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What could be better than enjoying a glass of cold, home-brewed beer, made from your own blend of barley and hops? Here, professional brewer John Parkes demystifies the brewing process and explains in simple terms how to produce a variety of ales, bitters and stouts with the help of just some basic equipment and a few key skills. Those new to home brewing will love the easy-to-follow instructions and the detailed explanations of the brewing process, and adept home brewers will be delighted with the wide selection of recipes. Made with natural ingredients, the brewing methods and beer recipes featured here will appeal to anyone seeking a more wholesome, self-sufficient lifestyle.

About the Author:

John Parkes has a lifelong fascination with beer, and in 2006 set up his own company, Red Rock Brewery, brewing traditional beer on his own farm. His beers are sold locally in Devon, England, and are also served in pubs around the area.

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We're destroying the planet, undermining happiness, and clinging to an unsustainable economy. Our obsessive pursuit of wealth isn't working. But there's another way. Less can be More. Throughout history wise people have argued that we need to live more simply — that only by limiting outer wealth can we have inner wealth.

With Less is More, editors Cecile Andrews and Wanda Urbanska have put together a compelling collection of works by people who have been writing about simplicity for decades, including Bill McKibben, Sarah Susanka, John de Graaf, Bryan Welch and many more.

These thinkers bring us a new vision of less: less stuff, less work, less stress, less debt. A life with less becomes a life with more: more time, more satisfaction, more balance, more security. When we have too much, we savor nothing. When we choose less, we regain our life and can think and feel deeply. Ultimately, a life of less connects us with one true source of happiness: being a part of a caring community.

About the authors:

Cecile Andrews is the author of Circle of Simplicity and Slow is Beautiful and co-founder of Phinney EcoVillage. She has her doctorate in education from Stanford University.

Wanda Urbanska is producer and host of Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska. She is author or co-author of numerous books, including Simple Living and Nothing's Too Small to Make a Difference.

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 and products to its readers. For nearly 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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More than 128 birds strut their stuff across the pages of Storey’s Illustrated Guide to Poultry Breeds, the ultimate primer for farmers and fanciers alike. Admire the handsome black and white plumage of Lakenvelder roosters, read the fascinating history of the Blue Hens of Delaware, and marvel at the petite size and toylike appearance of Call ducks. And if you’re curious to know which heritage turkeys are making a comeback, look no further. This definitive guide to North American barnyard and wild fowl includes a brief history of each breed, detailed descriptions of identifying characteristics, and colorful photography that celebrates the birds’ quirky personalities and charming good looks. If it’s fowl facts and photos you want, you’ll find them all here.

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Thriving During Challenging Times is meant to serve as your handbook to energy, food and financial independence during this difficult era of rising oil costs, economic crisis, water shortages and climate change.

It's an easy time to be discouraged, but it's also an excellent time to take stock of your life and make some changes. It's time to reclaim your financial independence, weather the storm, and bring new meaning to your life. The technological world we find ourselves in distances us from the experiences that used to be part of the rhythm of daily life. Growing your own food, heating your home without being reliant on someone else, and living within your means are activities that will bring joy to your life and help you deal with the multiple challenges that we face today.

This book is a road map to making your home more independent, getting your bank account back on track, and discovering that digging potatoes for dinner or showering in water heated by the sun can provide the greatest of satisfactions. It's time to pay down that debt, grow your own food, and start integrating renewable energy and energy efficiency into your home to reduce your carbon footprint, achieve financial independence, and return your spirit to its rightful place in harmony with the simple things that make life a fantastic journey.

About the author: Cam Mather lives four miles from the nearest electricity lines, generating his power from the sun and wind and growing most of his own food. He is co-publisher of Aztext Press and the Solutions for Sustainability book series. He has produced instructional DVDs on growing vegetables and installing wind turbines and has motivated thousands of his workshop attendees to take joy in becoming more independent.

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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This revised and expanded fifth edition of Create an Oasis With Greywater describes how to quickly and easily choose, build and use a simple greywater system. Some can be completed in an afternoon for under $30.

It also provides complete instructions for more complex installations, and how to deal with freezing, flooding, drought, failing septics, low perk soil and nonindustrialized world conditions. This book helps in coordinating a team of professionals to get optimum results on high-end projects and "radical plumbing" that uses 90% less resources.

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 and products to readers. For more than 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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Completely revised and updated, the fourth edition of this classic guide covers everything you need to know about raising rabbits, including breed selection, year-round care and feeding, safe housing, humane handling, and disease prevention and treatment. New and expanded features include guidelines for showing, updated breed guide photographs and expert advice on marketing.

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Mother Nature has shown her hand. Faced with climate change, dwindling resources and species extinctions, most Americans understand the fundamental steps necessary to solve our global crises — drive less, consume less, increase self-reliance, buy locally, eat locally, rebuild our local communities.

In essence, the great work we face requires rekindling the home fires.

Radical Homemakers is about men and women across the United States who focus on home and hearth as a political and ecological act, and who have centered their lives on family and community for personal fulfillment and cultural change. It explores what domesticity looks like in an era that has benefited from feminism, where domination and oppression are cast aside and where the choice to stay home is no longer equated with mind-numbing drudgery, economic insecurity or relentless servitude.

Radical homemakers nationwide speak about empowerment, transformation, happiness, and casting aside the pressures of a consumer culture to live in a world where money loses its power to relationships, independent thought and creativity. If you ever considered quitting a job to plant tomatoes, read to a child, pursue creative work, can green beans and heal the planet, this is your book.

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This latest addition to Storey's venerable Guide to Raising Series gives you the essential, expert instruction and advice you need to successfully raise miniature livestock. Sue Weaver clearly explains the ins and outs of breeding, feeding, housing, diet, nutrition, exercise, disease prevention and treatment and much, much more. Whether you're a new or an experienced farmer, you'll find everything you need to keep your minis healthy and productive.

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In the 1970s, Dolly Freed lived off the land dirt cheap and plum easy. Living in her own house on a half-acre lot outside of Philadelphia for almost five years, Dolly and her father produced their own food and drink and spent roughly $700 each per year. Thirty years later, Dolly Freed's Possum Living is as fascinating and pertinent as it was in 1978. This reissue of the survivalist classic has a foreword by David Gates and an afterword by the author.

After discussing reasons why you should or shouldn't give up your job, Possum Living gives you details about the cheapest ways with the best results to buy and maintain your home, dress well, cope with the law, stay healthy and keep up a middle-class facade — whether you live in the city, in the suburbs or in a small town. In a delightful, straightforward style, Dolly Freed explains how to be lazy, proud, miserly and honest, live well and enjoy leisure. She shares her knowledge for what you do need — your own home, for example — and what you don't need — such as doctors, lawyers and insurance. Through her own example, Dolly hopes to inspire you to do some independent thinking about how economics affects the course of your life now and may do so in the coming "age of shortages." If you ever wondered what it would be like to be in greater control of your own life, Possum Living will show you — and help you do it for yourself.

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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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $37.95. AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

Some 40 percent of North Americans live in homes built before 1940, and when it comes time to remodel or restore our older homes, homeowners and contractors can find themselves lost in a morass of wildly divergent information and opinion. With Green Restorations, author Aaron Lubeck brings his expertise as a restoration contractor and preservation consultant to this first-of-its-kind guide, leading the reader through the steps for restoring historic building using sustainable practices and green building techniques.

In a readily accessible room-by-room and system-by-system format, Green Restorations covers rehabilitation and remodelling questions applicable to old homes, focusing on the core techniques and debates often seen in practice. Here you'll find the answers to restoration questions, such as:

• Is sealing my old crawl space a good idea?
• Should I replace or rehabilitate my windows?
• Are there historic aspects of my home I need to preserve, and what can I change?
• What are the cultural, environmental and financial implications of my proposed changes?
• Do residential historic tax credits apply to my home and how can I access them?

Written in such a way as to be accessible for homeowners but technical enough for contractors, this book will appeal to anyone trying to green an older home while preserving its historic and cultural significance.

About the Author

Aaron Lubeck is a partner with Trinity Design/Build, a restoration and preservation consultancy in North Carolina that has won numerous preservation awards. He is a member of the United States Green Building Council who has completed the first historic building to be LEED-certified in North Carolina.