full-color photos help do-it-yourselfers realize their dreams." -- Log Homes IllustratedThe best-selling Cabins is back in print, at the same great value of its original price. This authoritative how-to title gives readers all the information they need to build their own cabin, including:A useful list of essential questions to consider during the planning process Types of cabin construction, such as pole built, stick built, post and beam, stone, cordwood, wood siding, and the advantages of each Site preparation, foundations, windows and doors, ladders and stairs, insulation, roofing, electricity, water systems and heating Essential information on log cabins Cabin designs and their advantages Furnishings and accessories Construction methods are clearly illustrated in meticulous line drawings and precise plans with measurements. Cut-away cross-sections and exploded diagrams give the builder the true perspective and detail needed to obtain the best result, allowing readers to get the most enjoyment out of their newly built wilderness retreat.

    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.

    With her husband 3,000 miles away in Florida and the passing of her father, she knew it was time to make some serious changes in her life. She was ready for an adventure, but little did she know what lay in store for her at the 'fixer upper' farmhouse she and her husband would soon become the owners of. S.A. Molteni has spent over thirty years in the Information Technology field working for various Fortune 500 companies. During those years, she and her husband had always dreamed of living on a farm once they became retired from the rat race.This collection of essays follows the author in her sometimes humorous transition from "I.T. Geek to Farm Girl Freak" and depicts the lessons that are learned along the way once farm animals become a large part of her life.

    You'll learn the traditional methods of brain tanning as well as how to use a dozen eggs or soap and oil instead. This revised and updated edition includes substantial improvements to the process that make it even easier for you to produce soft and durable buckskin. What's New A new 15 minute step that creates: • Easier to soften hides • Hides that come out super soft • Hides that take the dressing even when dry, which in turn: • Removes the variability of trying to get the perfect moisture content before dressing • Makes it much easier to get complete brain penetration on thick hides, which makes tanning thicker hides such as moose, elk or even thick deer, way less work. • Makes it so you can skip one of the wringing steps (which takes 15 minutes itself). Other key new highlights include: • Different skinning cuts for a better hide shape. • How to tan Moose, Elk & Antelope • Bibliography (thorough and user-friendly) • Important improvements to the Bucking process. • Important improvements to the Dressing step to ensure success for first timers. • A step-by-step guide to varying this books' Basic Method if you want to try the `pre-smoking' method, or if you want to tan without the bucking step. Buckskin is durable, soft, washable and warm. A hand-made garment for people all over the word for millennia, it breathes and stretches with your body, cuts the wind and won't tear on briars. It is excellent to wear hiking, hunting or around the house. Plus you don't need to hunt. Deer skins that would otherwise go to waste are available every fall from neighbors, locals and butcher shops.

    They're planting tomatoes in raised beds, runner beans in small plots, and strawberries in containers. But there is one place that has, until now, been woefully neglected—the front yard. And there's good reason. The typical veggie garden, with its raised beds and plots, is not the most attractive type of garden, and favorite edible plants like tomatoes and cucumbers have a tendency to look a scraggily, even in their prime. But The Edible Front Yard isn't about the typical veggie garden, and author Ivette Soler is passionate about putting edibles up front and creating edible gardens with curb appeal. Soler offers step-by-step instructions for converting all or part of a lawn into an edible paradise; specific guidelines for selecting and planting the most attractive edible plants; and design advice and plans for the best placement and for combining edibles with ornamentals in pleasing ways. Inspiring and accessible, The Edible Front Yard is a one-stop resource for a front-and-center edible garden that is both beautiful and bountiful year-round.

    Growing on just 1.5 acres, owners Jean-Martin and Maude-Helène feed more than two hundred families through their thriving CSA and seasonal market stands and supply their signature mesclun salad mix to dozens of local establishments. The secret of their success is the low-tech, high-yield production methods they’ve developed by focusing on growing better rather than growing bigger, making their operation more lucrative and viable in the process.The Market Gardener is a compendium of la Grelinette’s proven horticultural techniques and innovative growing methods. This complete guide is packed with practical information on:Setting-up a micro-farm by designing biologically intensive cropping systems, all with negligible capital outlay Farming without a tractor and minimizing fossil fuel inputs through the use of the best hand tools, appropriate machinery, and minimum tillage practices Growing mixed vegetables systematically with attention to weed and pest management, crop yields, harvest periods, and pricing approachesInspired by the French intensive tradition of maraichage and by iconic American vegetable grower Eliot Coleman, author and farmer Jean-Martin shows by example how to start a market garden and make it both very productive and profitable. Making a living wage farming without big capital outlay or acreages may be closer than you think.Jean-Martin Fortier is a passionate advocate of strong local food systems and founder of Les Jardins de la Grelinette, an internationally recognized model for successful biointensive micro-farming.

    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!

    Barbara Pleasant and Deborah Martin explain their six-way compost gardening system in this informative guide that will have you rethinking how you create and use your compost. With your plants and compost living together from the beginning, your garden will become a nourishing and organic environment that encourages growth and sustainability. You’ll also find that the enriched soil requires less tending, weeding, and mulching, so you can do less back-breaking work for the same lush, beautiful results.

    She lives in a home not unlike the average home in a neighborhood that is, more or less, typically suburban. What sets her apart from the rest of us is that she thinks more deeply - and in more eloquent detail- about food. In sharing her ponderings, she sets a delightful example for those of us who seek the healthiest, most pleasurable lifestyle within an environment determined to propel us in the opposite direct. Joan is a suburbanite with a green thumb, but also a feisty, defiant spirit with a relentlessly positive outlook.This Organic Life begins with Joan and her husband Alan's trials and tribulations growing vegetables for their own table while coping with careers and a sprawling Victorian house in Congers, New York. Motivated to go "off -the-grid" of the global food system in their later years, the Gussows find and fall in love with a dilapidated Odd Fellows Hall on the banks of the Hudson River. Joan's often hilarious accounts of the "renovation" of the "dream" (some would say "nightmare") house and the creation of their new gardens are spiced by extracts from her own journal, and over thirty wonderful recipes using fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables.There is also an occasion pontification about a food distribution system run amok! At the heart of This Organic Life is the premise that locally grown food eaten in season makes sense economically, ecologically, and gastronomically. Transporting produce to New York from California -- not to mention Central and South America, Australia, or Europe -- consumes more energy in transit than it yields in calories. (It costs 435 fossil fuel calories to fly a 5-calorie strawberry from California to New York.) Add in the deleterious effects of agribusiness, such as the endless cycle of pesticide, herbicide, and chemical fertilizers; the loss of topsoil from erosion of over-tilled croplands; depleted aquifers and soil salinization from over-irrigation; and the arguments in favor of "this organic life" become overwhelmingly convincing.

    With easy-to-read layouts and simple text, it runs the full ecological gamut, from geothermal heating to crop rotation to soap making. The Bridgewaters, well-regarded garden writers, help readers answer questions such as how much land they really require, whether or not to depend entirely on natural forms of energy, and which farm animals will best meet their needs. There’s practical information on building an insulated flue-pipe chimney, identifying edible wild plants, and composting with worms. In addition to recipes for jams, rhubarb wine, and other delicious foods, three A-Z sections offer planting and harvesting instructions for vegetables and salad crops, fruits, and herbs.

    Eliot Coleman introduces the surprising fact that most of the United States has more winter sunshine than the south of France. He shows how North American gardeners can successfully use that sun to raise a wide variety of traditional winter vegetables in backyard cold frames and plastic covered tunnel greenhouses without supplementary heat. Coleman expands upon his own experiences with new ideas learned on a winter-vegetable pilgrimage across the ocean to the acknowledged kingdom of vegetable cuisine, the southern part of France, which lies on the 44th parallel, the same latitude as his farm in Maine.This story of sunshine, weather patterns, old limitations and expectations, and new realities is delightfully innovative in the best gardening tradition. Four-Season Harvest will have you feasting on fresh produce from your garden all through the winter.To learn more about the possibility of a four-season farm, please visit Coleman's website www.fourseasonfarm.com.

    Time-tested advice on how to cure the meat by smoking or salting helps you preserve your harvest. A final section explains how to make sausages. Numerous mouth-watering recipes are included.

    This thoroughly revised and updated version highlights new organic pest controls, new fertilizer products, improved gardening techniques, the latest organic soil practices, and new trends in garden design. In this indispensable work readers will find: - comprehensive coverage for the entire garden and landscape along with related entries such as Community Gardening, Edible Landscaping, Horticultural Therapy, Stonescaping, and more - the most in-depth information from the trusted Rodale Organic Gardening brand - a completely new section on earth-friendly techniques for gardening in a changing climate, covering wise water management, creating backyard habitats, managing invasive plants and insects, reducing energy use and recycling, and understanding biotechnology - entries all written by American gardeners for American gardeners, with answers for all the challenges presented by various conditions, from the humid Deep South and the mild maritime coasts to the cold far North and the dry Southwest Rodale's Ultimate Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening by Fern Bradley has everything anyone needs to create gorgeous, non-toxic gardens in any part of the country.

    But she was beginning to feel a sense of longing for a family and for home. When she interviewed a dynamic young farmer, her world changed. Kristin knew nothing about growing vegetables, let alone raising pigs and cattle and driving horses. But on an impulse, smitten, if not yet in love, she shed her city self and moved to five hundred acres near Lake Champlain to start a new farm with him. The Dirty Life is the captivating chronicle of their first year on Essex Farm, from the cold North Country winter through the following harvest season—complete with their wedding in the loft of the barn. Kimball and her husband had a plan: to grow everything needed to feed a community. It was an ambitious idea, a bit romantic, and it worked. Every Friday evening, all year round, a hundred people travel to Essex Farm to pick up their weekly share of the "whole diet"—beef, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs, fruits, and forty different vegetables—produced by the farm. The work is done by draft horses instead of tractors, and the fertility comes from compost. Kimball’s vivid descriptions of landscape, food, cooking—and marriage—are irresistible. "As much as you transform the land by farming," she writes, "farming transforms you." In her old life, Kimball would stay out until four a.m., wear heels, and carry a handbag. Now she wakes up at four, wears Carhartts, and carries a pocket knife. At Essex Farm, she discovers the wrenching pleasures of physical work, learns that good food is at the center of a good life, falls deeply in love, and finally finds the engagement and commitment she craved in the form of a man, a small town, and a beautiful piece of land

    On the other hand, gardening itself could be the culprit: elaborate, traditional perennial borders; water-hungry or disease-prone plants; needy lawns; and high-maintenance plants that require staking or clipping all suck up precious hours. Simply put, we need to start gardening in a whole new way. In this inspiring book, Val Easton shows exactly how to have a low-maintenance garden that doesn't sacrifice style. You won't have to give up your favorite plants or settle for expanses of ugly bark nuggets. You just have to unlearn some bad old habits and pick up some good new ones. So, how do you go about making a "new" low-maintenance garden? First, design your garden with maintenance in mind—good-looking hardscape will both save weeding time and showcase your favorite plants. Second, simplify your garden routines—learn the most efficient planting and maintenance techniques and don't get stressed if everything isn't letter-perfect. Third, learn how to work with nature rather than against it. And finally, embrace home-grown fruits, herbs, and vegetables; well planted containers; and thoughtfully chosen plants.The New Low-Maintenance Garden doesn't just tell you how to garden in a whole new way—it shows you, through profiles and beautiful photographs of real gardens that embody low-maintenance techniques. The pressures of life are not likely to ease up anytime soon, but the lessons of this timely book will help you banish guilt over undone garden chores and revel in your garden successes.