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In this groundbreaking resource, two school garden pioneers offer parents, teachers and school administrators everything they need to know to build school gardens and to develop the programs that support them.

Today, both schools and parents have a unique opportunity — and an increasing responsibility — to cultivate an awareness of our finite resources, to reinforce values of environmental stewardship, to help students understand concepts of nutrition and health, and to connect children to the natural world. What better way to do this than by engaging young people, their families and teachers in the wondrous outdoor classroom that is their very own school garden?

It's all here: developing the concept, planning, fundraising, organizing, designing the space, preparing the site, working with parents and schools, teaching in the garden, planting, harvesting, and even cooking, with kid-friendly recipes and year-round activities. Packed with strategies, to-do lists, sample letters, detailed lesson plans and tricks of the trade from decades of experience developing school garden programs for grades K–8, this hands-on approach will make school garden projects accessible, inexpensive and sustainable.

Reclaiming a piece of neglected play yard and transforming it into an ecologically rich school garden is among the most beneficial activities that parents, teachers and children can undertake together. This book provides all the tools that the school community needs to build a productive and engaging school garden that will continue to inspire and nurture students and families for years to come.

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This celebrated, essential handbook for the urban homesteading movement shows how to grow and preserve your own food, clean your house without toxins, raise chickens, gain energy independence, and more. Step-by-step projects, tips and anecdotes will help get you started homesteading immediately. The Urban Homestead is also a guidebook to the larger movement and will point you to the best books and Internet resources on self-sufficiency topics.

Written by city dwellers for city dwellers, this copiously illustrated, two-color instruction book proposes a paradigm shift that will improve our lives, our community and our planet. By growing our own food and harnessing natural energy, we are planting seeds for the future of our cities.

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 definitive month-by-month guide brings gardeners into the delicious world of edible landscaping and helps take a load off the planet as we achieve greater food security. Full of illustrative color photos and step-by-step instructions, The Zero-Mile Diet shares wisdom gleaned from 30 years of food growing and seed saving with comprehensive advice on:

• Growing organic food year-round
• The small fruit orchard and backyard berries
• Superb yet simple seasonal recipes
• Preserving your harvest
• Seed saving and plant propagation
• Dirt-cheap ways to nourish your soil
• Backyard poultry — it's less time-consuming than you think
• Growing vegetables in the easiest way possible
• A-Z guide to growing the best vegetables and herbs

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The Herb Companion Guide to Healing Herbs is packed with valuable and illuminating information on more than 136 favorite herbs for growing, cooking and healing.

A 100-page guide is filled with articles on herbs that help you save money and help you stay healthy throughout the year. Articles cover everything from skin-soothing herbs to herbs that help with cold and flu.

Other articles include:

• Don't Break the Bank: Discover 15 herbs that will save you money on medical bills
• Beat Winter Colds: Treat and prevent winter colds with natural remedies
• Lower Your Blood Pressure: Help correct hypertension with four effective herbs
• Soothe Psoriasis: Control this skin condition with natural remedies

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Scientist and gardener Carol Deppe combines her passion for gardening with newly emerging scientific information from many fields — resilience science, climatology, climate change, ecology, anthropology, paleontology, sustainable agriculture, nutrition, health and medicine. In the last half of The Resilient Gardener, Deppe extends and illustrates these principles with detailed information about growing and using five key crops: potatoes, corn, beans, squash and eggs.

In this book you’ll learn how to:

• Garden in an era of unpredictable weather and climate change
• Grow, store, and use more of your own staple crops
• Garden efficiently and comfortably (even if you have a bad back)
• Grow, store, and cook different varieties of potatoes and save your own potato seed
• Grow the right varieties of corn to make your own gourmet-quality, fast-cooking polenta, cornbread, parched corn, corn cakes, pancakes and even savory corn gravy
• Make whole-grain, corn-based breads and cakes using the author’s original gluten-free recipes involving no other grains, artificial binders, or dairy products
• Grow and use popbeans and other grain legumes
• Grow, store, and use summer, winter, and drying squash
• Keep a home laying flock of ducks or chickens; integrate them with your gardening, and grow most of their feed

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Growing Roots: The New Generation of Sustainable Farmers, Cooks, and Food Activists is about a new revolution in food that involves young people who are living sustainable lives that revolve around healthy, natural food.

The book introduces us to farmers and beekeepers, fishermen and chefs, food activists and cheesemongers, and many, many more. We meet these fascinating young people from all across the nation through first-person profiles, along with brilliant photographs and delicious, simple recipes. They talk about raising grass-fed beef, lamb, and pork; growing vegetables and grains; keeping bees and making cheese; and their restaurants and their markets. Included are filmmakers, writers, and artists who change the way we look at what we eat and where our food comes from. In their profiles we learn how these young people got to where they are today, their backgrounds, their education, and their passionate relationship to food.

The author’s through-line gives us a glimpse of her own journey with food, through her own childhood, raising children, and becoming an empty-nester. Growing Roots is about relationships and how food figures in those relationships. It is for everyone who is interested in learning about this new iteration of the food movement and the folks involved, whether you’d like to figure out how to do it for yourself, or just love reading about it. The photos are beautiful, the narrative lively, and the recipes simple and delicious. A must-read for all ages and a wonderful addition to the food-lover’s bookshelf.

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Growing a Garden City offers compelling photographs and personal narratives of community garden members, graduate students and first graders, a low-income senior and troubled teen, a foodie, a food bank officer, and many more. They describe their setbacks and successes involved with community gardening and show how to build on and emulate their achievements anywhere across the country and around the world.

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It's the perfect gift for anyone who wants to grow the best garden ever and take the guesswork out of garden planning. This new revolutionary, one-year gift subscription software makes vegetable gardening so much easier.

Use the Mother Earth News Vegetable Garden Planner to:

• Create a personalized planting schedule - just enter your zip code and the software adjusts to your area!
• Experiment with bed designs and plant placement.
• Create a personalized planting schedule based on your local frost dates.
• Plan succession sowings to maximize the amount you can grow throughout the year.
• Plan crop rotations to prevent pests and depletion of soil nutrients.
• Keep track of plant varieties and other notes.
• Get biweekly e-mail reminders for what to plant and related information.

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In Thoughtful Gardening, award-winning historian and Financial Times gardening columnist Robin Lane Fox takes readers on a delightful journey through each season of the gardening year. From fending off vine-weevils to visiting Yves Saint Laurent’s private gardens in Marrakech, Morocco, Fox imbues each of his musings with grace, sophistication and charm. Essential reading for anyone planting a new garden or taking stock of one after several years, Thoughtful Gardening offers expert advice and a touching reminder of the power of art and literature to deepen what we see and experience in nature. Combining a vast understanding of horticulture with wit and artful storytelling, these vignettes form — season by season — a rich reflection on the lessons, challenges and joys of life with a green thumb.

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Nitrogen pollution of lakes, rivers and oceans by human urine is a growing problem. Liquid Gold shows how urine can safely be used to grow food, fuel, fiber and beautiful landscapes while protecting the environment and providing free and safe fertilizer. This great bathroom reader features a short history of urine use, from ritual to medicinal and even culinary, and many whimsical illustrations. It's an ideal gift for irreverent gardeners, homeowners, campers, environmentalists and anyone who urinates.

About the author:
Carol Steinfeld is a writer, urinal designer and ecological wastewater consultant.