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Backyard chickens meet contemporary design! Matthew Wolpe and Kevin McElroy give you 14 complete building plans for chicken coops that range from the purely functional to the outrageously fabulous. One features a water-capturing roof, another pays homage to mid-Modern architecture, and still another sports a built-in composting system. Some designs suit beginning builders, while others are challenging enough for experts. Full-color photographs and detailed construction illustrations accompany the step-by-step building plans.

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Starter Coops provides clear, detailed instructions for building and maintaining backyard chicken coops. Before bringing home chickens, hobbyists must first build a housing structure for their soon-to-be flock. This how-to guide offers everything there is to know about building a chicken coop, from deciding which type of structure fits your purpose and financial needs to adding the appropriate color and décor. Author Wendy Bedwell-Wilson also goes beyond the building of the coop to offer information about routine maintenance and troubleshooting tips for managing bugs and varmints. This book offers a solution to any issue that may arise when building and caring for your chicken coop. With its entertaining yet precise and practical tone, Starter Coops is the perfect guide for novice, small-scale chicken owners.

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Looking to start raising rabbits for meat? Want to be successful in the rabbit show ring? Wondering how you can keep those pesky wild rabbits out of your garden? GRIT's Guide to Backyard Rabbits is the answer to all these questions and many more. Inside this 100-page guide you'll find more than 25 keys to a successful rabbit-raising enterprise. Nearly 20 articles are included, as well as heartwarming photos and an "ID That Bunny" challenge to test your knowledge of backyard rabbits.

The entire rabbit-raising spectrum is covered in this second edition of Guide to Backyard Rabbits. Learn about raising rabbits for meat and breeding stock. Build rabbits homes and learn what equipment you'll need. Read about a basic bunny diet that will keep them happy and healthy. Discover new rabbit recipes as well as readers' favorites. And learn interesting rabbit facts and bizarre bunny history … such as where the tale of the Easter Bunny originates, and much more!

Other articles include:

• Hot-Weather Care That Pays Off Year-Round: Keeping your bunnies cool during the blazing heat of summer brings a litter of benefits.
• Hay for Hutch: Make tons of rabbit feed the easy way.
• The Rabbit House: If you're more of a "hands-off" type of animal husband, keeping rabbits all together in a colony - rather than individual cages - may appeal to you.
• Ban Bunnies From Your Vegetable Patch: Build this safe, simple and humane trap to keep uninvited critters out of your garden.
• On to the Rabbit Shows!: An excerpt from Storey's Guide to Raising Rabbits provides information for those wanting to show off their bunnies.
• Professional Rabbitry: If you've considered making the leap from hobby to business, read this advice from a professional conservation breeder.

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Calling all chicken enthusiasts! The fourth edition of GRIT's Guide to Backyard Chickens is overflowing with expert advice, key facts and easy chicken coop plans that will have both beginner and seasoned chicken owners crowing for joy! The 100 pages cover everything from hatching a flock to building the Whizbang Chicken Plucker.

Read how to build a broiler coop on a shoestring budget. Build the perfect chicken tractor. Learn which heritage hens are best for egg-laying. Understand how to use poultry as your secret weapon in pest control. Follow the wide variety of delicious chicken recipes this book has to offer.

Or maybe you're interested in raising guineas, ducks or turkeys? Learn how guineas can eliminate ticks from your property. Ducks can provide eggs, meat and entertainment. Discover nine facts about the unsuspecting turkey that you might not know.

More articles include:

• Heritage Breeds or Modern Hybrids: Two expert opinions on chicken breed selection.
• The Ever-Versatile Egg: Try these recipes to turn your dishes up a notch and hone tried-and-true techniques.
• Doghouse Chicken Tractor: Making do can often yield a more satisfying result than buying new.
• Wintering Chickens: Fowl weather lies ahead; follow a few easy steps, and your flock won't be vulnerable.
• Home on the (Free-) Range: "Where the hens and the rooster are happy all day …"
• Build a Weatherproof, Pest-Proof Chicken Feeder: Feed your flock without encouraging mold or supporting the local mouse and starling populations.

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Across North America, an agricultural renaissance is unfolding. A growing number of market gardeners are emerging to feed our appetite for organic, regional produce. At the same time, most books and resources about food production aim at the backyard and hobby gardener, who simply want to supplement their family's diet with a few homegrown fruits and vegetables. Targeted at serious growers in every climate zone, Sustainable Market Farming acts as a comprehensive manual for small-scale farmers raising organic crops sustainably on a few acres.

Informed by the author's extensive experience growing a wide variety of fresh, organic vegetables and fruit to feed the approximately 100 members of Twin Oaks Community in central Virginia, this practical guide provides:

• Detailed profiles of a full range of crops, addressing sowing, cultivation, rotation, succession, common pests and diseases, harvest and storage
• Information about new and efficient techniques, season extension, and disease-resistant varieties
• Farm-specific business skills to help ensure a successful, profitable enterprise

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If you want to incubate, hatch and brood chicks yourself, rather than buying them from a hatchery, this is the guide you need. Poultry authority Gail Damerow explains exactly how to hatch healthy baby chickens, ducklings, goslings, turkey poults and guinea keets, addressing everything from selecting a breed and choosing the best incubator to ensuring proper setup and sanitary conditions, understanding embryo development, and feeding and caring for newborn chicks in a brooder. This is an indispensable reference for any poultry raiser, whether you want to hatch three eggs or 100.

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MOTHER EARTH NEWS and GRIT come together to bring you 600 pages of expert advice, recipes, do-it-yourself projects and more information on living a self-sufficient life. This set covers everything from organic gardening to bees and honey, from backyard rabbits to self-reliance and country skills. The do-it-yourself projects include energy-saving household updates as well as instructions for constructing chicken coops, outdoor bread ovens and permanent garden beds. Follow recipes for baking sourdough bread, preparing rabbit meat, fixing delicious egg dishes, and cooking with honey. Discover how to save money with energy-saving tips for your home, and how to cut your food bills in half by growing your own food right in your own backyard.

This set includes:
MOTHER EARTH NEWS Guide to Organic Gardening, 4th Edition
This glossy-paged guide is perfect for beginners or expert gardeners. It covers everything from perennial vegetables to choosing a greenhouse, from organic pest control to making compost. Read how poultry is the secret weapon for organic pest control. Learn how to make the best homemade tomato cages. Or plan out your kitchen garden with four delightful herb gardens plans.

MOTHER EARTH NEWS Guide to Self-Reliance and Country Skills, 2nd Edition
With more than 20 articles, this guide has hundreds of great ideas for self-reliant living. From preserving food to small-space gardening, from backyard chickens to making your own yogurt and cheese, this special guide has a wide variety of information that will help you lead a sustainable life.

GRIT Guide to Homemade Bread, 3rd Edition
Bread, bagels, pretzels, pizza crust, cookies and more! All of these delicious homemade creations can be found in this Guide to Homemade Bread. This guide includes more than 53 keys to successful bread making, outdoor bread oven plans, fail-proof no-knead breads, top bread machines tips and more.

GRIT Guide to Backyard Rabbits, 2nd Edition
You'll find more than 25 keys to a successful rabbit-raising enterprise in this special Barnyard Series guide. Learn about raising rabbits for meat and breeding stock. Build rabbit homes and learn what equipment you'll need. Read about a basic bunny diet that will keep them happy and healthy, and also discover so much more.

GRIT Guide to Backyard Chickens, 4th Edition
Calling all chicken enthusiasts! The fourth edition of this popular guide is overflowing with expert advice, key facts and easy chicken coop plans that will have both beginner and seasoned chicken owners crowing for joy! Read how to build a broiler coop on a shoestring budget. Build the perfect chicken tractor. Learn which heritage hens are the best for laying eggs. Follow the wide variety of delicious chicken recipes this book has to offer.

GRIT Guide to Backyard Bees and Honey, 3rd Edition
This treasure-trove of bee knowledge has more than 75 ways to get more from your bees. Cover-to-cover, this guide includes tips on saving money while building your own beehive or honey extractor with simple materials available at your local hardware store. Read how to use a top-bar hive, a less expensive method to raising bees that will pollinate your crops and provide tasty honey fresh from the comb.

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This is the book that tells you just about everything you need to know to raise poultry on pasture, from the egg up through processing. Based on years of hands-on experiences -- both success and failures -- the authors hold back nothing about the realities, advantages, disadvantages and rewards of small-scale poultry production systems for income and community food self-sufficiency. Offering hard to find information on raising turkeys, small-scale breeder flocks and incubation production, the book also includes a foreword by everybody's favorite contrary farmer, Gene Logsdon.

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This beautiful new book by 30-year-old writer and photographer Anna H. Blessing introduces readers to the story of the modern heartland farm. The book explores how sustainable practices--and close ties to high-profile chefs and restauranteurs--have propelled the "locally grown" culinary movement into a central feature of life in major cities like Chicago. Blessing lays out the rich histories of 25 midwestern farms through beautiful photography, fascinating anecdotes from farmers and chefs, and up-close looks at what makes each farm so unique.

Interest in sustainable farming has been growing rapidly across the country and around the world, emphasizing locally produced and grown foods in place of the mass-marketed offerings from corporate consortia. When inhabitants of major cities choose to purchase food raised in nearby farms, they not only support vital satellite economies, but also improve the social and ecological quality of life along with the environmental sustainability of the world around them.

Now there are also innumerable top-tier dining establishments, led by esteemed chefs like Charlie Trotter and Paul Kahan, who scour farmers markets for natural ingredients and develop personal business relationships with small-time farmers to supply their restaurants with the best and most sustainable foods. Locally Grown shows how both long-standing and newly founded farms, along with urban farms and metropolitan nonprofit organizations like Growing Power and City Provisions, are boosting the sustainable food movement throughout Chicago and its neighborhoods.

Each chapter profiles a different farm, outlining locale, scale, production, and inner workings while also revealing the captivating backgrounds of each farmer. Blessing shows how each farm and farmer are making efforts to improve sustainability, and describes the behind-the-scenes practices that have made locally grown food an increasingly important part of America's food culture.