Through their compelling story looms a sense of a whole nation's tragedy during the Great Depression.Reviews of The Bones of Plenty: "It is possible . . .that literary historians of the future will decide that The Bones of Plenty was the farm novel of the Great Drought of the 1920s and 1930s and the Great Depression. Better than any other novel of the period with which I am familiar, Lois Phillips Hudson's story presents, with intelligence and rare understanding, the frightful disaster that closed thousands of rural banks and drove farmers off their farms, the hopes and savings of a lifetime in ruins about them."--New York Times Book Review"Hudson does a superb job of revealing the physical texture of farm life on the prairie--its sounds, smells, colors, sensations. Then she goes further, examining the spiritual texture as well. Her characters are bound to each other and to their land in a kind of harsh intimacy from which there is no relief. Weather, poverty, anger, and pride are the forces that drive them and ultimately wear them down. . . Like the best books of any era, it convinces us of its characters' enduring humanity, and surprises us, again and again, with the depth of emotion it makes us feel."--Minneapolis Star Tribune"At her best, Lois Phillips Hudson can make the American Ordeal of the 1930s so real that you can all but feel the gritty dust in your teeth."--Omaha World-Herald

    Combining traditional techniques with contemporary design, Max Bainbridge teaches you how to identify wood types, source timber, and set up a basic toolbox, then offers step-by-step carving and cutting techniques for making your own pieces. With little experience and very few tools, you’ll learn to create hand-carved bowls, cutting boards, spoons, knives, and spatulas, perfect for adding a touch of the handmade to your home. With further advice on finishing your projects—how to sand, ebonize, scorch, and texture the surfaces, as well as wax and oil your new, beloved kitchen creations—each of your handcrafted projects will be imbued with a tangible history visible through the maker’s mark. With beautiful photography and clear how-to instruction, Heirloom Wood gives you everything you need to create timeless kitchen keepsakes to be passed down from generation to generation.

    Whether you’re interested in growing them for your own kitchen or to sell at a local market, you’ll soon be harvesting a delicious and abundant crop of mushrooms.

    Humans have been farming for thousands of years, and yet agriculture has undergone more fundamental changes in the past 80 years than in the previous several centuries. In 1900, 30 million American farmers tilled the soil or tended livestock; today there are fewer than 4.5 million farmers who feed a population four times larger than it was at the beginning of the century. Fifty years ago, the planet could not have sustained a population of 6.5 billion; now, commercial and industrial agriculture ensure that millions will not die from starvation. Farmers are able to feed an exponentially growing planet because the greatest industrial revolution in history has occurred in agriculture since 1929, with U.S. farmers leading the way. Productivity on American farms has increased tenfold, even as most small farmers and tenants have been forced to find other work. Today, only 300,000 farms produce approximately ninety percent of the total output, and overproduction, largely subsidized by government programs and policies, has become the hallmark of modern agriculture. A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929 charts the profound changes in farming that have occurred during author Paul K. Conkin's lifetime. His personal experiences growing up on a small Tennessee farm complement compelling statistical data as he explores America's vast agricultural transformation and considers its social, political, and economic consequences. He examines the history of American agriculture, showing how New Deal innovations evolved into convoluted commodity programs following World War II. Conkin assesses the skills, new technologies, and government policies that helped transform farming in America and suggests how new legislation might affect farming in decades to come. Although the increased production and mechanization of farming has been an economic success story for Americans, the costs are becoming increasingly apparent. Small farmers are put out of business when they cannot compete with giant, non-diversified corporate farms. Caged chickens and hogs in factory-like facilities or confined dairy cattle require massive amounts of chemicals and hormones ultimately ingested by consumers. Fertilizers, new organic chemicals, manure disposal, and genetically modified seeds have introduced environmental problems that are still being discovered. A Revolution Down on the Farm concludes with an evaluation of farming in the twenty-first century and a distinctive meditation on alternatives to our present large scale, mechanized, subsidized, and fossil fuel and chemically dependent system.

    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.

    This book covers all the important aspects of plant tissue culture viz. nutrition media, micropropagation, organ culture, cell suspension culture, haploid culture, protoplast isolation and fusion, secondary metabolite production, somaclonal variation and cryopreservation. For good understanding of recombinant DNA technology, chapters on genetic material, organization of DNA in the genome and basic techniques involved in recombinant DNA technology have been added. Different aspects on rDNA technology covered gene cloning, isolation of plant genes, transposons and gene tagging, in vitro mutagenesis, PCR, molecular markers and marker assisted selection, gene transfer methods, chloroplast and mitochondrion DNA transformation, genomics and bioinformatics. Genomics covers functional and structural genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, sequencing status of different organisms and DNA chip technology. Application of biotechnology has been discussed as transgenics in crop improvement and impact of recombinant DNA technology mainly in relation to biotech crops.

    This anthology features both established food writers and rising stars cooking up everything from erudite culinary history to food-inspired memoirs. By turns opinionated, evocative, sensuous, and just plain funny, it's a tasty sampler to dip into time and again.As in previous editions, Best Food Writing 2009 will include top-notch writers like Colman Andrews, Anthony Bourdain, Frank Bruni, Bill Buford, Madhur Jaffrey, Ruth Reichl, Raymond Sokolov, Calvin Trillin, Alice Waters, and many others.

    Everything you need to know from set-up to finished product in order to create distinctive yarns for use in knitting, weaving, crocheting, needlepoint, embroidery, and macrame. Author's preface. 33 illustrations, 10 black-and-white photographs. Bibliography. Sources of Supply.

    All the way to their ninth decades, the Nearings grew their own food, built their own buildings, and fought an eloquent combat against the silliness of America's infatuation with consumer goods and refined foods. They also wrote or co-wrote more than thirty books, many of which are now being brought back into print by the Good Life Center and Chelsea Green.Simple Food for the Good Life is a jovial collection of quips, quotes, and one-of-a-kind recipes meant to amuse and intrigue all of those who find themselves in the kitchen, willingly or otherwise. Recipes such as Horse Chow, Scott's Emulsion, Crusty Carrot Croakers, Raw Beet Borscht, Creamy Blueberry Soup, and Super Salad for a Crowd should improve the mood as well as whet the appetite of any guest.Here is an antidote for the whole foods enthusiast who is fed up with the anxieties and drudgeries of preparing fancy meals with stylish, expensive, hard-to-find ingredients. This celebration of salads, leftovers, raw foods, and homegrown fruits and vegetables takes the straightest imaginable route from their stem or vine to your table.The funniest, crankiest, most ambivalent cookbook you'll ever read, said Food & Wine magazine. This is more than a mere cookbook, said Health Science magazine: It belongs to the category of classics, destined to be remembered through the ages.Among Helen Nearing's numerous books is Chelsea Green's Loving and Leaving the Good Life, a memoir of her fifty-year marriage to Scott Nearing and the story of Scott's deliberate death at the age of one hundred. Helen and Scott Nearing's final homestead in Harborside, Maine, has been established in perpetuity as an educational progam under the name of The Good Life Center.

    Let the Chicken Whisperer (poultry personality Andy Schneider) teach you everything he knows…and everything you need to know…about raising a backyard flock! Ditch the super-technical manuals and enjoy Andy's unique, common-sense perspective in The Chicken Whisperer's Guide to Keeping Chickens. This fun, comprehensive guide is a perfect fit for your busy lifestyle.Inside, you’ll learn:—The Benefits of a Backyard Chicken Flock—So You're Eggspecting: The Art of Incubation— The Art of Brooding—Home Sweet Home: Coops & Runs—Nutrition, Health, and Wellness…and much more!

    Here’s why: In the 1960s hunger was going global. Asia was wracked by famine, Latin America was hungry, and Africa was about to face the Sahel drought and massive starvation.Worse still, almost half the world’s 3 billion people were under the age of 30. Billions of babies were about to be born into a planet unable to feed them.Then a miracle occurred: the productivity of wheat doubled, tripled and in some places quadrupled. It happened in almost 100 countries all at once.Soon thereafter, the productivity of rice, corn and other cereals followed suit.Borlaug worked only with wheat but he set the trend toward making cereal crops efficient in using land, sunlight, growing time, and inputs, not to mention immune to major diseases.Nowadays his influence can be seen worldwide: Most crop plants have gotten shorter. No longer shoulder-high, wheat is now waist high or knee high. No longer 12 feet tall, corn is now head-high. That is the most visible part of the Borlaug legacy. And it’s why 7 billion people are eating on the same land that half a century ago could not feed half that number.This farm kid from Iowa achieved all this under difficult conditions in a hungry country: Mexico. He did it with dedication and with conventional plant breeding. He gave his seeds away freely to all who asked. He trained young people from almost every wheat-growing nation, including the U.S. and Canada, and sent them home with seeds of his most advanced research lines. That is why food production soared so quickly and global famine was averted. Borlaug’s students – widely known as Wheat Apostles – were pre-positioned and pre-programmed to make the most of his latest and most productive seeds.Norman Borlaug is an Indiana Jones of our time. He was bold and adventurous and faced down difficulty (sometimes danger) his whole life. He is a great role model for humanitarian achievement.Our Daily Bread tells the Borlaug story in lively style. It has been called The World's First Cereal Thriller. The author worked with Borlaug and recorded the behind-the-scenes dramas that have not been made public until now.

    But as they follow the trail of coffee beans from the Guatemalan peasant grower to the American coffee drinker, what unfolds is not only a stunning research discovery, but an unforgettable journey of personal challenge and growth.Based on an actual research project on fair trade coffee funded by USAID, The Taste of Many Mountains is a brilliantly-staged novel about the global economy in which University of San Francisco economist Bruce Wydick examines the realities of the coffee trade from the perspective of young researchers struggling to understand the chasm between the world’s rich and poor.“Wydick’s first novel is brewed perfectly—full of rich body with double-shots of insight.” —Santiago “Jimmy” Mellado, President and CEO of Compassion International"This wonderfully enlightening book describes the Mayan culture in Guatemala and some of the sufferings these people have survived." —CBA Retailers + ResourcesIncludes Reading Group Guide

    This is a timely and important book.”—Ted Morgan, author of Wilderness at Dawn“A lively visit with the dauntless men and women who operate America’s family farms and help provide our miraculous annual bounty. Richard Horan writes with energy and passion.”—Hannah Nordhaus, author of The Beekeeper’s Lament“Horan’s new book evocatively describes the peril and promise of family farms in America. I loved joining him on this journey, and so will you.”—T.A. Barron, author of The Great Tree of AvalonIn Seeds, novelist and nature writer Richard Horan sought out the trees that inspired the work of great American writers like Faulkner, Kerouac, Welty, Wharton, and Harper Lee. In Harvest, Horan embarks upon a serendipitous journey across America to work the harvests of more than a dozen essential or unusual food crops—and, in the process, forms powerful connections with the farmers, the soil, and the seasons.

    Going beyond farm-to-table to encompass garden, forest, field, stream, and storeroom-to-table, author Rohan Anderson vividly illustrates the benefits of a lifestyle geared towards providing for yourself from the natural world. Whole Larder Love  author and ultimate DIY-er Rohan Anderson is a family man and a modern-day hunter-gatherer living just outside the historical town of Ballarat, an 1800s gold rush town in Australia. Within this rural landscape Anderson has capitalized on the opportunities for many a culinary adventure. Primarily concerned with how to live off of the land and provide himself and his family with fresh, local food, Anderson has become a passionate hunter, fisher, forager, gardener, pickler, and sometimes barterer. Anderson now wants to share his secrets and experiences in order to help move people away from unhealthy eating habits and people away from unhealthy eating habits and towards a more environmentally sustainable food industry.Food is an integral part of our lives. And in recent years, more and more people have been asking questions about the food they eat: How does that food get to our plates? How was it grown? What chemicals were used? How was the animal treated? What are the impacts on the environment? In Whole Larder Love, Anderson gives us easy to follow tips and instructions for setting up a home garden, the best practices for hunting and fishing, how to identify and collect edible food growing in the wild, and the proper tools, gear, and resources to use. Additionally, he gives us a slew of exciting recipes and preparation methods for our ingredients once they've been collected. This combination how-to manual and cookbook is beautifully illustrated in full-color with Anderson's own photographs, capturing his ingredients, gear, rural surroundings, and exquisite dishes in rich and vivid detail. And with suggestions for possible substitutions and tips on bartering and selecting food from farmer's markets, Whole Larder Love is perfect for foodies, farmers, hunters, gardeners—even urbanites looking to inject their lives with a little rural romance—and anyone else interested in getting more involved with the origins of the food they eat.Mouthwatering recipes include: Kale Fusilli Tris, Potimarron & Gorgonzola Soup, Vindaloo Hare, Quail Ragu with Polenta, Wild Duck Risotto, Pumpkin Gnocchi, Venison Ossobuco, Eel Cake with White Beans, Chili-Pickled Wild Mushrooms, Spud & Nettle Soup, Arrabiata Fish & Chips, Pork Rack Roast with Honey-roasted Wild Pear and many, many more!

    Commercial growers will want to consult this book regularly.The author tells us:which strains to plant when to fertilize when to plant when to prune flower stalks how to plant when to harvest Plus, how to store, market, and process the crop Growing Great Garlic makes a genuine contribution in the field of garlic classification that will help the public recognize several distinct varietal types of garlic.