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Soil is a living organism that loves to cooperate with farmers and gardeners. A green thumb will appear on those who align themselves with its health and requirements. This book discusses:

• Soil habitat
• Sustaining soil fertility
• The soil food-web
• Nutrient availability and deficiency

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $39.95 AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

A series of 4 guides originally published by NOFA (Northeast Organic Farming Association), on organic principles and practices for both the beginner farmer as well as established farmers looking to convert to organic, or deepen their practices. Each book is approximately 100 pages, but the information is weighty; the guides use a strong whole-systems farming theory behind their practical advice, as well as offer historical information, further resources, detailed appendices, and profiles of various organic farms across the Northeast. Titles include:

Growing Healthy Vegetable Crops written by Brian Caldwell.

Includes information on:

• Basic concepts of pest control (host susceptibility, soil health, genetic resistance, ecosystem factors)
• Practical approaches (crop cultural practices, rescue treatments, special section on mammals and birds, food safety))
• Farm design for pest reduction (diversity, crop rotation))
• Unorthodox approaches (farmers out of the box))
• Identifying pests)
• Crop-by-crop pests and practices)

• Soil habitat)
• Sustaining soil fertility)
• The soil food-web)
• Nutrient availability and deficiency)

• Strengths and limitations of hybrid varieties)
• Before you grow the seed (selecting varieties, saving seed and improving crops, intellectual property rights))
• Growing seed (pollination biology, harvesting, cleaning, storage, germination testing))
• Details on individual crops (amaranth, crucifers, beets and chard, lettuce, cucurbits, corn and small grains, nightshades, root veggies))

• Soils, the foundation of health (manure managament))
• Crop production and grazing management (forage species, pasture management, setting up a grazing system))
• Livestock (selection, nutrition, winter and summer feed considerations, seasonal milking, habitat, herd health, milk quality))
• Marketing (selling fluid milk, regulations, facility and equipment, selling raw milk))
• Recordkeeping)
• The transition to organic)

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Supermarket produce sections bulging with a year-round supply of perfectly round, bright red-orange tomatoes have become all but a national birthright. But in Tomatoland, which is based on his James Beard Award-winning article, "The Price of Tomatoes," investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry. Fields are sprayed with more than 100 different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yields, but has also produced fruits with dramatically reduced amounts of calcium, vitamin A and vitamin C, and tomatoes that have 14 times more sodium than the tomatoes our parents enjoyed. The relentless drive for low costs has fostered a thriving modern-day slave trade in the United States. How have we come to this point?

Estabrook traces the supermarket tomato from its birthplace in the deserts of Peru to the impoverished town of Immokalee, Fla., aka the tomato capital of the United States. He visits the laboratories of seedsmen trying to develop varieties that can withstand the rigors of agribusiness and still taste like a garden tomato, and then moves on to commercial growers who operate on tens of thousands of acres, and eventually to a hillside field in Pennsylvania, where he meets an obsessed farmer who produces delectable tomatoes for the nation's top restaurants.

Throughout Tomatoland, Estabrook presents a who's who cast of characters in the tomato industry: the avuncular octogenarian whose conglomerate grows one out of every eight tomatoes eaten in the United States; the ex-Marine who heads the group that dictates the size, color and shape of every tomato shipped out of Florida; the U.S. attorney who has doggedly prosecuted human traffickers for the past decade; and the Guatemalan peasant who came north to earn money for his parents' medical bills and found himself enslaved for two years.

Tomatoland reads like a suspenseful whodunit as well as an exposé of today's agribusiness systems and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $26.95 AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

Everything you ever wanted to know about homesteading, all with a cool, modern style. From windowsills to backyards, cities hold more potential for growth than just urban sprawl. We can grow vegetables, raise small livestock, and fill our cupboards with canned decadence. Renee Wilkinson offers something for everyone, regardless of space or green thumb know-how.

Wonder what it takes to raise clucking chickens? Wilkinson walks you through every step. Musing about what will grow best on your balcony or fire escape? She gives you garden designs and choices. Pondering what to do with your honey harvest? Try out a homemade lip balm recipe. Unsure what to make with your bounty of herbs and veggies? A rustic yet elegant goat cheese and zucchini panina might just do it.

While Wilkinson may use her grandmother’s old canning tricks or her aunt’s favorite recipes, this young, thoughtful gardener still manages to make her spread her own and delivers the best information on growing, raising, harvesting, and making from your own plot.

About the author: Renee Wilkinson is the creator of Hip Chick Digs, a popular blog dedicated to urban homesteading, edible landscape design and sustainable living. Garden spade in hand, Wilkinson is completing a graduate degree in landscape architecture and continues to inspire urbanites everywhere to get their hands dirty in their own city homesteads. She lives on a tenth-of-an-acre city lot in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and three chickens.

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From the stirrings of spring and summer swarms to autumn honey harvest and winter protection, this essential resource guides both the aspiring and experienced beekeeper through every season of the beekeeping year. Learn how to rear a queen, control a swarm, protect a hive, and keep bees healthy. The book is also packed with practical tips on using beeswax and, of course, making honey.

About the author: Ron Brown has more than 50 years' experience of keeping bees, both in Britain and central Africa. A former editor of the monthly journal Beekeeping, he has travelled all over the world to give lectures on specialist beekeeping topics.

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $17.95. AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

Chasing Chiles looks at both the future of place-based foods and the effects of climate change on agriculture through the lens of the chile pepper — from the farmers who cultivate this iconic crop to the cuisines and cultural traditions in which peppers play a huge role.

Why chile peppers? Both a spice and a vegetable, chile peppers have captivated imaginations and taste buds for thousands of years. Native to Mesoamerica and the New World, chiles are currently grown on every continent, since their relatively recent introduction to Europe (in the early 1500s via Christopher Columbus). Chiles are delicious, dynamic, and very diverse — they have been rapidly adopted, adapted and assimilated into numerous world cuisines, and while malleable to a degree, certain heirloom varieties are deeply tied to place and culture — but now accelerating climate change may be scrambling their terroir.

Over a year-long journey, three pepper-loving gastronauts — an agroecologist, a chef and an ethnobotanist — set out to find the real stories of America’s rarest heirloom chile varieties, and learn about the changing climate from farmers and other people who live by the pepper, and who, lately, have been adapting to shifting growing conditions and weather patterns. They put a face on an issue that has been made far too abstract for our own good.

Chasing Chiles is not your archetypal book about climate change, with facts and computer models delivered by a distant narrator. On the contrary, these three dedicated chileheads look and listen, sit down to eat, and get stories and recipes from on the ground — in farmers' fields, local cafes and the desert-scrub hillsides across North America. From the Sonoran Desert to Santa Fe and St. Augustine (the two oldest cities in the United States), from the marshes of Avery Island in Cajun Louisiana to the thin limestone soils of the Yucatan, this book looks at how and why climate change will continue to affect our palates and our producers, and how it already has.

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Based on the James Beard Award–winning blog The One-Block Diet, this all-in-one home gardening, do-it-yourself guide and cookbook shows you how to transform a backyard or garden into a self-sufficient locavore’s paradise.

When Margo True and her fellow staffers at Northern California–based Sunset magazine walked around the grounds of their Menlo Park office, they saw more than just a lawn and some gardens. Instead, they saw a fresh, bountiful food source, the makings for intrepid edible projects, and a series of seasonal feasts — all just waiting to happen.

The One-Block Feast is the story of how True and her team took an inspired idea and transformed it into an ambitious commitment: to create four feasts over the course of a year, using only what could be grown or raised in their backyard-sized plot. She candidly shares the group’s many successes and often humorous setbacks as they try their hands at chicken farming, cheese making, olive pressing, home brewing, beekeeping, winemaking and more.

Grouped into gardening, project and recipe guides for each season, The One-Block Feast is a complete resource for planning an eco-friendly kitchen garden; making your own pantry staples for year-round cooking and gifts; raising bees, chickens and even a cow; and creating made-from-scratch meals from ingredients you’ve grown yourself. Chapters are organized by season, each featuring a planting plan and crop-by-crop instructions, an account of how that season’s projects played out for the Sunset team, and a multicourse dinner menu composed of imaginative, appealing and ultra-resourceful vegetarian recipes, such as:

Butternut Squash Gnocchi With Chard and Sage Brown Butter, Egg and Gouda Crepes, Whole Wheat Pizzas With Roasted Vegetables and Homemade Cheeses, Fresh Corn Soup With Zucchini Blossoms, Braised Winter Greens With Preserved Lemons and Red Chile, Summer Lemongrass Custards, Honey Ice Cream

Generously illustrated and easy to follow, this ultimate resource for today’s urban homesteader will inspire you to take “eating local” to a whole new level.

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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In an era when "go local," "organic food" and "sustainability" are on the tip of everyone's tongues, Harriet Fasenfest's A Householder's Guide to the Universe takes up the banner of progressive homemaking and urban farming as a way to confront the political, social and environmental issues facing our world today. Offering grass-roots practical advice on how to shop, garden, run a household, preserve and cook food, and more, Fasenfest also discusses the philosophy of householding.

In A Householder's Guide to the Universe, which is organized according to season and presented in monthly installments, Fasenfest invites the reader into her home, garden and kitchen to consider concrete tools for change. Streetwise and poetic, fierce and romantic, the book provides not only a way out of our current economic and environmental logjam but also a readable and often funny analysis of how we got there.

About the author:
Harriet Fasenfest is an avid gardener, food preserver, homemaker and lover of the soil. At 56, Harriet officially fled Main Street (and her restaurants) for the greener pastures of the backyard, where she teaches classes on householding. Born and raised in the Bronx, she currently lives in Portland, Ore.

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Daughter of Iowa farmers, Missouri homesteader and mother of five, Diane Ott Whealy never anticipated that one day she would become a leader in a grass-roots movement to preserve our agricultural biodiversity. The love for the land and the respect for heirloom seeds that Ott Whealy shared with her husband, Kent, led to their starting Seed Savers Exchange in 1975.

Seed Savers Exchange, the nation’s premier nonprofit seed-saving organization, began humbly as a simple exchange of seeds among passionate gardeners who sought to preserve the rich gardening heritage their ancestors had brought to this country. Seeds that Ott Whealy herself inherited from her paternal grandparents were the impetus for the formation of Seed Savers Exchange, whose membership has grown from a small coterie to more than 13,000. Its influence has been felt in gardens across America.

Ott Whealy’s down-to-earth narrative traces her fascinating journey from Oregon to Kansas to Missouri then back home to Iowa where, in 1986, Heritage Farm became the permanent home of Seed Savers Exchange. Her heartwarming story captures what is best in the American spirit: the ability to dream and, through hard work and perseverance, inspire others to contribute their efforts to a cause. Thus was created one of the nation’s most admired nonprofits in the field of genetic preservation.

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A windowsill is among the best possible places to put a plant that provides ample sunlight, brightens the look of your home from the outside, and adds what amounts to a filter to the air coming in and out of your home. In winter, they can add a touch of color to an otherwise drab view, and in summer they thrive. But not every plant grows well in these conditions: According to Garden Guides, as many as 40 percent of most houseplants don't need nearly that much sunlight. The selection of the right houseplants for your windowsill is a necessary step to ensuring they survive and thrive.

This book will guide you through the steps needed to select the perfect plants for your windowsill and cultivate them to both fit in with your space and to survive the conditions, whether inside or outside. You will learn everything you need to know to effectively plant windowsill plants and improve how your home and your windows look to the world outside. You will learn, through a series of detailed charts, which plants are best suited to the cramped space of a windowsill and which ones will only give you problems. You will learn how much light each plant needs and how much water and food they need and whether you need to supplement natural provision of these resources. You will learn how to care for your plants while keeping away pests and animals that may eat the leaves or dig up the dirt.

Top experts in gardening have been interviewed and their insights will help you learn what works and what doesn't work for your windowsill plants. From first planting, whether by seed or potted plant, you will have every resource you need to keep your windowsill plants alive and thriving in their new environment with this book.