From the balconies of Manhattan to the patios of Malibu to the backyards of Chicago, anybody with a few square feet of earth is doing their best to make their little corner of the world more gracious and beautiful. And the best thing is, you really don't have to be born with a green thumb to give life to a glorious garden. Anybody can do it with a little coaching. Which is where Gardening All-in-One For Dummies comes in.Puzzled by pruning? Baffled by bulbs? Can't tell a hosta from a hyacinth? Don't worry! This all-in-one reference delivers the know-how you need to transform your little patch of the outdoors into a blooming paradise. Drawing upon the expertise of the National Gardening Association, it gets you up to speed on:Basic gardening skills--from understanding your microclimate to using gardening tools to managing pests and common plant diseases How to design, plan and build a garden landscape that reflects your unique sense of style Selecting, planting and maintaining stunning roses Building a raised bed for your perennials and making them bloom in any climate Choose, grow and maintain annuals From amaryllis to spider dahlias to wood tulips--coaxing beauty from homely bulbs Enjoying nature's bounty by growing you own vegetables and herbs A veritable encyclopedia of gardening, this Gardening All-in-One For Dummies is an indispensable resource for novices and experienced gardeners alike. It brings together between the covers of a single volume seven great books covering:Gardening Basics Garden Design Roses Perennials Annuals Bulbs Vegetables and Herbs Your one-step guide to a beautiful garden, Gardening All-in-One For Dummies shows you how to experience the "purest of human pleasures" in your own backyard.

    If you want to grow food but you don’t want your yard to look like a farm, what can you do? The Beautiful Edible Garden shares how to not only grow organic fruits and vegetables, but also make your garden a place of year-round beauty that is appealing, enjoyable, and fits your personal style. Written by a landscape design team that specializes in artfully blending edibles and ornamentals together, The Beautiful Edible Garden shows that it’s possible for gardeners of all levels to reap the best of both worlds. Featuring a fresh approach to garden design, glorious photographs, and ideas for a range of spaces—from large yards to tiny patios—this guide is perfect for anyone who wants a gorgeous and productive garden.

    Fickle plants make seemingly spontaneous decisions to bloom or bust, seeds sprout magically in the blink of an eye, and deep-rooted mysteries unfold underground and out of sight. Understanding basic botany is like unlocking a horticultural code; fortunately learning a little science can reveal the secrets of the botanical universe and shed some light on what’s really going on in your garden.Practical Botany for Gardeners provides an elegant and accessible introduction to the world of botany. It presents the essentials that every gardener needs to know, connecting explanations of scientific facts with useful gardening tips. Flip to the roots section and you’ll not only learn how different types of roots support a plant but also find that adding fungi to soil aids growth. The pruning section both defines “lateral buds” and explains how far back on a shoot to cut in order to propagate them.The book breaks down key areas and terminology with easy-to-navigate chapters arranged by theme, such as plant types, plant parts, inner workings, and external factors. “Great Botanists” and “Botany in Action” boxes delve deeper into the fascinating byways of plant science. This multifaceted book also includes two hundred botanical illustrations and basic diagrams that hearken to the classic roots of botany.Part handbook, part reference, Practical Botany for Gardeners is a beautifully captivating read. It’s a must for garden lovers and backyard botanists who want to grow and nurture their own plant knowledge.

    This special, large-format volume is geared as much to nonbirders as it is to the out-and-out obsessed, covering more than two hundred species and including more than 330 new illustrations by the author. While its focus is on familiar backyard birds--blue jays, nuthatches, chickadees--it also examines certain species that can be fairly easily observed, such as the seashore-dwelling Atlantic puffin. David Sibley's artwork and expertise bring observed behaviors vividly to life. (For most species, the primary illustration is reproduced life-sized.) And while the text is aimed at adults--including fascinating new scientific research on the myriad ways birds have adapted to environmental changes--it is nontechnical, making it the perfect occasion for parents and grandparents to share their love of birds with young children, who will delight in the big, full-color illustrations of birds in action.

    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.

    This book contains detailed information about each vegetable, including its botanical classification, flower structure and means of pollination, required population size, isolation distance, techniques for caging or hand-pollination, and also the proper methods for harvesting, drying, cleaning, and storing the seeds.Seed to Seed is widely acknowledged as the best guide available for home gardeners to learn effective ways to produce and store seeds on a small scale. The author has grown seed crops of every vegetable featured in the book, and has thoroughly researched and tested all of the techniques she recommends for the home garden.This newly updated and greatly expanded Second Edition includes additional information about how to start each vegetable from seed, which has turned the book into a complete growing guide. Local knowledge about seed starting techniques for each vegetable has been shared by expert gardeners from seven regions of the United States-Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast/Gulf Coast, Midwest, Southwest, Central West Coast, and Northwest.

    So they quit their jobs, sold their house and car, and flew off to Turkey with two bags each, a laptop computer and a camera. If you've ever dreamed of ditching the rat race and taking a year off, you’ll find inspiration in this charming and humorous series of essays and emails. A delightful memoir of a memorable year.

    An elaborately staged fake crime gang, run by a ‘Mr Big’, that lured Brett Cowan in with the promise of a hefty payout. It was the stuff of a TV crime series rather than an Australian police operation. The Sting reveals extraordinary new detail and a shocking insight into one of the country's most evil killers, and the operation that brought him down.Go behind the scenes in one of Australia’s most sensational undercover busts, including never-before-heard detail of the covert investigation, including how Cowan was slowly brainwashed into believing ‘Mr Big’.Read what Cowan’s family think of their black sheep.

    They had already made films that redefined the gangster movie, the screwball comedy, the fable, and the film noir, among others. No Country is just one of many Coen brothers films to center on the struggles of complex characters to understand themselves and their places in the strange worlds they inhabit. To

    White, the author of The Once and Future King and Mistress Masham's Repose, was a young writer who found himself rifling through old handbooks of falconry. A particular sentence — "the bird reverted to a feral state" — seized his imagination, and, White later wrote, "A longing came to my mind that I should be able to do this myself. The word 'feral' has a kind of magical potency which allied itself to two other words, 'ferocious' and 'free.'" Immediately, White wrote to Germany to acquire a young goshawk. Gos, as White named the bird, was ferocious and Gos was free, and White had no idea how to break him in beyond the ancient (and, though he did not know it, long superseded) practice of depriving him of sleep, which meant that he, White, also went without rest. Slowly man and bird entered a state of delirium and intoxication, of attraction and repulsion that looks very much like love. White kept a daybook describing his volatile relationship with Gos — at once a tale of obsession, a comedy of errors, and a hymn to the hawk. It was this that became The Goshawk, one of modern literature's most memorable and surprising encounters with the wilderness — as it exists both within us and without.

    The constant tilling, weeding, irrigating, and fertilizing create perpetual disturbance in a plot's ecology--and waste countless hours in a dubious struggle against nature.In Gardening Revolution, Weaner offers a radically new approach based on the ways plants and wildlife behave in nature. He advocates for a more fluid style, choosing plants that are adapted to the soil and climate and then capitalizing on positive developments as they occur. This lushly photographed reference is for anyone looking for a better, smarter way to garden.

    From constructing coops to rearing chicks, you’ll learn everything you need to know to make sure your chickens stay happy and healthy all year round.Which breed of chicken is right for you? What’s the best coop-bedding material? What sort of feed should you use? Let expert chicken keeper Anne Kuo answer these questions—and many others—in The Beginner’s Guide to Raising Chickens.The Beginner’s Guide to Raising Chickens includes: All cooped up—Create the perfect home for raising chickens using detailed backyard coop designs and construction guides. From chickens to eggs—Find out how to pick the right breed, raise chicks, collect eggs, keep your birds safe from predators, and more. Learn to speak bird—Start talking the talk thanks to an extensive glossary of common chicken-keeping terms. Get your own flock started in no time—The Beginner’s Guide to Raising Chickens shows you how.

    The Pollinator Victory Garden offers practical solutions for winning the war against the demise of these essential animals. Pollinators are critical to our food supply and responsible for the pollination of the vast majority of all flowering plants on our planet. Pollinators include not just bees, but many different types of animals, including insects and mammals. Beetles, bats, birds, butterflies, moths, flies, and wasps can be pollinators. But, many pollinators are in trouble, and the reality is that most of our landscapes have little to offer them. Our residential and commercial landscapes are filled with vast green pollinator deserts, better known as lawns. These monotonous green expanses are ecological wastelands for bees and other pollinators. With The Pollinator Victory Garden, you can give pollinators a fighting chance. Learn how to transition your landscape into a pollinator haven by creating a habitat that includes pollinator nutrition, larval host plants for butterflies and moths, and areas for egg laying, nesting, sheltering, overwintering, resting, and warming. Find a wealth of information to support pollinators while improving the environment around you:  •  The importance of pollinators and the specific threats to their survival•  How to provide food for pollinators using native perennials, trees, and shrubs that bloom in succession•  Detailed profiles of the major pollinator types and how to attract and support each one•  Tips for creating and growing a Pollinator Victory Garden, including site assessment, planning, and planting goals•  Project ideas like pollinator islands, enriched landscape edges, revamped foundation plantings, meadowscapes, and other pollinator-friendly lawn alternatives  The time is right for a new gardening movement. Every yard, community garden, rooftop, porch, patio, commercial, and municipal landscape can help to win the war against pollinator decline with The Pollinator Victory Garden.

    The team behind the inspirational design sites Gardenista.com and Remodelista.com presents an all-in-one manual for making your outdoor space as welcoming as your living room. Tour personality-filled gardens around the world and re-create the looks with no-fail planting palettes. Find hundreds of design tips and easy DIYs, editors’ picks of 100 classic (and stylish) objects, a landscaping primer with tips from pros, over 200 resources, and so much more.

    In Perennial Vegetables the adventurous gardener will find information, tips, and sound advice on less common edibles that will make any garden a perpetual, low-maintenance source of food.Imagine growing vegetables that require just about the same amount of care as the flowers in your perennial beds and borders--no annual tilling and potting and planting. They thrive and produce abundant and nutritious crops throughout the season. It sounds too good to be true, but in Perennial Vegetables author and plant specialist Eric Toensmeier (Edible Forest Gardens) introduces gardeners to a world of little-known and wholly underappreciated plants. Ranging beyond the usual suspects (asparagus, rhubarb, and artichoke) to include such -minor- crops as ground cherry and ramps (both of which have found their way onto exclusive restaurant menus) and the much sought after, anti-oxidant-rich wolfberry (also known as goji berries), Toensmeier explains how to raise, tend, harvest, and cook with plants that yield great crops and satisfaction.Perennial vegetables are perfect as part of an edible landscape plan or permaculture garden. Profiling more than 100 species, illustrated with dozens of color photographs and illustrations, and filled with valuable growing tips, recipes, and resources, Perennial Vegetables is a groundbreaking and ground-healing book that will open the eyes of gardeners everywhere to the exciting world of edible perennials.