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This comprehensive guide provides detailed information on three natural plasters-earthen, lime, gypsum and natural finishes. Extremely well-illustrated with drawings and photos, this book teaches the principles of plastering and plaster techniques, and describes the tools you'll need for a successful plaster job.

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Herbal Tea Gardens contains everything you need to know to grow, blend and brew healthful and delicious herbal teas. You'll find more than 100 tea recipes, as well as 22 illustrated garden plans to help you customize your tea garden.

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This is the first book to describe in depth the timber framing methods used by most contractors, framers and owner-builders — methods that use modern metal fasteners, special screws, and common-sense building principles to create post and beam structures in much less time. The book includes everything an owner-builder needs to know about building strong and beautiful structural frames from heavy timbers.

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.

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This guide to garden bugs shows you how to work with nature to reduce pests while producing bountiful, environmentally safe and chemical-free harvests. Includes a list of pests commonly found on 72 vegetables and fruits. Written by contributing editor Barbara Pleasant.

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In this 63-page book, the healing energies of aromatic herbs and flowers are combined into 17 dream blends specially designed to reduce stress and increase mental clarity and awareness.

A fragrance can instantly take you back in time in your mind. The brief smell of cologne or perfume, not experienced in years, can, in an instant, remind you of a first date in high school. The fragrance of roses may remind you of your great aunt, or the smell of fresh bread baking can transport you to the pleasant holidays of your childhood.

Dream Pillows are a form of aromatherapy, a means of making dreams more interesting, more soothing or colorful. In his newest book, Herbal Dream Pillows, Jim Long shares nearly two dozen of his dream pillow formulas.

You'll find dream blends to keep away nightmares, blends to comfort you when you travel, some that evoke romantic dreams, and still others that inspire creative dreaming.

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This book truly is "The Ultimate Guide to Backyard Bugs." Written by entomologist Whitney Cranshaw, the 650-page book includes hundreds of color insect photos, plus great advice on the least-toxic controls for vegetable, fruit and ornamental pests, and a big chapter on beneficial bugs.

Recommended Product for Wiser Living: More than ever before, our society is seeking ways to live more conscientiously. To help bring you the 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.

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For more than five years Stone House – A Guide to Self-Building with Slipforms has been the prime source for information on a unique method of stone masonry that affords everyone, regardless of their level of building experience, the opportunity to create walls and even homes of stone.

Stone House focuses on the story of author Tomm Stanley’s own experience of building his house with the slipform method. This book is certainly not your average “how-to” offering; it is more like a tapestry of information and entertainment interwoven with technical advice, diagrams and pictures, tales of the owner builder experience and as the title implies, plenty of guidance on how to build your own stone house using the slipform method of construction. It makes great reading for those that are on their way to becoming self-builders as well as the rest of us that dream of such adventures.

The book has now been revised with two new chapters, digital enhancement to the original images and new photographs.

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After years of living in awe of the mysterious fungi known as mushrooms-chefs, health enthusiasts, and home cooks alike can't get enough of these rich, delicate morsels. With updated production techniques for home and commercial cultivation, detailed growth parameters for 31 mushroom species, a trouble-shooting guide, and handy gardening tips, this revised and updated handbook will make your mycological landscapes the envy of the neighborhood.

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Building on the enormous success of his original Shelter book, Lloyd Kahn continues his odyssey of finding and exploring the most magnificent and unusual handbuilt houses in existence. Among the intriguing domiciles described in Home Work are a Japanese-style stilt house accessible only by a cable across a river; a stone house in a South African valley whose roof serves as a baboon trampoline; and a bottle house in the Nevada desert.

More than 1,500 photos illustrate various innovative architectural styles and natural building materials that have gained popularity in the last two decades, such as cob, papercrete, bamboo, adobe, strawbale, timber framing and earthbags. If you love fine, fun and/or funky buildings, you will want to own this splendid book.

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More than 70% of Americans cannot afford to own a code-enforced, contractor-built home. This has led to widespread interest in using natural materials — straw, cob and earth — for building homes and other buildings that are inexpensive, and that rely largely on labor rather than expensive and often environmentally-damaging outsourced materials.

Earthbag Building, a Mother Earth News Book for Wiser Living, is the first comprehensive guide to all the tools, tricks and techniques for building with bags filled with earth — or earthbags. Having been introduced to sandbag construction by the renowned Nader Khalili in 1993, the authors developed this "Flexible Form Rammed Earth Technique" over the last decade. A reliable method for constructing homes, outbuildings, garden walls and much more, this enduring, tree-free architecture can also be used to create arched and domed structures of great beauty — in any region, at home, in developing countries or in emergency relief work.

This fully-illustrated guide first discusses the many merits of earthbag construction, and then leads the reader through the key elements of an earthbag building:

• Special design considerations
• Foundations, walls and floors
• Electrical, plumbing and shelving
• Lintels, windows and door installations
• Roofs, arches and domes
• Exterior and interior plasters