Hide 

These 150 quick-and-easy recipes turn bumper crops into mouthwatering pickles and relishes, using little or no salt. All techniques meet current USDA guidelines.

New recipes for today's cooks include:

• Freezer pickles that can be prepared in less than half an hour
• Salt-free pickles for dieters
• Sweet Pickled Pears
• No-Salt Hot Sesame Parsnips
• Sunshine Pickles
• And more!

Hide 

Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money presents an essential new strategy for investing in local food systems and introduces a group of fiduciary activists who are exploring what should come after industrial finance and industrial agriculture. There is a vision for investing that puts soil fertility into return-on-investment calculations and serves people and place as much at it serves industry sectors and markets.

Leading the charge is Woody Tasch, whose decades of work as a venture capitalist, foundation treasurer, and entrepreneur now shed new light on a truer, more beautiful, more prudent kind of fiduciary responsibility. He offers an alternative vision to the dusty old industrial concepts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when dollars, and the businesses they financed, lost their connection to place; slow money, on the other hand, is firmly rooted in the new economic, social, and environmental realities of the 21st century.

About the author Woody Tasch is president of the newly formed NGO Slow Money and Chairman Emeritus of Investors’ Circle, a nonprofit network of angel investors, venture capitalists, foundations, and family offices that, since 1992, has facilitated the flow of $130 million to 200 early-stage companies and venture funds dedicated to sustainability. He lives in northern New Mexico. For information about Slow Money please visit www.slowmoneyalliance.org.

Hide 

In his insightful new book, Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind, contrary farmer Gene Logsdon provides the inside story of manure — our greatest, yet most misunderstood, natural resource. He begins by lamenting a modern society that not only throws away both animal and human manure — worth billions of dollars in fertilizer value — but that spends a staggering amount of money to do so. This wastefulness makes even less sense as the supply of mined or chemically synthesized fertilizers dwindles and their cost skyrockets. In fact, he argues, if we do not learn how to turn our manures into fertilizer to keep food production in line with increasing population, our civilization, like so many that went before it, will inevitably decline.

With his trademark humor, his years of experience writing about both farming and waste management, and his uncanny eye for the small but important details, Logsdon artfully describes how to make fertilizer and humus by managing farm manure, pet manure and human manure.

About the author
Gene Logsdon farms in Upper Sandusky, Ohio. He is one of the clearest and most original voices of rural America. He has published more than two dozen books. He writes a popular blog at OrganicToBe.org, is a regular contributor to Farming Magazine and The Draft Horse Journal, and writes an award-winning weekly column in the Ohio Progressor Times.

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.

Hide 

The latest buzz is that anyone from 8 to 80 can learn and enjoy the popular hobby of beekeeping. Whether you live in an apartment with just a small balcony or you have a farm with acres of land, this book will teach you how to get started. Find out where to locate your bees, how to get them home, where and how to house them, and the methods for collecting their wax and honey. Whether you want to start a home-based beekeeping business or simply enjoy a new hobby, you'll become an expert in no time at all. Learn the history of bees and beekeeping and get the best advice available for safely collecting the honey and wax from your bees.

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.

Hide 

From a lakeside cabin to a hilltop farmhouse, from an urban brownstone to a suburban ranch — any house can be beautified with decorative pieces crafted from found bits of the woodland landscape, such as pine cones, moss, bark, twigs and river rocks. Artist and author Marlene Hurley Marshall shows you how to use responsibly collected materials to create stylish wreaths, frames, furniture, collages, potpourri, birdhouses, garden pots and much more. Featuring luscious photography by Sabine Vollmer von Falken, Woodland Style gives you the inspiration and instruction you need to enjoy the peace and beauty of the woods and meadows in your own home.

About the author
Marlene Marshall is a painter/collage artist, arts educator, designer, and author of Making Bits and Pieces Mosaics (Storey, 1998), Shell Chic (Storey, 2002) and Woodland Style (Storey, 2010). For more than a decade, Marshall has been conducting studio art classes in mosaic and shell design applications, as well as the visual arts. She frequently lectures at museums, art schools and private clubs along the East Coast. She also designs and consults with communities on outdoor mosaic projects for public walkways and parks. Marshall has appeared on both the Home and Garden and DIY networks. Her work has been exhibited and sold in galleries and museum shops throughout North America. She lives in Hudson, N.Y.

Hide 

Rather than cover hundreds of plants in abbreviated accounts like the typical field guide, author Samuel Thayer has chosen a smaller selection of species to discuss in exhaustive detail, including only those plants he has eaten 50 times or more. This book contains as many as 10 high-quality color photographs of each plant. These have been painstakingly selected to facilitate identification and depict the plant parts at exactly the stage of growth in which they should be harvested. The accompanying text is accurate and thorough, giving readers of any experience level the confidence to harvest wild plants for food. Botanically, the text is accurate — yet it remains accessible to the layperson by using technical terms only when necessary.

The Forager’s Harvest has many unique features that will appeal to naturalists, hikers, campers, survivalists, homesteaders, gardeners, chefs, Native Americans and whole-food enthusiasts. The book contains a calendar of harvest times for wild produce, a step-by-step protocol for positive identification, an illustrated glossary tailored to the needs of foragers, a recommended reading list, plus special sections on conservation, safety, nutrition, harvest techniques, preparation methods and storage. While The Forager’s Harvest is not a regional guide, it will prove most useful to readers in the eastern US and Canada, the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Northwest.

Hide 

Novices eager to collect tasty wild mushrooms will find this unique guide invaluable. Unlike others, it focuses only on those mushrooms that are both safe to eat and delicious. Most important, this book presents the eight rules of mushroom gathering in a straightforward fashion — including "Never, never take a mushroom with gills," and "If a mushroom smells rotten, it is rotten." Among the many mushrooms covered are the cep; the red-cracked, larch, bay and birch boletes; hen of the woods, chanterelle, trumpet chanterelle, hedgehog fungus, common puffball, horn of plenty and cauliflower mushroom. Each is identified with several color photographs and identification checklist, and there's also information on mushroom season, handling, storage and cooking, complete with recipes.

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.

Hide 

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.

Hide 

Wanna save yourself money and time at the gas pump? Learn how to make your own electric car with Ben Nelson's DVD, "Build Your Own Electric Car."

Providing almost two hours of hands-on instructions, this helpful DVD will take you through all of the aspects of building an electric car. Nelson's idea is for you to make your own electric car for not a lot of money and be proud of your do-it-yourself creation.

Hide 

Conventional agriculture destroys our soils, pollutes our water and is a major contributor to climate change. What if our agricultural practices could stabilize, or even reverse these trends?

The Biochar Solution explores the dual function of biochar as a carbon-negative energy source and a potent soil-builder. Created by burning biomass in the absence of oxygen, this material has the unique ability to hold carbon back from the atmosphere while simultaneously enhancing soil fertility. Author Albert Bates traces the evolution of this extraordinary substance from the ancient black soils of the Amazon to its reappearance as a modern carbon sequestration strategy.

Combining practical techniques for the production and use of biochar with an overview of the development and future of carbon farming, The Biochar Solution describes how a new agricultural revolution can reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to below zero while increasing world food reserves and creating energy from biomass wastes. Biochar and carbon farming can reduce fossil fuels inputs into our food system; bring new life to desert landscapes; filter and purify drinking water; and help build carbon-negative homes, communities and nations.

Biochar is not without dangers if unregulated, and it is not a panacea, but if it fulfills its promise of taking us back from the brink of irreversible climate change, it may well be the most important discovery in human history.