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Acquire herbal healing wisdom with this guide to gathering, drying, storing, and blending 25 common herbs. Create your own all-natural home medicine cabinet filled with teas, tinctures, salves, syrups and lozenges.

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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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Cob cottages are the ultimate expression of ecological design. Made of earth, clay, sand, straw and water, they are their surroundings, literally rising up from the earth. These houses are light, energy-efficient and cozy, with curved walls and built-in whimsical touches.

The Hand-Sculpted House is theoretical and philosophical, but intensely practical as well. You will get all the how-to information to undertake an earth and straw building project. As the modern world rediscovers the importance of living in sustainable harmony with the environment, this book is a bible of radical simplicity.

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If you're considering a solar or wind system for your home or business, this solar power guide is a valuable resource. In Got Sun? Go Solar, the authors explain how installing a solar or wind system is an economically attractive and environmentally responsible option.

From Vermont to California, homeowners are plugging in to a hot new idea — reducing or eliminating their electric bills by using free energy from the sun and wind. In this straight-talking new solar power guide, authors Rex Ewing and Doug Pratt tell other grid-connected homeowners how to capture alternative energy and put it to use in their home.

Renewable energy is going mainstream, thanks to affordable new technologies with rebates and incentives from many states. Today more and more homeowners believe that installing a home RE system is the economically-attractive and environmentally-responsible thing to do. Whether they install a solar/wind system to benefit their checkbooks or to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, they also enjoy the added independence of a more self-sufficient lifestyle.

This solar power guide covers battery backup versus non-battery systems, as well as equipment needed and installation considerations. Other topics include legal and safety issues, incentives/rebates, and permits and paperwork. An extensive appendix of resources, state energy offices, system sizing worksheets, and much more turns this 160-page book (filled with more than 120 photos and illustrations) into a must-have book for anyone interested in exploring their power options.

Contents:

• Why invest in renewable energy for your home?
• Is it legal and safe?
• How solar electricity works
• Batteries or not?
• Sizing your system
• Got Wind?
• What does it cost?
• Any financial help out there?
• Permits and Paperwork
• The Nuts and Bolts: what to look for, what to avoid
• Who does the installation?
• Appendix: manufacturers, web resources, state energy offices, sizing worksheets, glossary and more

About the authors:

The authors of this solar power guide know firsthand how these systems work. Rex Ewing, author of Power With Nature has lived off-the-grid in the Colorado Rockies since 1999. Doug Pratt, the former technical editor of the Solar Living Sourcebook, lives in a grid-tied home in northern California, and has been on the front lines of the renewable energy revolution since 1985.

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 nearly 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 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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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.