Book picks similar to
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It's a Long Road to a Tomato: Tales of an Organic Farmer Who Quit the Big City for the (Not So) Simple Life
Keith Stewart - 2006
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.
The Garden in Every Sense and Season
Tovah Martin - 2018
But what about taking the time to truly enjoy the garden in every sense and season? In The Garden in Every Sense and Season, Tovah Martin does just that. Beginning with the heady blooms of spring and closing with putting the garden to bed in winter, Martin mindfully explores her garden through sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste. She sees the bright yellow of forsythia of spring, smells summer’s pungent roses, hears the crows in autumn, and tastes winter’s juicy citrus. Throughout her lyrical essays, she shares sage garden advice and intimate reflections on her own garden. This compelling narrative is beautifully supported by photography by Kindra Clineff. The Garden in Every Sense and Season is a must-have book from one of the greatest garden writers of our time that urges gardeners to listen up, look over, inhale, savor, and become more attuned with their gardens.
Essential Allotment Guide: How To Get The Best Out Of Your Plot
John Harrison - 2009
In this guide John Harrison shows the reader how to get the most out of their plot, providing a complete introduction to planting and growing your own vegetables and plants.
The Earth-sheltered Solar Greenhouse Book: How to Build an Energy Free Year-round Greenhouse
Mike Oehler - 2007
Book by Mike Oehler
The New American Herbal
Stephen Orr - 2014
Here are entries on hundreds of plants that are extraordinarily useful in cooking, homeopathy, and more; dozens of recipes and DIY projects; and beautifully styled photographs so you know just what you're growing.With more than 900 entries, each accompanied by brand new photography and helpful growing advice, The New American Herbal takes the study of herbs to an exciting new level. Orr covers the entire spectrum of herbaceous plants, from culinary to ornamental to aromatic and medicinal, presenting them in an easy to use A to Z format packed with recipes, DIY projects, and stunning examples of garden design highlighting herbal plantings. Learn about the herbs you've always wanted to grow (chervil, chamomile, and lovage), exotic herbs (such as Artemisia, the bitter herb used in Absinthe, or the anti-inflammatory Meadowsweet), and ornamental varieties (Monkshood and Perilla). For cooks there is indispensable guidance on planting and maintaining a bountiful kitchen garden and crafters will delight in dozens of exciting new uses for fresh, dried, and distilled herbs. Here, too, are 40 delicious recipes such as Ragu Bolognese with Fennel and Lemon Semolina Cake with Lavender, as well easy steps for projects such as a hanging herb garden and instructions on how to plant, dry, and preserve your garden’s bounty. Meticulously researched and exhaustive in its scope, The New American Herbal is an irresistible invitation to explore the versatility of herbs in all their beauty and variety.
Great Streets
Allan B. Jacobs - 1993
With more than 200 illustrations, all prepared by the author, along with analysis and statistics, Great Streets offers a wealth of information on street dimensions, plans, sections, and patterns of use, all systematically compared. It also reveals Jacobs's eye for the telling human and social details that bring streets and communities to life.An extensive introduction discusses the importance of streets in creating communities and criteria for identifying the best streets. The essays that follow examine 15 particularly fine streets, ranging from medieval streets in Rome and Copenhagen to Venice's Grand Canal, from Parisian boulevards to tree-lined residential streets in American cities. Jacobs also looks at several streets that were once very fine but are less successful today, such as Market Street in San Francisco, identifying the factors that figure in their decline.To broaden his coverage, Jacobs adds briefer treatments of more than 30 other streets arranged by street type, including streets from Australia, Japan, and classical antiquity in addition to European and North American examples. For each of these streets he has prepared plans, sections, and maps, all drawn at the same scales to facilitate comparisons, along with perspective views and drawings of significant design details.Another remarkable feature of this book is a set of 50 one square-mile maps, each reproduced at the same scale, of the street plans of representative cities around the world. These reveal much about the texture of the cities' street patterns and hence of their urban life. Jacobs's analysis of the maps adds much original data derived from them, including changes of street patterns over time.Jacobs concludes by summarizing the practical design qualities and strategies that have contributed most to the making of great streets.
Design With Nature
Ian L. McHarg - 1969
--LewisMumford. . . important to America and all the rest of the world in ourstruggle to design rational, wholesome, and productive landscapes.--Laurie Olin, Hanna Olin, Ltd.This century's most influential landscape architecture book.--Landscape Architecture. . . an enduring contribution to the technical literature oflandscape planning and to that unfortunately small collection ofwritings which speak with emotional eloquence of the importance ofecological principles in regional planning. --Landscape and UrbanPlanningIn the twenty-five years since it first took the academic world bystorm, Design With Nature has done much to redefine the fields oflandscape architecture, urban and regional planning, and ecologicaldesign. It has also left a permanent mark on the ongoing discussionof mankind's place in nature and nature's place in mankind withinthe physical sciences and humanities. Described by one enthusiasticreviewer as a user's manual for our world, Design With Natureoffers a practical blueprint for a new, healthier relationshipbetween the built environment and nature. In so doing, it providesnothing less than the scientific, technical, and philosophicalfoundations for a mature civilization that will, as Lewis Mumfordecstatically put it in his Introduction to the 1969 edition, replace the polluted, bulldozed, machine-dominated, dehumanized, explosion-threatened world that is even now disintegrating anddisappearing before our eyes.
The Worm Book: The Complete Guide to Gardening and Composting with Worms
Loren Nancarrow - 1998
Worms are the latest (as well as, of course, perhaps the oldest!) trend in earth-friendly gardening, and in this handy guide, the authors of DEAD SNAILS LEAVE NO TRAILS demystify the world of worm wrangling, with everything you need to know to build your own worm bin, make your garden worm-friendly, pamper your soil, and much much more.
The Roots of My Obsession: Thirty Great Gardeners Reveal Why They Garden
Thomas C. Cooper - 2012
They show that gardening is a passion and obsession that cannot be conquered or abandoned, only indulged. Each gardener tells a compelling story. Whether their muse is the quest to achieve a personal vision of ultimate beauty, a mission to heal the earth, or the attempt to grow a perfect heirloom tomato, the writing is direct, engaging, and from the heart.For Doug Tallamy, a love of plants is rooted first in a love of animals: "animals with two legs (birds), four legs (box turtles, salamanders, and foxes), six legs (butterflies and beetles), eight legs (spiders), dozens of legs (centipedes), hundreds of legs (millipedes), and even animals with no legs (snakes and pollywogs)." For Rosalind Creasy, it's "not the plant itself; it's how you use it in the garden." And for Sydney Eddison, the reason has changed throughout the years. Now, she "gardens for the moment."As you read, you may find yourself nodding your head in agreement, or gasping in disbelief. What you're sure to encounter is some of the best writing about the gardener's soul ever to appear. For anyone who cherishes the miracle of bringing forth life from the soil, "The Roots of My Obsession" is essential inspiration.
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
William H. Whyte - 1980
Whyte published the findings from his revolutionary Street Life Project in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Both the book and the accompanying film were instantly labeled classics, and launched a mini-revolution in the planning and study of public spaces. They have since become standard texts, and appear on syllabi and reading lists in urban planning, sociology, environmental design, and architecture departments around the world.Project for Public Spaces, which grew out of Holly's Street Life Project and continues his work around the world, has acquired the reprint rights to Social Life, with the intent of making it available to the widest possible audience and ensuring that the Whyte family receive their fair share of Holly's legacy.From the forward: For more than 30 years, Project for Public Spaces has been using observations, surveys, interviews and workshops to study and transform public spaces around the world into community places. Every week we give presentations about why some public spaces work and why others don't, using the techniques, ideas, and memorable phrases from William H. "Holly" Whyte's The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.Holly Whyte was both our mentor and our friend. Perhaps his most important gift was the ability to show us how to discover for ourselves why some public spaces work and others don't. With the publication of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces and its companion film in 1980, the world could see that through the basic tools of observation and interviews, we can learn an immense amount about how to make our cities more livable. In doing so, Holly Whyte laid the groundwork for a major movement to change the way public spaces are built and planned. It is our pleasure to offer this important book back to the world it is helping to transform.
The Organic Lawn Care Manual: A Natural, Low-Maintenance System for a Beautiful, Safe Lawn
Paul Tukey - 2007
This comprehensive guide covers everything you need to know to grow and maintain a thriving lawn using organic gardening methods. With expert advice on planting the best grass varieties, nourishing the soil, watering, fighting weeds, and sustainable maintenance, Paul Tukey helps you create a luscious and inviting lawn that is pesticide-free and safe for your children and pets.
Rig Warrior
William W. Johnstone - 1987
In a busted marriage, he learned how to be a survivor. And in Washington, he learned how to make big money, consulting with the U.S. government on weapons. Then he got a message from home. Someone had come after his old man -- and turned Barry Rivers into the deadliest enemy of all...Now Rivers is back behind the wheel of a midnight blue Kenworth -- a hard-swearing, hard-driving, tightly-packed blonde named Kate and his dog named "Dog" by his side. With a few good trucking friends. Rivers has the fire-power to take on an army. He'll need it. Because a contract to haul Sale Secure Transport has plunged him into a world of betrayal, corruption, and violence that is killing everyone around him. And the only way to stop a coming war is to start one first -- behind the barrel of an uzi.
The World's Strangest True Stories: FATE's Library of the Paranormal and the Unknown (The Best of FATE Magazine)
Fate Magazine - 2015
The individuals whose experiences you are about to read know that only too well, since nothing in their lives had prepared them for their encounters with things that are not supposed to happen — but did! Events like these remain hidden because those they happen to are afraid to speak out of a natural reluctance to have their sincerity or sanity questioned. Societies define their own realities and those who challenge them do so at their own peril. The moral seems to be that where these kinds of events are concerned, ignorance is the best policy. Ignorance, of course, will not stop people from having strange, inexplicable experiences. Mysterious stuff will continue to fall out of the sky. People will continue to have bizarre UFO encounters. Little men, monsters, talking mongooses and invisible presences won't stop their determined trespassing into our reality. While most of the world turns a deaf ear to these dimensions of experience, FATE has been listening. And a great number of people have shared their stories with FATE. You are about to read the strangest of them, the reports that represent the greatest challenge to science, reason and understanding. What you will find here, in The World's Strangest True Stories, is nothing less than a full, unobstructed view of these other realities, tantalizing glimpses of things that don't belong here, of worlds not our own...
City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village
David Sucher - 1994
Many of these small details are so obvious as to be invisible.
Zora's Zucchini
Katherine Pryor - 2015
Fortunately the ever-resourceful girl comes up with the perfect plan--a garden swap! Author Katherine Pryor and artist Anna Raff followup with their first book, Sylvia's Spinach, with this playful story of a child who discovers not only the wonder of growing food but the satisfaction of growing a community. Shelf Awareness, says "Zora's Zucchini satisfies every appetite with its clean, happy storyline and whimsical illustrations." and Tom Watson, EcoConsumer, writes "We'll never make headway with the pressing environmental issues of our time - such as climate change, community-building and food waste - without brilliant, fun little books like Zora's Zucchini ." A Whole Kids Foundation Book Club selection.