Looking for some good deals during the August Eco-Farming Book Sale? Well search no more! We’ve rounded up some of the best deals out there and put them in a list for your convenience.
Books for $10 or less
None of these titles will break the bank – and each of them has some wisdom and education to impart.
7 Basic Macrobiotic Principles
Making it easier to understand abstract ideas is the forte of Herman Aihara. For the past 40 years, this teacher has given the key to creating happiness to countless Westerners. Aihara makes the learning and the application of the Seven Basic Principles an enjoyable trip. Includes antique etchings dating back to the 1850’s depicting the traditional lifestyle of the author’s ancestors in Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island.
Growing & Using Herbs Successfully
With homegrown herbs comes the promise of flavor, scent, healing and beauty. Open your garden to the beauty of herbs, and the reward will be manifold. Herb growers, herbs businesses, and those who have always wanted to try will find a wealth of encouragement and sound advice in this well illustrated book.
The Organic Backyard
A guide to applying organic farming practices to your home or community garden. Growing organic food enables you to eat and share the most authentic form of local food possible while actively contributing to the health of our ecosystems. In this guide, we have taken the key elements of organic farming principles and practices as contained in the Canadian Organic Standards, and have made them more user-friendly for you, the gardener. Although coined The Organic Backyard, the content is intended to reach all growers of food on a small-scale — either at home, in community gardens, across urban backyards, at schools or in parks and reclaimed urban land.
Cows Save the Planet
Rebuilding soil is only one aspect of this important, paradigm-shifting book. Drawing on the work of thinkers and doers, renegade scientists and institutional whistleblowers from around the world, Schwartz challenges much of the conventional thinking about global warming and other problems. Cows Save the Planet is at once a primer on soil’s pivotal role in our ecology and economy and an antidote to those awash in despairing environmental news. It is also an important call to action on behalf of the soil — and, by extension, those of us who benefit from it.
How to Grow Top Quality Corn
Learn which is better, hybrids or open-pollinated corn. How important is humus to high quality crops? Which fertilizer materials are harmful and which are beneficial? Practical hands-on knowledge that is hard to come by.
Books for $15 or less
These books are a great deal – all by authors who are widely recognized as experts in their fields!
How to Grow World-Record Tomatoes
For most of his 80+ years, Charles Wilber studied how to best work with nature. In How to Grow World Record Tomatoes he tells his personal story and offers his philosophy and approach to gardening. He reveals for the first time how he grows record-breaking tomatoes and produce of every variety. There’s no magic involved. Just a well thought out system that gives plants more than they could ever want, and makes it possible for them to reach their full potential.
Mushrooming Without Fear
Novices eager to collect tasty wild mushrooms will find this unique guide invaluable. Unlike others, it focuses only on those types that are both safe to eat and delicious. Most important, it 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.
Hemp Bound
The stat sheet on hemp sounds almost too good to be true: its fibers are among the planet’s strongest, its seed oil the most nutritious, and its potential as an energy source vast and untapped. Its one downside? For nearly a century, it’s been illegal to grow industrial cannabis in the United States even though Betsy Ross wove the nation’s first flag out of hemp fabric, Thomas Jefferson composed the Declaration of Independence on it, and colonists could pay their taxes with it. But as the prohibition on hemp’s psychoactive cousin winds down, one of humanity’s longest-utilized plants is about to be reincorporated into the American economy. Get ready for the newest billion-dollar industry.
Small Farms are Real Farms
Along the way, small farms have been ridiculed and dismissed as inconsequential — but now the seeds of a rural renaissance are being planted, not by these industrial behemoths, but by family-scale farms. In this collection of essays by one of America’s most eloquent and influential proponents of sustainable agriculture, the multifaceted case for small farms is built using logic and facts.
The Secret Life of Compost
We don’t need to poison the earth in order to grow better food, and what is harmful to the environment when improperly disposed of often can be turned back to the soil in a beneficial way through composting — if you know how. The Secret Life of Compost tells you how. Author Malcom Beck was a lifelong organic farmer, and the founder of Garden-Ville, one of the largest commercial composting operations in the country. Beck shares his insight into the processes of decay that can transform everything from lawn trimmings to sewer sludge into life-giving earth.
