Hide 

This 241-page book helps you evaluate the housing needs of your animals and provides dozens of adaptable plans for sheds, coops, hutches, multipurpose barns, windbreaks and shade structures, as well as plans for essential equipment.

Hide 

Skilled lumberjacks Frank and Stephen Philbrick show you how to bring a tree from forest to fireplace. This is your complete guide to bringing in wood, from felling the tree, to splitting and drying the wood, to stacking and burning. The father and son duo will give you detailed instructions on managing a woodlot, felling and bucking, splitting and stacking, and even include fun facts on burning wood.

Hide 

Chicken coops come in all sizes and styles to meet the needs of every chicken family. Start a great DIY project, and build a chicken coop with these how-to drawings and conceptual plans for 45 different designs — from strictly practical to flights of fancy — guaranteed to meet the needs of every chicken owner. A 16-page color section shows detailed photos of many of the featured coops.

Hide 

Build your own home brewing equipment with this Mother Earth News e-handbook. Making your own counterflow wort chiller or a refrigerated keg system will save you money. Brew your own beer without buying expensive equipment.

The instructions in these e-handbooks are written for beginner or advanced brewers, whether you brew from a kit or are an experienced grain master. Chapters include:

• Immersion Wort Chillers
• Counterflow Chillers
• Mash Tuns
• Kegging
• Brewery Design

Hide 

Fix your septic system with The Septic System Owners Manual. Learn how conventional gravity-fed septic systems work. Read about maintenance and upkeep for your septic system.

There is also basic information on the recent evolution in composting-toilet systems and designs for simple graywater systems.

This is a basic manual for the average homeowner, based on conventional systems and providing practical advice on how to keep these systems up and running.

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 its 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.

Hide 

This book turns the compost bin upside down with a natural six-way gardening system of keeping compost heaps right in the garden, rather than in some dark corner behind the garage. The compost and plants live together from the beginning in a nourishing, organic environment.

Author Barbara Pleasant's bountiful, compost-rich gardens require less digging, weeding, mulching and even less planting. And here's one of the best parts — no more backbreaking slogs from compost bin to garden. Pleasant and co-author Deborah Martin even identify the plants that benefit most from compost and how the elements of a composted garden work together. Their natural six-way compost gardening system provides the ruling principles for successfully improving every garden with healthy compost.

Hide 

This book is fully illustrated with step-by-step directions for building your own earth oven. This easy DIY project can be completed with a few tools and in one day. If you have a scrap pile you can build this for free — or buy materials for less than $30. Kiko Denzer's book includes directions on how to tend the fire and how to make sourdough hearth loaves in the artisan tradition.

Good building soil is often right in your backyard, under your feet. Build the simplest oven in a day! With a bit more time and imagination, you can make a permanent foundation and a fire-breathing-dragon oven or any other shape that you can dream up.

Hide 

Heat Your Home for Free is a collection of classic articles exclusively from Mother Earth News that shows how simple solar systems can heat your home, garage, shop, barn, commercial building — just about any structure with a south-facing wall. The heat comes from solar energy, and it’s free. Best of all, this e-handbook shows how you can design, build and install solar heating systems yourself! We’ve compiled our best articles on do-it-yourself solar heating, from the early days of the magazine right up to the present.