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Simple step-by-step instructions guide you through the process of drying and storing more than 100 kinds of fruits, vegetables, grains, meats and herbs. There are even complete plans for building your own food dryer. As seen in the Seed Savers Exchange catalog.

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This complete guide presents everything you need to know to enhance your health, beauty and emotional well-being through the practice of aromatherapy. Kathi Keville and Mindy Green, who are masters in the fields of herbalism and aromatherapy, offer a fresh perspective on the most fragrant of the healing arts and discuss such topics as:

• The history and theory of fragrance.
• Therapeutic uses of aromatherapy for circulation, digestion, respiration, immunity, and more.
• Instructions for creating personal beauty and skin-care products.
• Techniques for the home distillation and blending of essential oils.
• A materia medica listing the origins and uses of commonly available essential oils.

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The Backyard Beekeeper, now revised and expanded, makes the time-honored and complex tradition of beekeeping an enjoyable and accessible backyard pastime that will appeal to gardeners, crafters, and cooks everywhere. This expanded edition gives you even more information on "greening" your beekeeping with sustainable practices, pesticide-resistant bees, and urban and suburban beekeeping. More than a guide to beekeeping, it is a handbook for harvesting the products of a beehive and a honey cookbook--all in one lively, beautifully illustrated reference. This complete honey bee resource contains general information on bees; a how-to guide to the art of beekeeping and how to set up, care for, and harvest honey from your own colonies; as well as tons of bee-related facts and projects. You'll learn the best place to locate your new bee colonies for their safety and yours, and you'll study the best organic and nontoxic ways to care for your bees, from providing fresh water and protection from the elements to keeping them healthy, happy, and productive. Recipes of delicious treats and instructions on how to use honey and beeswax to make candles and beauty treatments are also included.

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This newly revised second edition contains more than 250 simple, but remarkably effective recipes for cleansers and scrubs, toners and skin refreshers, creams, lotions, shampoos, conditioners, and nail and lip-care treatments.

Beauty in modern America is a multibillion-dollar industry, and consumers spend hundreds of dollars on beauty products only to discover that they aren't satisfactory or effective. In this new edition, author Janice Cox has refined more than 20 years' worth of simple and self-indulgent recipes for body and soul.

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If it concerns houseplants, you'll find it here. Mother Earth News contributing editor and garden expert Barbara Pleasant's full-color photographs and complete care guidelines put growing instructions for 160 blooming and foliage houseplants at your fingertips.

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The decline of cheap oil is inspiring increasing numbers of North Americans to achieve some measure of backyard food self-sufficiency. In hard times, the family can be greatly helped by growing a highly productive food garden, requiring little cash outlay or watering.

Currently popular intensive vegetable gardening methods are largely inappropriate to this new circumstance. Crowded raised beds require high inputs of water, fertility and organic matter, and demand large amounts of human time and effort. But, except for labor, these inputs depend on the price of oil. Before the 1970s, North American home food growing used more land with less labor, with wider plant spacing, with less or no irrigation, and all done with sharp hand tools. But these sustainable systems have been largely forgotten. Gardening When It Counts, a Mother Earth News book, helps you rediscover traditional low-input gardening methods to produce healthy food.

Designed for readers with no experience and applicable to most areas in the English-speaking world, except the tropics and hot deserts, this book shows that any family with access to 3-5,000 sq. ft. of garden land can halve their food costs using a growing system requiring just the odd bucketful of household wastewater, perhaps $200 worth of hand tools and about the same amount spent on supplies — working an average of two hours a day during the growing season.

About the author:

Steve Solomon is a well-known West Coast gardener and author of five previous books, including Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, which has appeared in five editions.

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 its 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.

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The Solar Food Dryer describes how to use solar energy to preserve your summer's harvest. With your own solar-powered food dryer, you can quickly and efficiently dry all your extra garden veggies, fruits and herbs with free sunshine and enjoy their goodness all year long! Solar food dryers perform amazingly well under a wide range of conditions, working effectively in almost any climate where you can grow fruits and vegetables. As a bonus, solar food drying is a great way to learn about solar energy and experience the incredible power of the sun — as well as being a great deal of fun! The Solar Food Dryer includes everything you need to get started:

• Complete step-by-step plans for building a high-performance, low-cost solar food dryer from readily available materials
• Solar energy design concepts
• Food drying tips and recipes
• Resources, references, solar charts and more

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $23.95 AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

With her tea and herbal businesses expanding faster than she could have imagined, China Bayles is already short on time. But she can't refuse when her stepson's principal approaches her to conduct a sensitive investigation. What she uncovers is a perplexing story of forbidden desire, deception and questionable circumstances surrounding a young woman's death.

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This 215-page book by a leading expert on Amish cooking highlights traditional and contemporary recipes adapted from the kitchens and pantries of Amish cooks. Delicious and savory recipes fill this book with some of the best food you'll find anywhere.

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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.