Cheerful and informative, Happy Houseplants will guide any budding indoor botanist through a bevy of topics, from soil and water to light and fertilizer. With beautiful illustrations accompanying 30 different profiles of plants, from the easygoing Air Plant to the striking Zebra Cactus, this nifty book is the perfect gift for anyone looking to bring a piece of the outdoors inside.

    Covering every aspect of vegetable gardening from preparing soil to manures, composts and fertilizers, from growing techniques to protection, pests, from diseases and weeds to making good use of space, this is a comprehensive guide to ensuring the best results from your garden or allotment. With cultivation information for over 100 vegetables, including site and soil requirements, cultivation, pests and diseases, and cultivars, this illustrated handbook is a must for vegetable gardeners of all levels and experience.

    This couple abandoned the city for a rural life with minimal cash and the knowledge of self reliance and good health.

    Martha Stewart's Gardening is the perfect book for longtime gardeners, new gardeners--and everyone looking for a thoughtful and useful gift. Illustrations.

    The secret? Cooking ahead.Finally, anyone can learn how to maximize (and enjoy) time in the kitchen. Food52 founders Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs start with flexible base dishes they make on the weekend, then use them in multiple ways for quick weekday meals--exactly the way they really cook for themselves and their families. Both authors tackles every month of the year, providing seasonal recipes and clever tips and strategies that yield delicious, dependable results. This indispensable cookbook lays out the building blocks of modern meal planning, encouraging readers to be creative, confident, and resourceful in the kitchen all year-round.From the Hardcover edition.

    The incidence of diet-related diseases, including obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, and heart disease, has skyrocketed to unprecedented levels. Whether you have forty acres and a mule or a condo with a balcony, you can do more than you think to safeguard your health, your money, and the planet.Homegrown and Handmade shows how making things from scratch and growing at least some of your own food can help you eliminate artificial ingredients from your diet, reduce your carbon footprint, and create a more authentic life. Whether your goal is increasing your self-reliance or becoming a full-fledged homesteader, it's packed with answers and solutions to help you:Take control of your food supply from seed to plate Raise small and medium livestock for fun, food, and fiber Rediscover traditional skills to meet more of your family's needs than you ever thought possibleThis comprehensive guide to food and fiber from scratch proves that attitude and knowledge is more important than acreage. Written from the perspective of a successful self-taught modern homesteader, this well illustrated, practical, and accessible manual will appeal to anyone who dreams of a simpler life.Deborah Niemann is a homesteader, writer, and self-sufficiency expert who presents extensively on topics including soapmaking, bread baking, cheesemaking, composting, and homeschooling. She and her family raise sheep, pigs, cattle, goats, chickens, and turkeys for meat, eggs, and dairy products, while an organic garden and orchard provides fruit and vegetables.

    It shows you how to grow your tea from seeds, cuttings, or small plants, as well as which parts of the plant are used to make tea. Liversidge lays out when and how to harvest your plants, as well as information on how to prepare the plant, including how to dry tea leaves to make tea you can store to last you throughout the year. As a guide to using tea to make you feel better, there are nutritional and medicinal benefits. Finally, there is an illustrated guide to show how to make up fresh and dried teabags and how to serve a delicious homegrown tea. It is sustainable way to look at a beverage, which is steeped in history and tradition.Sample drinks include well-known plants such as rose hips, mint, sage, hibiscus, and lavender, as well as more obscure ones like chicory, angelica, apple geranium, and lemon verbena.

    It's full of physical pleasures -- the look of favorite clothes restored to freshness and beauty, the tactile satisfaction of crisp linens in beautifully folded stacks. Good laundering preserves things you love and protects your pocket book. It doesn't take much time or effort. What it takes is knowledge, and Laundry is the comprehensive, entertaining, and inspiring new book on the art of laundering.Culled from the bestselling Home Comforts, with revised and updated information and a new introduction, Laundry is an indispensable guide to caring for all the cloth in one's home: from kitchen rags to bedding, hand-washables, and baby clothes to vintage linens. Mendelson offers detailed guidance on when to disregard labels, removing stains, making environmentally informed choices, sewing, and storing clothing and fabrics. A much-needed antidote to the standard-issue how-to manual, Laundry celebrates the satisfactions of ironing, folding, and caring for clothes and linens. Both pragmatic and eloquent, Mendelson provides beginning and veteran homemakers with a seamless combination of reliable instruction, time-tested advice, and fascinating personal narrative.As a farm girl in Pennsylvania, Mendelson -- who is a philosopher, lawyer, and professor, as well as a homemaker, wife, and mother -- received a classic domestic education from her grandmothers, aunts, and mother. Laundry combines the best of the traditional lore they taught her with the latest in technical and scientific information. Writing with infectious love and respect for her subject, Mendelson is sure to instill in readers a newfound affection and appreciation for the art of laundering.

    As the owner of over 200 plants, Hilton feels strongly about the role of plants in one’s home—not just for the beauty they add, but for health benefits as well: ‘having plants in your home not only adds life, but changes the airflow throughout. It’s also a key design element when styling your place. For me, it wasn’t about just having greenery, but having the right variety of greenery. I like to see the different textures of foliage all grouped together. You take a fiddle leaf fig and sandwich it between a birds of paradise and a monstera and…. yes!’ You will be armed with the know-how you need to care for your plants, where to place them, how to propagate, how to find the right pot, and much more, and most importantly, how to arrange them so that they look their best. Combine sizes and leaf shapes to stunning effect, grow your own succulents from leaf cuttings, create your own air plant display, and more.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    But how do you get plants to grow in a spot where trees and shrubs hide the sun? In this stunning volume, garden expert Larry Hodgson shows how to create a lush and lovely garden filled with plants that will flourish in the shade.The first part covers the basics of shade gardening, including planning, planting, and problem-solving. Here readers will find out how to use shade-tolerant grasses and groundcovers for the root-filled areas under trees; discover solutions for dry shade and heavy needle and leaf drop; and learn what to do if a tree should fall and a shade garden is suddenly thrust back in the sun. The second part is devoted to an encyclopedia of shade-loving plants.Complete with expert designs for five different kinds of shaded gardens, Making the Most of Shade is a splendid new gardening title by the popular author of Perennials for Every Purpose, which Susan McClure, author of Easy-Care Perennial Gardens, called "a treasure . . . the next best thing to having a friendly expert whispering in your ear as you plan, plant, and perfect your perennial garden."

    Dissecting everything from tractors and pigs to fences, hay bales, crop rotation patterns, and farm tools, Rothman gives a richly entertaining tour of the quirky details of country life. From the shapes of squash varieties to the parts of a goat; from how a barn is constructed to what makes up a beehive, every corner of the barnyard is uncovered and celebrated. A perfect gift for gardeners, locavores, homesteaders, and country-living enthusiasts alike.

    Throughout and beyond those years she was also a gardener. In 1958, when her job as editor was coming to a close, White wrote the first of a series of fourteen garden pieces that appeared in The New Yorker over the next twelve years. The poet Marianne Moore originally persuaded White that these pieces would make a fine book, but it wasn't until after her death in 1977 that her husband, E. B. White, assembled them into this now classic collection.Whether White is discussing her favorite garden catalogs, her disdain for oversized flower hybrids, or the long rich history of gardening, she never fails to delight readers with her humor, lively criticism, and beautiful prose. But to think of Katharine White simply as a gardener, cautioned E. B. White in his introduction to the book, would be like insisting that Ben Franklin was simply a printer. Katharine White had vast and varied interests in addition to gardening and she brought them all to bear in the writing of these remarkable essays.Onward and Upward in the Garden is an essential book of enduring appeal for writers and gardeners in every generation. Intensely personal and charged with emotion, the essays remain timeless. Now in this new edition, White can be read and appreciated anew.

    This haven of ecologically friendly practices has been the focus of BBC Two's popular series It's Not Easy Being Green, a title at least somewhat belied by the simplicity of the practical changes suggested in Self Sufficiency for The 21st Century. (Hand-selling tip: It's important to realize that low impact living isn't generally a one-jump leap. The incremental changes recommended in this book can help people take their first major steps in that direction.)

    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.