The homesteading movement is continuing to grow, as more people are stepping up to have a hand in where their food comes from. Whether you want to dabble or immerse yourself completely in the do-it-yourself, back-to-basics lifestyle, Welcome to the Farm is a comprehensive, fully illustrated guide to growing the very best food right in your own backyard. Shaye Elliott takes readers on a journey that teaches them how to harvest baskets full of organic produce, milk a dairy cow (and make butter), plant a homestead orchard, can jams and jellies, and even raise chickens and bees. From her experience running The Elliott Homestead, Shaye provides all the how-to wisdom you need to know about:

• The benefits of a home garden
• The basics of seed starting
• Building your own greenhouse
• What belongs in the winter garden
• Canning, freezing, and dehydrating techniques and recipes
• The pros and cons of caged vs. free-range chickens
• Keeping a dairy cow and what to do with all the milk
• Raising animals for meat
• Making your own cider and wine
• And so much more!

Welcome to the Farm is aimed to serve homesteaders and urban-farmers alike, guiding them through the beginning stages of small-area farming and utilizing whatever amount of space they have available for optimal and delicious food production.

It's the question most commonly heard in every garden: What's wrong with my…? And with the best-selling What's Wrong With My Plant? and What's Wrong With My Vegetable Garden?, David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth answered it for flower borders, perennial gardens and vegetable beds. What's next? One of the most challenging parts of the garden-the delicious yet disease-prone fruit garden.

What's Wrong With My Fruit Garden? offers a path toward a healthy garden packed with fresh fruit. In addition to learning how to diagnose a plant problem through clear visual keys, you will also learn the most effective organic solutions for every problem. Detailed plant portraits include information on growth; seasonality; temperature, light and soil requirements; and planting techniques. The 37 plants include everything from almonds to watermelons.

This book is a must-have guide for any food gardener looking to grow scrumptious and problem-free fruit!

Disasters often strike without warning and leave a trail of destruction in their wake. Yet armed with the right tools and information, survivors can fend for themselves and get through even the toughest circumstances. Matthew Stein's When Disaster Strikes provides a thorough, practical guide for how to prepare for and react in many of life's most unpredictable scenarios.

In this disaster-preparedness manual, he outlines the materials you'll need—from food and water, to shelter and energy, to first-aid and survival skills—to help you safely live through the worst. When Disaster Strikes covers how to find and store food, water, and clothing, as well as the basics of installing back-up power and lights. You’ll learn how to gather and sterilize water, build a fire, treat injuries in an emergency, and use alternative medical sources when conventional ones are unavailable.

Stein instructs you on the smartest responses to natural disasters—such as fires, earthquakes, hurricanes and floods—how to keep warm during winter storms, even how to protect yourself from attack or other dangerous situations. With this comprehensive guide in hand, you can be sure to respond quickly, correctly, and confidently when a crisis threatens.

There’s never been a better time to “be prepared.” Matthew Stein’s comprehensive primer on sustainable living skills — from food and water to shelter and energy to first-aid and crisis-management skills — prepares you to embark on the path toward sustainability. But, unlike any other book, Stein not only shows you how to live “green” in seemingly stable times, but to live in the face of potential disasters, lasting days or years, coming in the form of social upheaval, economic meltdown or environmental catastrophe.

When Technology Fails covers the gamut. You’ll learn how to start a fire and keep warm if you’ve been left temporarily homeless, as well as the basics of installing a renewable energy system for your home or business. You’ll learn how to find and sterilize water in the face of utility failure, as well as practical information for dealing with water-quality issues even when the public tap water is still flowing. You’ll learn alternative techniques for healing equally suited to an era of profit-driven malpractice as to situations of social calamity. Each chapter offers the same approach, describing skills for self-reliance in good times and bad. Chapter subjects include: a survey of the risks to the status quo; supplies and preparation for short- and long-term emergencies; emergency measures for survival; water; food; shelter; clothing; first aid, low-tech medicine and healing; energy, heat and power; metalworking; utensils and storage; low-tech chemistry; and engineering, machines and materials.

Fully revised and expanded — the first edition was written pre-9/11 and pre-Katrina, when few Americans took the risk of social disruption seriously — When Technology Fails ends on a positive, proactive note with a new chapter on "Making the Shift to Sustainability," which offers practical suggestions for changing our world on personal, community and global levels.

About the author

Matthew Stein holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. He is an engineer, author and building contractor. He has also worked as a schoolteacher, carpenter, and rock-climbing and ski instructor. As the owner of Aloha Aina Builders, Stein has built hurricane-resistant, energy-efficient and environmentally friendly homes. As a mechanical engineer and president of Stein Design, he has designed consumer water-filtration devices, commercial water-filtration systems, photovoltaic roofing panels, medical bacteriological filters, drinking fountains, emergency chemical drench systems, computer disk drives, portable fiberglass buildings, and automated assembly machinery for Applied Solar, Hewlett-Packard, Seagate, Plantronics, Duraflame, Haws and IGT. He currently resides with his wife, Josie, in the High Sierra Mountains near Lake Tahoe, Calif. For many years, Stein has pursued avid interests in renewable energy, alternative healing, sustainable growth and preventative medicine.

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.

Written by Mother Earth Living Food Editor and Mother Earth News Contributing Editor Tabitha Alterman, Whole Grain Baking Made Easy is an in-depth guide for bakers who want to maximize the nutritional value of their breads, pastries and desserts while experimenting with delicious new flavors of many different whole grains and other real food ingredients.

Try more than 75 recipes for whole-grain baked goods (all with full-color photography) featuring amaranth, barley, buckwheat, corn, durum, einkorn, emmer, oats, quinoa, rice, sorghum, spelt, rye, teff and different types of whole wheat. Alterman’s recipes are accessible yet thorough, with explanations of technique that will not only ensure success with her recipes, but will also make you a better cook.

Whole Grain Baking Made Easy also includes thorough instructions for grinding your own grains, from choosing a grain mill to making it easy to fit homemade flour making into your life. It’s not necessary to make homemade flour in order to enjoy the recipes in this book, but Alterman shows you how easy and worthwhile it can be to take the extra step toward self-sufficiency.

Whether you want to bake low-gluten goodies, maximize the nutrition in your desserts, become more self-reliant, learn how to find time to make your daily bread, master sourdough at last, or learn how to buy and use heirloom and heritage grains to replace white flour in everyday recipes, Whole Grain Baking Made Easy puts you in charge of the grains in your diet from start to finish.

From one of the country's foremost doctors comes a groundbreaking book about diagnosing, treating and healing Lyme, and peeling away the layers that lead to chronic disease.

You may not know that you have Lyme. It can mimic disease processes including chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, autoimmune conditions such as multiple sclerosis, psychiatric conditions such as depression and anxiety, and cause significant memory and concentration problems, mimicking early dementia. It is called the "Great Imitator," and inaccurate testing (combined with a fierce, ongoing debate that questions chronic infection) makes it difficult for sufferers to find effective care.

When Dr. Richard Horowitz moved to the Hudson Valley more than two decades ago to start his own medical practice, he had no idea that he was jumping into a hotbed of Lyme disease. He would soon realize that many of the chronic disease diagnoses people were receiving were also the result of Lyme … and he would discover how once-treatable infections, in the absence of timely intervention, could cause dis¬abling conditions. In a field where the number of cases is growing exponentially around the world and answers remain elusive, Horowitz has treated more than 12,000 patients and made extraordinary progress. His plan represents a crucial paradigm shift, without which the suffering will continue.

In this book, Horowitz:

• Breaks new ground with a 16-Point Differential Diagnostic Map, the basis for his revolutionary Lyme treatment plan, and an overarching approach to treating all chronic illness.
• Introduces MSIDS, or Multiple Systemic Infectious Disease Syndrome, a new lens on chronic illness that may prove to be an important missing link.
• Covers in detail Lyme's leading symptoms and co-infections, including immune dysfunction, sleep disorders, chronic pain and neurodegenerative disorders. He pro¬vides a unique functional and integrative health care model, based on the most up-to-date scientific research, for physicians and health care providers to effectively treat Lyme and other chronic illnesses.

Cutting through the frustration, misinformation and endless questions, Horowitz's enlightening story of medical discovery, science and politics is an all-in-one source for patients of chronic illness to identify their own symptoms and work with their doctors for the best possible treatment outcome.

Bread. Cheese. Wine. Beer. Coffee. Chocolate. Most people consume fermented foods and drinks every day. For thousands of years, humans have enjoyed the distinctive flavors and nutrition resulting from the transformative power of microscopic bacteria and fungi. Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods is the first cookbook to widely explore the culinary magic of fermentation.

"Fermentation has been an important journey of discovery for me," writes author Sandor Ellix Katz. "I invite you to join me along this effervescent path, well trodden for thousands of years yet largely forgotten in our time and place, bypassed by the superhighway of industrial food production."

The flavors of fermentation are compelling and complex, quite literally alive. This book takes readers on a whirlwind trip through the wide world of fermentation, providing readers with basic and delicious recipes-some familiar, others exotic-that are easy to make at home.

The book covers vegetable ferments such as sauerkraut, kimchi, and sour pickles; bean ferments including miso, tempeh, dosas, and idli; dairy ferments including yogurt, kefir, and basic cheesemaking (as well as vegan alternatives); sourdough bread-making; other grain fermentations from Cherokee, African, Japanese, and Russian traditions; extremely simple wine- and beer-making (as well as cider-, mead-, and champagne-making) techniques; and vinegar-making. With nearly 100 recipes, this is the most comprehensive and wide-ranging fermentation cookbook ever published.

About the author:
Sandor Ellix Katz is a self-taught fermentation experimentalist. He wrote Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods—which Newsweek called "the fermenting bible"—in order to share the fermentation wisdom he had learned, and demystify home fermentation. Since the book's publication in 2003, Katz has taught hundreds of fermentation workshops across North America and beyond, taking on a role he describes as a "fermentation revivalist." Now, in The Art of Fermentation, with a decade more experience behind him, the unique opportunity to hear countless stories about fermentation practices, and answering thousands of troubleshooting questions, he's sharing a more in-depth exploration of the topic.

Since its publication in 2003, and aided by Katz’s engaging and fervent workshop presentations, Wild Fermentation has inspired people to turn their kitchens into food labs: fermenting vegetables into sauerkraut, milk into cheese or yogurt, grains into sourdough bread, and much more. This updated and revised edition, now with full-color photos throughout, is sure to introduce a whole new generation to the flavors and health benefits of fermented foods. It features many brand-new recipes and updates and refines original recipes, reflecting the author’s ever-deepening knowledge of global food traditions that has influenced four-star chefs and home cooks alike.

Making wine at home just got more fun, and easier, with author Richard Bender’s experiments. Whether you’re new to winemaking or a seasoned pro, you’ll find this innovative manual accessible, thanks to its focus on small batches that require minimal equipment and that use an unexpected range of readily available fruits, vegetables, flowers, and herbs.

The book is about wind energy, but it’s not just about small wind turbines or large ones. It’s about the depth and breadth of wind energy, encompassing more than either type of turbine. It includes water-pumping windmills and sailing ships. If it’s a book hard to categorize, that suits its author, Paul Gipe, who likes to think he’s hard to categorize after four decades at the frontiers of renewable energy. His book tells the story of modern wind energy in all its complexity and introduces a North American audience to the trailblazing electricity rebels who have launched a renewable energy revolution in Europe. Gipe refutes many common myths surrounding wind energy and argues persuasively that wind turbines are productive, effective, and environmentally sound. Gipe argues that wind energy is too important to be left to electric utilities and their subsidiaries alone. Wind energy is also for the rest of us, he says. It is our resource. We can develop it and we can own it … ourselves.