A Little Piece of Earth: How to Grow Your Own Food in Small Spaces

A hip, eco-friendly guide with fun and easy projects for all levels. Eating locally has so many benefits—for the planet, for your health, and for your tastebuds—and you can’t get much more local than your very own backyard. But is planting a garden too big a commitment? Then this book is for you. A Little Piece of Earth is all about starting small, with more than fifty self-contained, doable projects. Whether you have a yard, a terrace, a rooftop, or just a windowsill, there are plenty of ideas and inspirations to choose from. Harvest your own precious vanilla pods from a pot indoors. Grow savory shiitakes on a small log in your kitchen. Build a miniature vineyard trellis on your deck or build a raised bed on your patio. Recipes for using your homegrown bounty are sprinkled throughout. Charming illustrations guide you through step-by-step, and there’s a complete resources section. This is about making dirt work for you, taking some control over your food supply, and, most important, enriching your life with the quiet, simple pleasures of produce raised organically with your own hands.
Request A Little Piece of Earth from the catalog.

Grow Your Own Drugs: Easy Recipes for Natural Remedies and Beauty Fixes

A guide to home remedies--including solutions for digestive disorders, aches and pains, and face and body care and beatification, as well as kids' remedies--features 150 full-color photos, a list of suppliers for easy shopping and a 60-page reference covering the top 100 plants one should consider growing for use in home remedies.

Request Grow Your Own Drugs from the catalog.

The Complete Compost Gardening Guide

Barbara Pleasant and Deborah L. Martin turn the compost bin upside down with their liberating system of keeping compost heaps right in the garden, rather than in some dark corner behind the garage. The compost and the plants live together from the beginning in a nourishing, organic environment. The authors' bountiful, compost-rich gardens require less digging, weeding, mulching, and even less planting. And here's one of the best parts — no more backbreaking slogs from compost bin to garden. The authors even identify the plants that benefit most from compost and how the elements of a composted garden work together.

 Request The Complete Compost Gardening Guide from the catalog.

Wind power for dummies

 by Ian Woofenden. The consumer guide to small-scale wind electricity production!Maybe you're not T. Boone Pickens, but you can build your own home-sized wind-power empire right in your back yard. Wind Power for Your Home For Dummies supplies all the guidance you need to install and maintain a sustainable, cost-effective wind generator to power your home for decades to come.This authoritative, plain-English guide walks you through every step of the process, from assessing your site and available wind sources to deciding whether wind power is the solution for you, from understanding the mechanics of wind power and locating a contractor to install your system to producing your own affordable and sustainable electricity. Guides you step by step through process of selecting, installing, and operating a small-scale wind generator to power your home Demystifies system configurations, terminology, and wind energy principles to help you speak the language of the pros Helps assess and reduce your energy needs and decide whether wind power is right for you Explains the mechanics of home-based wind power Shows you how to tie into the grid and sell energy back to the power company Offers advice on evaluating all of the costs of and financing for your project Provides tips on working with contractors and complying with local zoning laws. --Summary (Check Catalog)

10,001 Ways to Declutter Your Home on a Small Budget

A book that illustrates ways of efficiently organizing necessary possessions and examines dozens of ways to dispose of clutter.  This title also includes ideas for turning storage into art, shifting with the seasons, cleaning the garage, choosing cleaning tools, tidying the home office and much more.
Request 10,001 Ways to Declutter Your Home from the catalog.

Country Living: Simple Country Wisdom : 501 Old-Fashioned Ideas to Simplify Your Life

Is modern life becoming too complicated and messy? Top-selling author Susan Waggoner is here to simplify it all. She shows how anyone can enjoy a more relaxed lifestyle filled with traditional country values—and save time, money, work, and frustration in the process—with household hints our foremothers knew well.

This ingenious and fun-to-read illustrated handbook presents tried-and-true household hints and practical solutions to everyday problems. And the superb organization—covering such topics as “Clutter Control,” “Better Living Through Baking,” and “In the Garden”—makes it easy to find the information you need. Whether it’s a no-scrub trick to make bathroom faucets gleam or advice on growing a garden guaranteed to attract birds and butterflies, Country Living Simple Country Wisdom is the key to creating a home that’s cheerful, welcoming, and warm. (Sterling)

Request Country Living from the catalog.

Sissinghurst: an Unfinished History: The Quest to Restore a Working Farm at Vita Sackville-West's Legendary Garden

Sissinghurst Castle is a jewel in the English countryside. Its chief attraction is its celebrated garden, designed in the 1930s by the poet Vita Sackville-West, lover of Virginia Woolf. As a boy, Adam Nicolson, Sackville-West's grandson, spent his days romping through Sissinghurst's woods, streams, and fields. In this book, he returns to the place of his bucolic youth and finds that the estate, now operated by Britain's National Trust, has lost something precious. It is still unquestionably a place of calm and beauty but, he asks, where is the working farm, the orchards, the cattle and sheep? Nicolson convinces the Trust to embrace a simple idea: Grow lunch for the two hundred thousand annual visitors.

Sissinghurst is a personal biography of a place and an inspiring story of one man's quest to return a remarkable landscape to its best, most useful purpose. Nicolson is an entertaining and charming writer and this book will capture fans of Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. (Penguin USA)
Request Sissinghurst an Unfinished History from the catalog.

Living With What You Love: Creating Intimate Spaces With Family Photos, Cherished Heirlooms, and Collectibles

Counsels decorators in homes of any size on how to personalize living spaces with family photographs and heirlooms, sharing complementary information on such topics as restoring vintage frames and preserving photographs.

Request Living With What You Love from the catalog.

The Colourful Home: Confident and Creative Colour Schemes for Every Room

A creative use of color can completely transform a home and bring warmth, light, and welcome focus to even the smallest of spaces. Perfect for do-it-yourself decorators, this informative guide explains the principles of color theory and details classic color combinations for homes. A range of inspirational color schemes are also addressed in detail—among them all-white neutrals to jewel-bright shades of turquoise—and hints on ways to introduce color via wall, floors, fabrics, and furnishings are provided. Practical and chock-full of innovative ideas, this is the ultimate resource for adding life and style to any room.

Request The Colourful Home from the catalog.

Style and Substance: The Best of Elle Decor

Style and Substance: The Best of ELLE DECOR offers a unique, closer look at hundreds of dazzling rooms the magazine has published during its first two decades. The book provides an intimate view inside breathtaking homes from around the world with 240 pages of striking images culled from the archives of ELLE DECOR - America's most elegant interiors magazine. 

Request Style and Substance from the catalog.

Ultimate Guide to Architectural Ceiling Treatments: Plan-Design-Build

Ultimate Guide to Architectural Ceiling Treatments shows homeowners how to turn what is wasted space in most homes--the ceiling-- into a distinctive design element. Through inspirational photographs and easy-to-follow text, author Neal Barrett will help readers select the right type of treatment for their home. Detailed step-by-step photographs provide the information a do-it-yourselfer needs to complete the projects themselves.

Request Ultimate Guide to Architectural Ceiling Treatments from the catalog.

Black & Decker The Complete Outdoor Builder: From Arbors to Walkways, 150 DIY Projects

Adding beautiful, functional patios and walkways to the yard has never been easier thanks to this book. Over 150 projects and hundreds of instructional photographs combine with informative tips, tricks, and inspiration for the most comprehensive patio and walkway book on the market. From low-cost, curb-appeal walkways to expansive, estate-quality decorative concrete patios complete with outdoor kitchens, this book presents each project with step-by-step instructions and full-color photographs as well as informative tips, tricks, and inspiration. Each project uses the most current materials, tools, common practices, codes, and construction techniques to help readers add value to their homes and allow them to enjoy their outdoor spaces to full potential. Whether an existing patio needs to be freshened up or an unused space in the yard is just waiting to be put to use, this book is a crucial resource for do-it-yourself homeowners.

Request The Complete Outdoor Builder from the catalog.