Home canning puts the pleasures of eating natural, delicious produce at your fingertips year round. Preserving food is as modern and practical as the latest food trend, and its really quite simple. Easy-to-understand detailed instructions provide all the information you need before you begin a project. Enjoy the rewards of numerous homemade meals and snacks, created from just one preserving session.

    You regularly handle the filthiest object in your home -- the kitchen sponge -- and put the same chemicals on your face that are used in brake fluid and antifreeze. The cleaning agents and personal care products commonly marketed to and used in American homes contain not only some very dangerous, toxic chemicals, but they also create an "overly clean," chemically bombed-out house that compromises immune systems. And with more than fifty million Americans suffering from allergies and other autoimmune diseases -- not to mention the developing and fragile immune systems of children and seniors -- large numbers of people are actually being made sicker and sicker by their homes.Learn to live a clean, healthy, more economical way with Ellen Sandbeck, the nontoxic avenger. In this must-have book for the twenty-first- century home, this passionate, witty advocate of all things organic will teach you how to maintain every part of the home -- from living room to septic tank, kitchen floor to bathroom sink -- using safe, simple cleansers and quick preventative measures as well as the most effective organic products on the market to get the job done.Learn time-saving, preventative housekeeping, such as taking thirty seconds to clean the shower while you shower. Take care of bathroom stains with baking soda and vinegar rather than commercial, toxic bathroom "bombs" peddled to you with such force by manufacturers. Need whiter whites? There is no bleaching power on earth stronger than the sun. Snow clean your fine rugs. Choose fruits and vegetables from the relatively pesticide residue-free list. Clean felt-tipped pen stains with vodka. Make furniture shine with olive oil and lemon. Your house will also smell as great as it looks.

    So he wonders: Is it possible to keep his Netflix and his car, his Wi-Fi and his subwoofers, and still reduce his carbon footprint? In an attempt to find out, Fine up and moves to a remote ranch in New Mexico, where he brazenly vows to grow his own food, use sunlight to power his world, and drive on restaurant grease. Never mind that he’s never raised so much as a chicken or a bean. Or that he has no mechanical or electrical skills. Whether installing Japanese solar panels, defending the goats he found on Craigslist against coyotes, or co-opting waste oil from the local Chinese restaurant to try and fill the new “veggie oil” tank in his ROAT (short for Ridiculously Oversized American Truck), Fine’s extraordinary undertaking makes one thing clear: It ain’t easy being green. In fact, his journey uncovers a slew of surprising facts about alternative energy, organic and locally grown food, and climate change. Both a hilarious romp and an inspiring call to action, Farewell, My Subaru makes a profound statement about trading today’s instant gratifications for a deeper, more enduring kind of satisfaction.

    Apartment dwellers, schoolteachers, and anyone else who wants to grow a lot of food in a little space will find a great small garden resource in Grow All You Can Eat in 3 Square Feet.Small-space gardeners, find your start in Grow All You Can Eat in 3 Square Feet, packed with information on window boxes, potted plants, patio gardening, raised beds, small square-foot gardening, container gardening, and everything else related to growing your own small garden. Whether you want to grow a full garden, grow tomatoes, grow an herb garden, or just pick up great tips for small gardens, Grow All You Can Eat in 3 Square Feet is the resource you need.Reviews:"Beautiful color photographs and step-by-step instructions distinguish this guide to growing vegetables, fruit, and herbs in small spaces." - Library Journal

    John Kallas makes it fun and easy to learn about foods you've unknowingly passed by all your life. Through gorgeous photographs, playful, but authoritative text, and ground-breaking design he gives you the knowledge and confidence to finally begin eating and enjoying edible wild plants. Edible Wild Plants divides plants into four flavor categories -- foundation, tart, pungent, and bitter. Categorizing by flavor helps readers use these greens in pleasing and predictable ways. According to the author, combining elements from these different categories makes the best salads.

    This has cut down her expenditure of hard work and has given her excellent fruit, vegetables and flowers...a new method of mulch gardening.

    When he purchased four acres of land on Vashon Island, he was looking for an affordable home a ferry ride away from the restaurants he ran in Seattle. But as he continued to serve his customers frozen chicken breasts and packaged pork, he became aware of the connection between what he ate and where it came from: a hive of bees provided honey; a young cow could give fresh milk; an apple orchard allowed him to make vinegar. Told in Timmermeister's plainspoken voice, Growing a Farmer details with honesty the initial stumbles and subsequent realities he had to face in his quest to establish a profitable farm for himself. Personal yet practical, Growing a Farmer includes the specifics of making cheese, raising cows, and slaughtering pigs, and it will recast entirely the way we think about our relationship to the food we consume.

    Small-scale, self-contained worm bins can be kept indoors, in a basement or even under the kitchen sink in an apartment — making vermicomposting a great option for city dwellers and anyone who doesn’t want or can’t have an outdoor compost pile. The fully revised 35th anniversary edition features the original’s same friendly tone, with up-to-date information on the entire process, from building or purchasing a bin (readily available at garden supply stores), maintaining the worms, and harvesting the finished compost.

    Detailed weekly to-do lists break gardening down into simple and manageable tasks so that you always know what needs to be done and when to do it, from starting seeds and planting strawberries to checking for tomato hornworms and harvesting carrots. Enjoy a bountiful harvest with this organized and stress-free approach to gardening.

    Honey bee hives now grace the White House Lawn, the roof of Chicago City Hall, the National Arboretum, and the top of the Fairmont Hotel. Even Hagen-Daazs has gotten into the act with its well-funded campaign, Help the Honey Bees.Storey's Guide to Keeping Honey Bees, the newest addition to the best-selling series, will be the single resource sought by beekeepers in all settings. Malcolm T. Sanford presents a thorough overview of these industrious and critically important insects. With this book as their guide, beekeepers will understand how to plan a hive, acquire bees, install a colony, keep bees healthy, maintain a healthy hive, understand and prevent new diseases, and harvest honey crops.The book also provides an overview of the honey bee nest and colony life, insights into honey bee anatomy and behavior, an exploration of apiary equipment and tools, season-by-season beekeeper responsibilities, instructions for harvesting honey, and detailed, up-to-date information about diseases and other potential risks to bees.This comprehensive reference will appeal to both the experienced beekeeper who seeks help with specific issues and the novice eager to get started.

    Moreover, it is the distillation of twenty--not two--years in the woods, and it offers wisdom and practical guidance to city dweller and prospective homesteader alike.This book is a harvest of congenial and specific advice on harmonious rural living, for its authors have proved to themselves--and now to the world--that with hard work and harder common sense, they could take a piece of eroded, stony land and make it bloom and support them. In the process they have achieved something fine for themselves and relevant for everybody. (Description from book jacket.)

    It gives a fascinating insight into the literary, historic, and world-wide application of the fifty common plants that it covers. It is the sort of book you can enjoy as an armchair reader or use to harvest and make your own herbal remedies from wild plants. Anyone who wants to improve his or her health in the same way that human-kind has done for centuries around the world, by using local wild plants and herbs, will find this book fascinating and useful.

    This latest addition to the ...For Dummies "RM" gardening series is ripe with down-to-earth advice and tons of illustrations for growing a wide variety of tasty veggies -- from green beans to yellow squash.-- Detailed guidelines for planting by climate, soil, and water needs-- Tooling up -- great tips for selecting the best gardening equipment-- Basic training on combating garden pests and other nuisances-- How to design a vegetable garden for any size space-- A complete reference of online resources and mail-order suppliers-- Illustrations and full-color photos to inspire gardeners of all skill levels

    . . oh my . . . what have I done? I am 30 years old, I have been married for three years and am a new father to a fantastic little boy. Surely there are things that I should be doing at this age which do not involve little yellow and black insects that can hurt you if you are remotely clumsy (which at 6ft 5, I have an amazing ability to be). James Dearsley's wife thought he had lost his mind when he announced his intention to become a beekeeper. But like many interested in the self-sufficient lifestyle, he loved gardening and growing vegetables in his garden and the old romantic in him had idealistic notions of teaching his little boy where honey came from, so he set himself what seemed a reasonable goal: to get, in a year's time, just one jar of honey.

    Stretch the resources of your small backyard garden further than ever before, without devoting hundreds of hours to canning! This informative and inspiring guide shows you not only how to construct your own root cellar, but how to best use the earth’s naturally cool, stable temperature as an energy-saving way to store nearly 100 varieties of perishable fruits and vegetables.