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This book gives you all the information you need to start your own local foods business. You'll get plain-English advice from a self-proclaimed farm-girl-turned-entrepreneur on:

• Trends in niche agriculture and local foods
• Creating a business plan for a small-scale or hobby venture
• Assessing your home marketplace and uncovering niches not yet served
• Financing options, especially grants and cost-sharing programs
• Free or low-cost marketing ideas
• Basic strategies for surviving the first year in business
• And more

About the author

Sarah Beth Aubrey was born into a family of farmers and was raised to believe, like Scarlett O'Hara, that it is land that sustains after all else. In addition to operating her company, Aubrey's Natural Meats, Aubrey writes and speaks extensively on agriculture, the rural lifestyle and small farm development.

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Nature’s Garden follows the same award-winning format of Samuel Thayer’s first book, with in-depth chapters covering 41 wild edibles. You will find the most authoritative accounts available anywhere of several important food plants, such as hackberry and American lotus.

You'll find mouthwatering photography of cranberries, blueberries, huckleberries, strawberries, wild plums and more. You’ll hear of new methods for using dandelions, and learn to make sense of the tricky wild lettuce / sow thistle group. You’ll also discover that wild carrot and poison hemlock can be reliably told apart, thanks to a detailed chart accompanied by 19 photographs.

You’ll read about vegetables with a rich tradition of use around the world that are largely ignored in the wild food literature, such as cow parsnip, patience dock and honewort. You can read more exciting myth-busting about poisonous plant fables and the maligned black nightshade, plus anecdotes about purple children and the hazards of eating cacti.

Yet, perhaps the best part of all is the book within a book about acorns: 51 pages of the details that turn these nuts into food.

Recommended Product for Wiser Living: Today, more than ever before, our society is seeking ways to live more conscientiously. To help bring you the very best inspiration and information about greener, more sustainable lifestyles, MOTHER EARTH NEWS is recommending books to readers. For 40 years, MOTHER EARTH NEWS has been North America’s “Original Guide to Living Wisely,” creating books and magazines for people with a passion for self-reliance and a desire to live in harmony with nature.

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Since Rosalind Creasy popularized the concept of landscaping with edibles a quarter-century ago, interest in eating healthy, fresh, locally grown foods has swept across the nation. More and more Americans are looking to grow clean, delicious produce at home, saving money and natural resources at the same time. And food plants have been freed from the backyard, gracing the finest landscapes — even the White House grounds!

Creasy’s expertise on edibles and how to incorporate them in beautifully designed outdoor environments was first showcased in the original edition of Edible Landscaping (1982), hailed by gardeners everywhere as a groundbreaking classic. Now this highly anticipated new edition presents the latest design and how-to information in a glorious full-color format, featuring more than 300 inspiring photographs.

Drawing on the author’s decades of research and experience, the book presents everything you need to know to create an inviting home landscape that will yield mouthwatering vegetables, fruits, nuts and berries. The comprehensive Encyclopedia of Edibles — a book in itself — provides horticultural information, culinary uses, sources and recommended varieties; and appendices cover the basics of planting and maintenance, and of controlling pests and diseases using organic and environmentally friendly practices.

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Residential consumption represents nearly one quarter of North America's total energy use, and the average homeowner spends thousands of dollars a year on power bills. To help alleviate this problem, Energy-Wise Landscape Design presents hundreds of practical ways everyone can save money, time and effort while making their landscapes more environmentally healthy, ecologically rich and energy efficient.
Combining general guidelines with tips, techniques and actions, this fully illustrated guide explains the many opportunities our landscapes provide for conserving energy. Readers will learn how to:

• lower a home's heating and cooling costs
• minimize fuel used in landscape construction, maintenance and everyday use
• choose landscape products and materials with lower embedded energy costs
• make a positive difference without a major investment or change in lifestyle.

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More and more people are recognizing the need for nutritious, local, sustainable food, but organic options can be costly, and the produce sections of most supermarkets are packed with fruits and vegetables that have racked up more frequent flier miles than a rock band on world tour. How can urban dwellers without ready access to fertile land enjoy the benefits of traditional gardening? And for those with a yard, how do you maximize the harvest of fresh, healthy edibles?

In From Container to Kitchen, author D.J. Herda shows that there is a way. Written for the novice home gardener as well as the seasoned pro, this fully illustrated, comprehensive guide will show you how to save up to 70% on your produce bill by growing fruits and vegetables in pots. Topics include:

• Selecting the right container size and location
• Optimizing soil composition and nutrients
• Managing light, water and humidity
• Choosing the best fruits and vegetables for container gardening
• Eliminating pests and plant diseases naturally
• Extending the harvest.

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This humorous yet practical gardening guide will help you get "down to earth." Packed with whimsical illustrations and overflowing with useful suggestions, Gardening for the Faint of Heart is ideal for the novice gardener. Learn about everything from planning a garden and getting started to pruning, managing pests, seeding and breeding, greenhouse and container gardening and more. A perfect rainy day read, this book never loses sight of the fact that above all, gardening should be fun.

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $19.95. AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

The term "guerrilla" may bring to mind a small band of armed soldiers, moving in the dead of night on a stealth mission. In the case of guerrilla gardening, the soldiers are planters, the weapons are shovels, and the mission is to transform an abandoned lot into a thing of beauty. Once an environmentalist's nonviolent direct action for inner-city renewal, this approach to urban beautification is spreading to all types of people in cities around the world.

These modern-day Johnny Appleseeds perform random acts of gardening, often without the property owner's prior knowledge or permission. Typical targets are vacant lots, railway land, underused public squares and back alleys. The concept is simple, whimsical and has the cheeky appeal of being a not-quite-legal call to action. Dig in some soil, plant a few seeds, or mend a sagging fence ... one good deed inspiring another, with win-win results all around.

Guerrilla Gardening outlines the power-to-the-people campaign for greening our cities. Tips for effective involvement cover:

• finding plants and seeds cheap (or free)
• handling city officials
• getting the dirt on soil
• planting to bring back the birds
• knowing when to ask permission and when to seek forgiveness.

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In a hectic world of mass-produced food, clothing, and entertainment, it’s easy to miss out on the simple pleasures of doing things for yourself. Meet Jenna Woginrich, a 26-year-old web designer who decided to take control of her life — what she ate, what she wore, and how she spent her free time. Learn a few basic country skills, she reasoned, and she would be able to produce at least some of the food and other resources she used every day. Made from Scratch tells the story of Woginrich's hilarious, heartbreaking, soul-satisfying journey, inspiring and entertaining readers who dream about a more self-sufficient lifestyle. Discover the joys of homesteading with Woginrich as she experiences the satisfaction of making bread, keeping chickens, keeping bees, sew clothing, grow vegetables and more!

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In this new book, Ann Lovejoy exuberantly consolidates her gardening and cooking expertise into a year-round feast of fruits, vegetables and herbs, complete with color photographs. Her simple, uncluttered recipes emphasize bright flavors and a creativity centered on an abundance of fresh produce, from the familiar to the exotic.

Fresh from the Garden will appeal even to readers who don't have a vegetable garden or orchard in their backyard. Thanks to the ever-expanding farmers markets and popular community-supported agriculture programs in the Pacific Northwest, fresh, organic produce is always easy to come by.