. . a goat in your garage?! It might be if you've been reading The Urban Farm Handbook: City-Slicker Resources for Growing, Raising, Sourcing, Trading, and Preparing What You Eat. In this comprehensive guide for city-dwellers on how to wean themselves from commercial supermarkets, the authors map a plan for how to manage a busy, urban family life with home-grown foods, shared community efforts, and easy yet healthful practices.More than just a few ideas about gardening and raising chickens, The Urban Farm Handbook uses stories, charts, grocery lists, recipes, and calendars to inform and instruct. As busy urbanites who have learned how to do everything from making cheese and curing meat to collaborating with neighbors on a food bartering system, the authors share their own food journeys along with those of local producers and consumers who are changing the food systems in the Pacific Northwest. Organized seasonally, this handbook instructs on:> How to maximize space for planting a variety of fruits and vegetables> Small-animal husbandry and beekeeping> Canning, drying, freezing, fermenting, and pickling techniques> Grinding grains for flour and other uses> Tips for creating a farmer-to-consumer connection> How to form a "buying club" with neighbors> "Opportunities for Change" steps to followAnd so much more!

    The plants then pump the water back out in the form of beauty, food, shelter, wildlife habitat, timber and forage, while controlling erosion, reducing down-stream flooding, dropping utility costs, increasing soil fertility, enhancing the soil carbon sponge, and improving water and air quality.This dramatically revised and expanded full-color second edition builds on the information in Volume 1 by showing you how to turn your yard, school, business, park, ranch, and neighborhood into lively, regenerative producers of resources. Conditions at home will improve as you simultaneously enrich the ecosystem and inspire the surrounding community.Learn to select, place, size, construct, and plant your chosen earthworks. All is made easier and more effective by the illustrations of natural patterns of water and sediment flow with which you can collaborate or mimic. Detailed step-by-step instructions with over 550 images show you how to do it, and plentiful stories of success motivate you so you will do it!

    But as a series of weather-related crop disasters put Brown and his wife, Shelly, in desperate financial straits, they started making bold changes to their farm. Brown--in an effort to simply survive--began experimenting with new practices he'd learned about from reading and talking with innovative researchers and ranchers. As he and his family struggled to keep the farm viable, they found themselves on an amazing journey into a new type of farming: regenerative agriculture.

    It's about living tangibly in a virtual world. It's about being resourceful, saving money, reducing consumption, and increasing self-reliance. Join the many who are raising backyard chickens in the city and tilling their side yards: tapping into natural energy, managing homes more efficiently, and getting back to the earth.Explore the homesteading arts: gardening on small and large scales, raising dwarf fruit trees, sprouting grains, smoking meats and fish, grinding grains for flour, making cheese, making wine, cellaring, heating without fossil fuel, harvesting rainwater, composting, and much moreThe City Homesteader provides all the basics, including how to find supplies and step-by-step instructions that make it easy to follow along. Original illustrations throughout help you create your very own homestead on any piece of earth.

    The revised and updated edition of the classic guide praised by Library Journal as "a highly successful demystification of an increasingly popular art." The perfect book for a new generation of environmentally aware gardeners.

    Laurelynn G. Martin and Byron E. Martin show you how to successfully plant, grow, and harvest 47 varieties of tropical fruiting plants — in any climate! This straightforward, easy-to-use guide brings papaya, passionfruit, pepper, pineapples, and more out of the tropics and into your home. With plenty of gorgeous foliage, entrancing fragrances, and luscious fruits, local food has never been more exotic.

    A generation of smart, highly educated young people are spending their time knitting, canning jam, baking cupcakes, gardening, and more (and blogging about it, of course), embracing the labor-intensive domestic tasks their mothers and grandmothers eagerly shrugged off. They’re questioning whether regular jobs are truly fulfilling and whether it’s okay to turn away from the ambitions of their parents’ generation.How did this happen? And what does it all mean? In Homeward Bound, acclaimed journalist Emily Matchar takes a long, hard look at both the inspiring appeal and the potential dangers of this trend she calls the New Domesticity, exploring how it could be reshaping the role of women in society and what the consequences may be for all of us.This groundbreaking reporting on the New Domesticity is guaranteed to transform our notions of women in today’s society and add a new layer to the ongoing discussion of whether women can—or should—have it all.

    By talking through a hundred or so items, Mike Berners-Lee sets out to give us a carbon instinct for the footprint of literally anything we do, buy and think about. He helps us pick our battles by laying out the orders of magnitude. The book ranges from the everyday (foods, books, plastic bags, bikes, flights, baths...) and the global (deforestation, data centres, rice production, the World Cup, volcanoes, ...) Be warned, some of the things you thought you knew about green living may be about to be turned on their head. Never preachy but packed full of information and always entertaining.

    Gardeners know it is the best way to feed the soil, while others look to composting as a way to dispose of grass clippings, autumn leaves, and tree trimmings. The Rodale Book of Composting edited by Grace Gershuny and Deborah L. Martin offers:* Easy-to-follow instructions for making and using compost* Helpful tips for apartment dwellers, suburbanites, farmers and community leaders* Ecologically sound solutions to growing waste disposal problems

    Instead, Barber proposes Americans should move to the 'third plate,' a cuisine rooted in seasonal productivity, natural livestock rhythms, whole-grains, and small portions of free-range meat.

    You (and your bees) will be buzzing with delight.From picking the right hive and bringing your bees home to surviving winter and collecting honey, experienced beekeeper Amber Bradshaw takes you on an easy-to-follow journey through your first year of beekeeping and beyond.Beekeeping for Beginners includes: Just the essentials—Learn everything you need to know to begin your first colony—written with brand new beekeepers in mind. Modern beekeeping—Start your colony off right with guides that feature the newest practices and current, natural approaches. Learn to speak bee—Clearly defined terms and a complete glossary will have you talking like a pro beekeeper in no time. Begin your beekeeping the right way—and avoid getting stung by mistakes—with Beekeeping for Beginners.

    Not only are backyard vegetable plots popping up in places long reserved for lawns, but some renegades are even planting their front yards with food. People in apartments are filling their balconies with pots of tomatoes, beans, and basil, while others are gazing skyward and "greening" their rooftops with food plants. Still others are colonizing public spaces, staking out territory in parks for community gardens and orchards, or convincing school boards to turn asphalt school grounds into "growing" grounds.Woven through the book are the stories of guerrilla urban farmers in various cities of North America who are tapping city trees for syrup, gleaning fruit from parks, foraging for greens in abandoned lots, planting heritage vegetables on the boulevard, and otherwise placing food production at the centre of the urban community. Additional stories describe the history of urban food production in North America, revealing the roots of our current hunger for more connection with our food, and the visionaries who have directed that hunger into action.Throughout the book, sidebars offer practical tips for how to compost, how to convert a lawn into a vegetable bed, and what edible plants are easy to grow with children, among other topics.

    Her husband and teenage daughter looked on incredulously as coop sketches and chicken-raising books filled their New England home. But when the chicks arrived, the whole family fell in love with the bundles of fluff and the wild adventures began. Once Upon a Flock: Life with My Soulful Chickens stars Scheuer’s backyard chickens—with their big personalities, friendships, rivalries, and secrets—and the flock’s guardian, Marky the terrier. The flock includes Hatsy, the little dynamo; Lil’White, the deranged and twisted Buff Orpington; Pigeon, the fixer-upper chicken; and Lucy, the special-needs hen who bonds with Lauren and becomes a fast friend. This charming story of Lauren’s life with her quirky flock is filled with moments of humor and heartbreak: When Lucy is afflicted with a neurological disease, Lauren builds Lucy a special-needs coop. When Lucy’s nesting instinct leads Lauren to act as a chicken midwife of sorts, Lauren hatches a chick in her home. And when Lucy’s best friend Hatsy falls ill, Lauren finds an unlikely friend for Lucy in a chicken named Pigeon, who requires an emergency bath and blow-dry. Enthusiastically immersing herself in the world of her flock, Lauren discovers that love, loss, passion, and resilience are not only parts of the human experience, but of the chicken experience as well. Throughout it all, Lauren documents the laughter and drama of her flock’s adventures with her own whimsical photos and illustrations. At once humorous, poignant, and informative, Once Upon a Flock is a feathered tale like no other.

    Unwittingly, we've been selecting plants that are high in starch and sugar and low in vitamins, minerals, fiber, and antioxidants for more than 400 generations.EATING ON THE WILD SIDE reveals the solution--choosing modern varieties that approach the nutritional content of wild plants but that also please the modern palate. Jo Robinson explains that many of these newly identified varieties can be found in supermarkets and farmer's market, and introduces simple, scientifically proven methods of preparation that enhance their flavor and nutrition. Based on years of scientific research and filled with food history and practical advice, EATING ON THE WILD SIDE will forever change the way we think about food.Winner of the 2014 IACP Cookbook Award in the category of "Food Matters."

    There are Douglas firs as tall as skyscrapers, and a banyan tree in Calcutta as big as a football field.From the tallest to the smallest, trees inspire wonder in all of us, and in The Tree, Colin Tudge travels around the world—throughout the United States, the Costa Rican rain forest, Panama and Brazil, India, New Zealand, China, and most of Europe—bringing to life stories and facts about the trees around us: how they grow old, how they eat and reproduce, how they talk to one another (and they do), and why they came to exist in the first place. He considers the pitfalls of being tall; the things that trees produce, from nuts and rubber to wood; and even the complicated debt that we as humans owe them.Tudge takes us to the Amazon in flood, when the water is deep enough to submerge the forest entirely and fish feed on fruit while river dolphins race through the canopy. He explains the “memory” of a tree: how those that have been shaken by wind grow thicker and sturdier, while those attacked by pests grow smaller leaves the following year; and reveals how it is that the same trees found in the United States are also native to China (but not Europe).From tiny saplings to centuries-old redwoods and desert palms, from the backyards of the American heartland to the rain forests of the Amazon and the bamboo forests, Colin Tudge takes the reader on a journey through history and illuminates our ever-present but often ignored companions. A blend of history, science, philosophy, and environmentalism, The Tree is an engaging and elegant look at the life of the tree and what modern research tells us about their future.