Learn how to transform an ordinary backyard garden into a true showpiece. Originally published in 1924, Peter Bisset shares with readers timeless advice and tips for creating a variety of water gardens. After experiencing one, it’s easy to see why these gardens hold such appeal; these splashing fountains and ponds make hot days seem cooler, and they also attract birds and butterflies to your backyard. Even tiny tabletop fountains offer soothing sounds to drown out a busy street or a noisy neighbor.

The Water Gardening Idea Book gives in full detail all the practical information necessary for the selection, grouping, and successful cultivation of aquatic and other plants required in the making of a water garden and its surroundings. It’s perfect for both amateurs and those with green thumbs looking to take their gardens to the next level. Readers will enjoy projects of varying difficulty, starting with simple container gardens and advancing to large estate or park fountains and ponds. Whether you’re interested in creating a casual pond or a formal fountain, with The Water Gardening Idea Book, you’ll be able to create them with confidence.

When you're busy and living a fast-paced lifestyle, it's hard to imagine preparing quick and healthy meals. Weeknight Fresh & Fast is filled with 100 solution-oriented dinner recipes featuring meat, poultry, seafood, and vegetables. When you hear the questions, "What's for dinner tonight?" you now have a healthy and quick answer!

This book offers a road map for cooking and eating healthy meals anytime, no matter what the day brings. Look no farther for tips offering time-saving strategies and ideas for using leftovers. You can cook healthy dinners no matter how much or little time you have!

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.

Building upon his critical work in Good Calories, Bad Calories and presenting fresh evidence for his claim, Gary Taubes revisits the urgent question of what's making us fat-and how we can change.

He reveals the bad nutritional science of the last century-none more damaging or misguided than the "calories-in, calories-out" model of why we get fat-and the good science that has been ignored. He also answers the most persistent questions: Why are some people thin and others fat? What roles do exercise and genetics play in our weight? What foods should we eat, and what foods should we avoid? Persuasive, straightforward and practical, Why We Get Fat is an essential guide to nutrition and weight management.

Sergei Boutenko has been gathering wild plants since he was 13, when, early on in a 6-month hike from Mexico to Canada, he and his raw-food family ran out of provisions and turned to foraging for survival in the wild. Back in civilization, Boutenko was dismayed by the inferior quality of store-bought food and industrial agriculture, and began to regularly collect wild plants near his home and on his travels. Now, in Wild Edibles, he shares knowledge gleaned from years of live-food wildcrafting and thriving in harmony with nature.

This practical guide to plant foraging gives hikers, backpackers, raw foodists, gardeners, chefs, foodies, DIYers, survivalists and off-the-grid enthusiasts the tools to identify, harvest and prepare wild edible plants. The book outlines basic rules for safe wild-food foraging and discusses poisonous plants, plant identification protocol, gathering etiquette and conservation.

Boutenko explores in detail the many rewards of eating wild flora: environmental protection, sustainability, saving money, economic self-sufficiency and healthy living. He draws on thoroughly researched nutrition science to make a compelling case for the health benefits of a diverse, local-food diet that includes wild greens.

The majority of the 60 edible plants described in this field guide can be found worldwide, including common-growing trees. More than 300 color photos make plant identification easy and safe. A chapter containing 67 high-nutrient vegan recipes-including green smoothies, salads and salad dressings, spreads and crackers, main courses, juices, and sweets-provides inspiration to join Boutenko on the trail to radiant health.