gardens. Pick the right varieties for the conditions you've got, invest in a bit of planning and preparation, follow the instructions contained in these pages, and you can be harvesting and eating your own strawberries, plums, pears, apricots, blackberries, redcurrants, melons, and figs.

    Compact Farms is an illustrated guide for anyone dreaming of starting, expanding, or perfecting a profitable farming enterprise on five acres or less. The farm plans explain how to harness an area’s water supply, orientation, and geography in order to maximize efficiency and productivity while minimizing effort. Profiles of well-known farmers such as Eliot Coleman and Jean-Martin Fortier show that farming on a small scale in any region, in both urban and rural settings, can provide enough income to turn the endeavor from hobby to career. These real-life plans and down-and-dirty advice will equip you with everything you need to actually realize your farm dreams.

    What ensues—through hilarious encounters with all manner of livestock and colorful local characters—is a crash course in sustainable agriculture. Pritchard’s biggest ally is his renegade father, who initially questions his son’s career choice and eschews organic foods for sugary mainstream fare. But just when the farm starts to turn heads at local markets, his father’s health takes a turn for the worse. With poetry and humor, this timely memoir tugs on the heartstrings and feeds the soul long after the last page is turned.

    And with only one exception-watering-container gardening is a whole lot easier. Beginning with the down-to-earth basics of soil, sun and water, fertilizer, seeds and propagation, The Bountiful Container is an extraordinarily complete, plant-by-plant guide.Written by two seasoned container gardeners and writers, The Bountiful Container covers Vegetables-not just tomatoes (17 varieties) and peppers (19 varieties), butharicots verts, fava beans, Thumbelina carrots, Chioggia beets, and sugarsnap peas. Herbs, from basil to thyme, and including bay leaves, fennel, and saffron crocus. Edible Flowers, such as begonias, calendula, pansies, violets, and roses. And perhaps most surprising, Fruits, including apples, peaches, Meyer lemons, blueberries, currants, and figs-yes, even in the colder parts of the country. (Another benefit of container gardening: You can bring the less hardy perennials in over the winter.) There are theme gardens (an Italian cook's garden, a Four Seasons garden), lists of sources, and dozens of sidebars on everything from how to be a human honeybee to seeds that are All America Selections.

    In hard times, the family can be greatly helped by growing a highly productive food garden, requiring little cash outlay or watering.Currently popular intensive vegetable gardening methods are largely inappropriate to this new circumstance. Crowded raised beds require high inputs of water, fertility and organic matter, and demand large amounts of human time and effort. But, except for labor, these inputs depend on the price of oil. Prior to the 1970s, North American home food growing used more land with less labor, with wider plant spacing, with less or no irrigation, and all done with sharp hand tools. But these sustainable systems have been largely forgotten. Gardening When It Counts helps readers rediscover traditional low-input gardening methods to produce healthy food.Designed for readers with no experience and applicable to most areas in the English-speaking world except the tropics and hot deserts, this book shows that any family with access to 3-5,000 sq. ft. of garden land can halve their food costs using a growing system requiring just the odd bucketful of household waste water, perhaps two hundred dollars worth of hand tools, and about the same amount spent on supplies — working an average of two hours a day during the growing season.Steve Solomon is a well-known west coast gardener and author of five previous books, including Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades which has appeared in five editions.

    Ideal for first-time foragers, this book features 70 edible weeds, flowers, mushrooms, and ornamental plants typically found in urban and suburban neighborhoods. Full-color photographs make identification easy, while tips on common plant locations, pesticides, pollution, and dangerous flora make foraging as safe and simple as stepping into your own backyard.

    "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"

    The site is a terraced paradise on a hillside in Vermont that would otherwise be overlooked by conventional farmers as unworthy farmland. Falk's wide array of fruit trees, rice paddies(relatively unheard of in the Northeast), ducks, nuts, and earth-inspired buildings is a hopeful image for the future of regenerative agriculture and modern homesteading.The book covers nearly every strategy Falk and his team have been testing at the Whole Systems Research Farm over the past decade, as well as experiments from other sites Falk has designed through his off-farm consulting business. The book includes detailed information on earthworks; gravity-fed water systems; species composition; the site-design process; site management; fuelwood hedge production and processing; human health and nutrient-dense production strategies; rapid topsoil formation and remineralization; agroforestry/silvopasture/grazing; ecosystem services, especially regarding flood mitigation; fertility management; human labor and social-systems aspects; tools/equipment/appropriate technology; and much more, complete with gorgeous photography and detailed design drawings."The Resilient Homestead" is more than just a book of tricks and techniques for regenerative site development, but offers actual working results in living within complex farm-ecosystems based on research from the "great thinkers" in permaculture, and presents a viable home-scale model for an intentional food-producing ecosystem in cold climates, and beyond. Inspiring to would-be homesteaders everywhere, but especially for those who find themselves with "unlikely" farming land, Falk is an inspiration in what can be done by imitating natural systems, and making the most of what we have by re-imagining what's possible. A gorgeous case study for the homestead of the future.

    Readers will learn the fundamentals of gardening--from what, when and how to plant--presented with options for container gardening, raised-bed gardening, traditional gardening and even covert gardening where they blend edible plants into their flowerbeds. The authors will draw from their real-life experiences as they teach readers how to keep bees, chickens and even goats in their backyards while still keeping the peace with their neighbors and their municipalities. Seventy-five recipes will show readers how to turn the eggs, honey, beeswax, goat milk and plants they harvest in to natural skin care products and non-toxic cleaning products. Readers will also find plenty of ideas for cute handmade gifts for family and friends. Finally, in true homesteading fashion, readers will find advice on how to build community in their neighborhood with babysitting co-ops, meal co-ops and barter systems.