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Learn how to collect, save, and cultivate the seeds from more than 300 vegetables, herbs, fruits, flowers, trees and shrubs. It’s easy, and it’s fun! Authors Robert Gough and Cheryl Moore-Gough thoroughly explain every step in the seed-saving process. Descriptions of seed biology; tips on how to select plants for the best seeds; and advice on harvesting and cleaning, proper storage and care, and propagating and caring for new seedlings are all presented with clear, easy-to-follow instructions.

Chapters dedicated to individual plants contain species-specific directions and detailed information. Gardeners of any experience level will find all the information they need to extend the life of their favorite plants to the next generation and beyond.

About the authors
Robert Gough holds a doctorate in botany and is Professor Emeritus of Horticulture at the College of Agriculture, Montana State University. He is the author of 17 gardening books, 500 extension service publications, and articles for Fine Gardening, Country Journal, National Gardening, Zone 4, Montana Magazine, and Harrowsmith. He served as Extension Horticulturalist in Montana, hosted the popular Dr. Bob’s Northern Gardening Tips radio program for 10 years, and was a panel member on PBS’s Montana Ag Live for 15 years. He is a Fellow of both the American Society for Horticultural Science and the North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture, as well as a member of the advisory board of Zone 4.

Cheryl Moore-Gough holds an M.S. in Plant Sciences from Montana State University, where she retired as State Extension Horticulturalist in Montana; she is currently adjunct assistant professor in Horticulture. Moore-Gough has instructed and coordinated the Montana Master Gardener program as well as various undergraduate classes at MSU, and has published numerous works alone and with her husband, Dr. Robert Moore, including five gardening books. She has written for Montana Magazine, Fine Gardening, American Nurseryman, Zone 4 Magazine, and hosts “Northern Gardening Tips” carried by radio stations throughout Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota on the Northern News Network. She has been gardening and saving seeds in Montana for 30 years.

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $24.95 AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

Plan a flower garden for season-round beauty and color with this indispensable reference to growing 541 annuals, perennials and bulbs. Each plant listed features precise information on regional suitability; how to sow seeds indoors and out; how and when to transplant seedlings; general plant care; when to expect the plant to flower; and how to propagate the plant. An at-a-glance design planner lists bloom time, color, height, and site requirements for more than 1700 species. All this, plus a full-color gallery of more than 500 flowers, makes this the essential Potting Bench Reference Book for every flower gardener.

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If you love the joys of eating home-garden vegetables but always thought those joys had to stop at the end of summer, this book is for you. Eliot Coleman introduces the surprising fact that most of the United States has more winter sunshine than the south of France. He shows how North American gardeners can successfully use that sun to raise a wide variety of traditional winter vegetables in backyard cold frames and plastic-covered tunnel greenhouses without supplementary heat. Coleman expands upon his own experiences with new ideas learned on a winter-vegetable pilgrimage across the ocean to the acknowledged kingdom of vegetable cuisine, the southern part of France, which lies on the 44th parallel, the same latitude as his farm in Maine.

This story of sunshine, weather patterns, old limitations and expectations, and new realities is delightfully innovative in the best gardening tradition. Four-Season Harvest will have you feasting on fresh produce from your garden all through the winter.

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.

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $19.95 AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

Until recently, children played outdoors after school and in the summer. Today, however, children are more likely to spend their free time indoors, watching television, playing video games, or using a computer. But children thrive in the natural world — studies show that they work and mature better mentally, physically, and emotionally when exposed to nature. This book offers a wide range of innovative examples showing how to create special places in which children can experience nature on their own home turf. Featured throughout are miniature paradises that parents and grandparents have designed just for the children in their lives, highlighting an enchanting variety of elements that will make any garden come alive.

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $29.95 AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

Assembled by two of the most distinguished botanical and ethnological scholars in Britain, this book chronicles the medicinal uses of more than 400 species used by the plain folk of Britain and Ireland. The history of these plants' usages has been mined from rich firsthand accounts captured by surveys, from more than 1000 manuscript volumes of the Irish Folklore Commission, and from close to 300 other published and unpublished sources. The book includes chosen illustrations from herbals such as those by Bock, Fuchs, and Brunfels, and a selection of color photographs by Deni Bown.

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $24.95 AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

Smart gardeners know that soil is anything but an inert substance. Healthy soil is teeming with life — not just earthworms and insects, but a staggering multitude of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms. When we use chemical fertilizers, we injure the microbial life that sustains healthy plants and become increasingly dependent on an arsenal of artificial, often toxic, substances. But there is an alternative to this vicious cycle. We can garden in a way that strengthens the soil food web — the complex world of soil-dwelling organisms whose interactions create a nurturing environment for plants.

Teaming with Microbes extols the benefits of cultivating the soil food web. First, it clearly explains the activities and organisms that make up the web. Next, it explains how gardeners can cultivate the life of the soil through the use of compost, mulches and compost tea. The revised edition updates the original text and includes two completely new chapters — on mycorrhizae (beneficial associations fungi form with green-leaved plants) and archaea (single-celled organisms once thought to be allied to bacteria).

With Jeff Lowenfels's help, everyone — from devotees of organic gardening techniques to weekend gardeners who simply want to grow healthy, vigorous plants without resorting to chemicals — can create rich, nurturing, living soil.

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $29.95 AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

If people knew how many poisonous plants are commonly found in homes and gardens, they'd be shocked. Plants as common as monkshood, castorbean and oleander are not just dangerous, they're deadly. The North American Guide to Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms is a comprehensive, easy-to-use handbook. The book is split into four main categories: mushrooms, wild plants, ornamental and crop plants, and houseplants. Each plant entry includes a clear photograph to aid the task of identification, a description of the plant, notes on where it commonly occurs, and a description of its toxic properties. Plants are listed by common name to assist the nonspecialist.

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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.