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.

    Twenty-five years later, the prodigal daughter returns to confront her dying parents, her best friend, and her conflicted past, and finds herself caught up in an altogether new drama. The post-millennial farming community has been invaded by Agribusiness forces at war with a posse of activists, the Seeds of Resistance, who travel the country in a camping car, “The Spudnick,” biofueled by pilfered McDonald’s french-fry oil. Following her widely hailed, award-winning debut novel, My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki returns here to deliver a quirky cast of characters and a wickedly humorous appreciation of the foibles of corporate life, globalization, political resistance, youth culture, and aging baby boomers. All Over Creation tells a celebratory tale of the beauty of seeds, roots, and growth—and the capacity for renewal that resides within us all.

    From his New Mexico mountain home, award-winning author Stanley Crawford writes about growing garlic and selling it."To dream a garden and then to plant it is an act of independence and even defiance to the greater world."--Stan Crawford

    Take it from Forrest Pritchard and Ellen Polishuk: Making this dream a reality is not for the faint of heart, but it's well within reach—and there's no greater satisfaction under the sun!

    Author Ann Larkin Hansen sets the priorities for each area of the farm, including the barn, garden, orchard, field, pasture, and woodlot. For every critical turn of the year (12 in all), Hansen provides an at-a-glance to-do list along with tips and a more in-depth discussion of key topics for the season. Easy-reference charts, checklists, and record-keeping sections help you keep track of it all.

    In her latest book, groundbreaking garden writer Carol Deppe (The Resilient Gardener, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties) focuses on some of the most popular home garden vegetables--tomatoes, green beans, peas, and leafy greens--and through them illustrates the key principles and practices that gardeners need to know to successfully plant and grow just about any food crop. Deppe's work has long been inspired and informed by the philosophy and wisdom of Tao Te Ching, the 2,500-year-old work attributed to Chinese sage Lao Tzu and the most translated book in the world after the Bible. The Tao of Vegetable Gardening is organized into chapters that echo fundamental Taoist concepts: Balance, Flexibility, Honoring the Essential Nature (your own and that of your plants), Effortless Effort, Non-Doing, and even Non-Knowing. Yet the book also offers a wealth of specific and valuable garden advice on topics as diverse as: - The Eat-All Greens Garden, a labor- and space-efficient way to provide all the greens a family can eat, freeze, and dry--all on a tiny piece of land suitable for small-scale and urban gardeners.- The growing problem of late blight and the future of heirloom tomatoes--and what gardeners can do to avoid problems, and even create new resistant varieties.- Establishing a Do-It-Yourself Seed Bank, including information on preparing seeds for long-term storage and how to -dehybridize- hybrids.- Twenty-four good places to not plant a tree, and thirty-seven good reasons for not planting various vegetables. Designed for gardeners of all levels, from beginners to experienced growers, The Tao of Vegetable Gardening provides a unique frame of reference: a window to the world of nature, in the garden and in ourselves.

    Still, when she and her husband call it quits, leaving her more broke than ever, Link makes a seemingly impossible resolution: to hang on to her northern Michigan farm and continue to raise her boys on well water and wood chopping and dirt. Armed with an unfailing sense of humor and her three resolute accomplices, Link confronts blizzards and coyotes, learns about Zen divorce and the best way to butcher a hog, dominates a zucchini-growing contest and wins a year's supply of local bread, masters the art of bargain cooking, deals with rampaging poultry, and finds her way to a truly rich existence. Told with endless heart and candor, Bootstrapper is a story of motherhood and survival and self-discovery, of an indomitable woman who, against all the odds, holds on to what matters most.

    Archeologists have found evidence of beekeeping, or apiculture, in the Middle East dating back more than five thousand years. If you've ever tasted good clover honey, it's not hard to understand why. But it's not just for the honey that more than 125,000 people (and growing) in the United States, alone, keep hives. Anyone interested in nature can't help but be fascinated by those buzzing yellow bundles of energy and the exotic world they inhabit, with all its weird rituals and incredible efficiency. Also, dedicated gardeners appreciate the extra bounty that pollinating bees bring to their fruits, flowers, and vegetable gardens. In this easy-to-follow guide, Howland Blackiston, one of the nation's most respected authorities on the subject, takes the mystery (and the sting) out of beekeeping. Taking a step-by-step approach to successful backyard beekeeping, he gets you up and running with all the information you need to:Build a hive Establish your first colony Inspect your hives with confidence Maintain healthy colonies Deal with pests and fix common problems Harvest and enjoy fresh homemade honey Bottle and market your honey Howland Blackiston covers all the bases, from bee anatomy, society, and behavior, to identifying and healing common illnesses afflicting bees. He also offers inventive solutions to most common and many uncommon problems you're likely to run into. Among other things, you'll discover:Where to put your hive, basic equipment you'll need, and how to assemble a hive The best and safest way to inspect and enjoy your bees Year-round tasks a beekeeper must perform to maintain a healthy colony How to recognize and deal with common problems with brood production and the precious queen How to harvest honey and decide what kind of honey you'd like to make Making products from beeswax and propolis For both fun and profit, beekeeping has become a booming enterprise. A real honey of a book, Beekeeping For Dummies gets you on the road to enjoying this ancient, highly-rewarding, and oh-so-tasty hobby.

    Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an enthralling narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.

    In Dishing Up the Dirt, Andrea offers 100 authentic farm-to-table recipes, arranged by season, including:Spring: Honey Roasted Strawberry Muffins, Lamb Lettuce Wraps with Mint Yogurt Sauce, Spring Harvest Pizza with Mint & Pea Pesto, Kohlrabi and Chickpea SaladSummer: Blueberry Lemon Ricotta Biscuits, Roasted Ratatouille Toast, Kohlrabi Fritters with Garlic Herb Cashew Cream Sauce, Farmers Market Burgers with Mustard Greens Pesto Fall: Farm Girl Veggie Bowls, Butternut Molasses Muffins, Early Autumn Moroccan Stew, Collard Green Slaw with Bacon Gremolata Winter: Rutabaga Home Fries with Smokey Cashew Sauce, Hoisin Glazed Brussels Sprouts, Country Girl Old Fashioned Cocktails, Tumbleweed Farm Winter Panzanella  Andrea’s recipes focus on using whole, locally-sourced foods—incorporating the philosophy of eating as close to the land as possible. While many recipes are naturally gluten-free, dairy-free, or vegetarian, many others include elemental ingredients like bread, cheese, eggs, meat, and sweeteners, which are incorporated in new and inventive ways.In short essays throughout the book, Andrea also presents an honest glimpse of life on Tumbleweed Farm—the real life of a farmer, not the shabby-chic fantasy often portrayed—offering fascinating and frequently entertaining details about where the food on our dinner tables comes from. With stunning food photography as well as intimate portraits of farm life, Dishing Up the Dirt allows anyone to be a seasonal foodie and an armchair farmer.

    Not to mention the vacations that had to be planned around the harvest, the near electrocution of the tree man, the limitations of his own middle-aged body, and the pity of his wife and kids. When Alexander runs (just for fun!) a costbenefit analysis, adding up everything from the live animal trap to the Velcro tomato wraps and then amortizing it over the life of his garden, it comes as quite a shock to learn that it cost him a staggering $64 to grow each one of his beloved Brandywine tomatoes. But as any gardener will tell you, you can't put a price on the unparalleled pleasures of providing fresh food for your family.

    But this time he was also there to change his direction, like his father years ago. In the 1970s, well before the explosion of the farm-to-table and slow food movement, Arlo's father, Jim, left behind law school and Vietnam, and decided to give farming a try. Arlo's return also prompts a reexamination of a past tragedy: the murder of a neighboring farmer twenty years before. A chronicle of one full season on a farm, with all its small triumphs and inevitable setbacks, A Farm Dies Once a Year is a meditation on work--the true nature of it, and on taking pride in it--and a son's reckoning with a father's legacy. Above all, it is a striking portrait of how one man builds, sows, and harvests his way into a new understanding of the risks necessary to a life well-lived.

    Dawn Again takes readers along on Doniga’s journey: as a troubled teen attending a wilderness immersion school where wildlife trackers and Indigenous elders were among her teaches, hitchhiking across the pacific northwest, the moment she first connected with a deer using owl eyes and fox walking techniques, and to Alaska where she fell in love with tracking white wolves and the rigor of wilderness survival. With chapters on food, permaculture, and more, Dawn Again dives into Doniga’s real-life experiences while arming readers with practical knowledge. When Doniga tracks mountain lions with Erik, a rancher, she finds herself falling in love with more than just nature. She settles down on a cattle ranch on the California coast to start a family, and has to learn how to apply the deep, unshakeable lessons of the wild to her everyday life.

    In-depth profiles highlight how many plants to grow of each crop for a year s worth of eating, and which storage methods work best for specific varieties. Author Barbara Pleasant culls tips from decades of her own gardening experience and from growers across North America to offer planting, care, and harvesting refreshers for every region and each vegetable."

    Transplanted from New York fifteen years ago and now a real-life Vermont farmer, Noel Perrin candidly admits to hilarious early mistakes ("In Search of the Perfect Fence Post") while presenting down-to-earth advice on such rural necessities as "Sugaring on $15 a Year," "Raising Sheep," and "Making Butter in the Kitchen." But, as everyone who has read his essays in The New Yorker, Country Journal, and Vermont Life will confirm, not everything Perrin writes is strictly about the exigencies of country life. While one essay seems to discuss the use of wooden sap buckets, it really addresses the nature of illusion and reality as they coexist in rural places.