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You can transform your garden into a handmade, personality-infused oasis. Author Lorene Edwards Forkner — part eco-friendly non-traditionalist, part crafty creative — will show you how.

Projects run the gamut from eye-catching structures, like a pergola made from plumbing pipes, to imaginative details, like a tree-hung chandelier for nighttime ambiance. You'll also find helpful plant guides to accompany projects: delectable herbs to fill a stacking container tower, stellar succulents for a vertical gutter garden, glorious flowering vines to climb a bamboo obelisk, and so much more.

Ready to get started? All you need are refreshingly simple, inexpensive materials — hardware store basics, salvaged goods, repurposed castoffs from cluttered basements — along with a little do-it-yourself spirit. With clear instructions and inspiring variations on every theme, this book is easy to follow and easy to love. Your journey to a made-from-scratch outdoor space starts here.

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Good things do come in small packages.

Just ask internationally recognized small living expert Jay Shafer. His small buildings have appeared on CNN, Oprah, Fine Homebuilding, and This Old House. Ranging in size from 64 to 110 square feet, these tiny backyard buildings can be used as guest cottages, art or writing studios, home offices, craft workshops, vacation retreats, or a full-time residence.

Filled with photos, elevation drawings, and door/window schedules for six Tumbleweed box bungalows, The Tumbleweed DIY Book of Backyard Sheds and Tiny Houses, also includes an extensive how-to set of instructions that can be applied to any backyard building project. Though conventionally built, these handsome little buildings have real doors, windows, and skylights with interesting and practical details throughout. With extra attention given to energy and space efficiency in their design, these tiny houses can help deliver the relief we all need on the road toward a sustainable world.

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Local songbird populations are rapidly declining, and food, shelter and safe nesting areas are urgently needed. This remarkable book is packed with great ideas plus all the woodworking drawings and howto information needed for hobbyists and birders who want to build attractive birdhouses, feeders and nesting boxes that will attract birds.

Build Your Own Birdhouses and Feeders features a wide range of designs suitable for all skill levels and space limitations, from a very easy box feeder for a small balcony to the challenge of a magnificent bird mansion for a large garden. The 25 projects appeal to a variety of tastes, ranging from a traditional Victorian townhouse, to a tonguein-cheek Wild West saloon, to a medieval tournament tent.

Each project includes:

• 
  Detailed designs with acolor photo of the finished item
• Easy-to-follow instructions and step-by-step illustrations
• Enlarged and technical diagrams in color
• List of recommended materials
• Advice on choosing a location for best results

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If you like making things for your garden, you'll love concrete. Durable, beautiful, and inexpensive, it's also surprisingly simple to work with. Best of all, it weathers elegantly, softening around the edges to become more picturesque with age.

Concrete Garden Projects offers up an inspiring array of creative projects that can be made for next to nothing. Follow the easy, step-by-step instructions to make containers of all sizes, benches and stools, ponds and birdbaths, pavers and stepping stones — and even a barbecue.

At pennies per pound, you can't beat concrete's price. And the molds for the projects (like bowls and baking pans) can often already be found in your house.

For elegant, individual, garden décor, don't spend a fortune, just mix and pour.

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This is a practical and engaging guide to transforming an ordinary backyard into a productive farm.

Homesteading is experiencing a revival among both rural and urban residents who want to get back to basics and live closer to the land. With this book, homeowners will obtain both inspiration and instruction for transforming their grassy yard into a lush farm that can produce all the food they need.

The author is an experienced woodworker and homesteader who shows how to plan and design a backyard farm. He offers expert advice for making all of the essential hard-working structures that are needed to sustain small-scale agriculture.

Step-by-step instructions are provided for 10 projects including green houses, beehives, rabbit hutches, raised beds, potting sheds, trellises, fences, and more. Readers learn how to create an irrigation system, harvest rainwater, and keep their farms environmentally sound. Each detailed plan is accompanied by the author's clear, instructive drawings.

More than just a manual, the book also offers entertaining and enlightening interviews with both experts and “average Joe” farmers. We learn what motivates them to become backyard farmers, the lessons that they have to share, and maybe even a couple of funny stories along the way.

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A State-of-the-Art Resource for Natural Builders

Natural buildings not only bring satisfaction to their makers and joy to their occupants, they also leave the gentlest footprint on the environment. In this complete reference to natural building philosophy, design, and technique, Jacob Deva Racusin and Ace McArleton walk builders through planning and construction, offering step-by-step instructions on:

• Siting
• Planning for heat and moisture
• Developing an integrative design
• Creating the foundation, wall system, roof, and floors
• Protecting against fire and insects
• Planning for acoustics
• Selecting and making finishes
• Plastering
• Budgeting

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Everything you wanted to know about building a workbench, making outfeed tables for shop machines, making work tables and assembly tables, storage cabinets for tools, materials, supplies. Build like an aircraft engineer, super-flat and strong with a torsion box workbench, assembly table, and alignment beams.

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There's a grassroots movement in tiny homes these days. The real estate collapse, the economic downturn, burning out on 12-hour workdays – many people are rethinking their ideas about shelter – seeking an alternative to high rents, or a lifelong mortgage debt to a bank on an overpriced home.

In this book are some 150 builders who have taken things into their own hands, creating tiny homes (under 500 sq. ft.). Homes on land, homes on wheels, homes on the road, homes on water, even homes in the trees. There are also studios, saunas, garden sheds, and greenhouses.

There are 1,300 photos, showing a rich variety of small homemade shelters, and there are stories (and thoughts and inspirations) of the owner-builders who are on the forefront of this new trend in downsizing and self-sufficiency.

At the heart of our 1973 book Shelter were drawings of 5 small buildings, which we recommended as a starting point in providing one's own home. Now, almost 40 years later, there's a growing tiny house movement all over the world – which we've been tracking over the past two years.

Many people have decided to scale back, to get by with less stuff, to live in smaller homes. You can buy a ready-made tiny home, build your own, get a kit or pre-fab, or live in a bus, houseboat, or other movable shelter. Some cities have special ordinances for building "inlaw" or "granny flats" in the back yard. There are innovative solutions in cities, such as the "capsules" in Tokyo. There are numerous blogs and websites with news, photos, and/or plans for tiny homes, documented here.

If you're thinking of scaling back, you'll find plenty of inspiration here. Here's a different approach, a 180º turn from increasing consumption. Here are builders, designers, architects (no less), dreamers, artists, road gypsies, and water dwellers who've achieved a measure of freedom and independence by taking shelter into their own hands.

About the Author
In 1968 Lloyd Kahn worked as Shelter editor for the Whole Earth Catalog. In 1971 he published Domebook 2. His shake-covered geodesic dome was featured in Life magazine. Ultimately disillusioned with domes, he took Domebook 2 out of print and in 1973, published the oversized book Shelter, which went on to sell more than 250,000 copies. In 2004, Kahn published HomeWork: Handbuilt Shelter – in many ways the sequel to Shelter – and Builders of the Pacific Coast in 2008. Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter is the 4th book in this series. Kahn and his wife Lesley live and work in a small coastal town in Northern California.

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Beautiful, sustainable bamboo is one of the most popular materials around for gardens and home decor. This highly regarded introduction to the material is now back in print, revised and updated. It still offers rich history, fascinating background, and great projects, but with more than 20 new image,smaking this the most attractive source on the 'it' plant of the green movement.

The book covers all the tools and techniques you need for harvesting, storing, and making things with bamboo. Thirty how-to projects include bamboo fences, trellises, chopsticks, teacups, and even an outdoor shower. The updated edition describes bamboo's importance in local and global eco-systems and illustrates how to contain bamboo in the landscape. Lush photography makes the book a visual treat, and abundant illustrations add instructive detail.

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An impassioned champion of toxin-free living, Beth Greer shows how simple adjustments can have major health benefits for individuals and the earth. Beth Greer had been living what she considered a healthy lifestyle when a medical crisis prompted her to reevaluate everything - from the food she ate to the personal-care products she used and the environment she lived in. Now, in Super Natural Home, she shows the alarming extent of the dangerous chemicals we unwittingly expose ourselves to every day. As she did in her own life, she invites readers to put their lives under a microscope-to scrutinize what Americans put in and on their bodies and bring into their homes-and to make personal choices that will enable them to "live clean" in a toxic world.

The straightforward, solutions-based approach of Super Natural Home - complete with quizzes to help identify and correct potential toxic hot zones-speaks directly to what environment-conscious consumers really need: ultra-practical advice on what they can do right now to limit exposure to the poisons that are endangering them and their children. At a time when impeccable scientific research points to an alarming correlation between common chemical compounds and cancers, allergies, psychiatric disorders, and birth defects, among other serious health concerns, Super Natural Home gives consumers the tools to start protecting themselves and their families.

BETH GREER, Super Natural Mom™, is an award-winning journalist and holistic health advocate. Her articles have appeared in Us magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as online. She is the founder of SuperNaturalHome.com, a Web site devoted to providing healthy, natural strategies, and advice. As former president and co-owner of The Learning Annex, the largest private alternative adult education company in the US, Beth has helped thousands see new possibilities and feel empowered to make changes in their lives.