Create you own backyard winery!

From breaking ground to savoring the finished product, Jeff Cox's From Vines to Wines is the most complete and up-to-date guide to growing flawless grapes and making extraordinary wine.

Wine connoisseurs, gardeners, and home winemakers will find the latest techniques in this fully revised and updated edition. With thorough, illustrated instructions, you'll learn how to:

-- Choose and prepare a vineyard site

-- Construct sturdy and effective trellising systems

-- Plant, prune, and harvest the perfect grapes for your climate

-- Press, ferment, age and bottle your own wine

-- Judge wine for clarity, color, aroma, body, and taste

With few exceptions-such as corn and pumpkins-everything edible that's grown in a traditional garden can be raised in a container. And with only one exception-watering-container gardening is a whole lot easier. Beginning with the down-to-earth basics of soil, sun and water, fertilizer, seeds and propagation, THE BOUNTIFUL CONTAINER is an extraordinarily complete, plant-by-plant guide.

Written by two seasoned container gardeners and writers, THE BOUNTIFUL CONTAINER covers Vegetables-not just tomatoes (17 varieties) and peppers (19 varieties), butharicots verts, fava beans, Thumbelina carrots, Chioggia beets, and sugarsnap peas. Herbs, from basil to thyme, and including bay leaves, fennel, and saffron crocus. Edible Flowers, such as begonias, calendula, pansies, violets, and roses. And perhaps most surprising, Fruits, including apples, peaches, Meyer lemons, blueberries, currants, and figs-yes, even in the colder parts of the country. (Another benefit of container gardening: You can bring the less hardy perennials in over the winter.) There are theme gardens (an Italian cook's garden, a Four Seasons garden), lists of sources, and dozens of sidebars on everything from how to be a human honeybee to seeds that are All America Selections.

THE ORCHARD is the story of a street-smart city girl who must adapt to a new life on an apple farm after she falls in love with Adrian Curtis, the golden boy of a prominent local family whose lives and orchards seem to be cursed. Married after only three months, young Theresa finds life with Adrian on the farm far more difficult and dangerous than she expected. Rejected by her husband's family as an outsider, she slowly learns for herself about the isolated world of farming, pesticides, environmental destruction, and death, even as she falls more deeply in love with her husband, a man she at first hardly knew and the land that has been in his family for generations. She becomes a reluctant player in their attempt to keep the codling moth from destroying the orchard, but she and Adrian eventually come to know that their efforts will not only fail but will ultimately take an irreparable toll.

Margaret Roach worked at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia for 15 years, serving as Editorial Director for the last 6. She first made her name in gardening, writing a classic gardening book among other things. She now has a hugely popular gardening blog, "A Way to Garden." But despite the financial and professional rewards of her job, Margaret felt unfulfilled. So she moved to her weekend house upstate in an effort to lead a more authentic life by connecting with her garden and with nature. The memoir she wrote about this journey is funny, quirky, humble--and uplifting--an Eat, Pray, Love without the travel-and allows readers to live out the fantasy of quitting the rat race and getting away from it all.

For seven months, Manny Howard—a lifelong urbanite—woke up every morning and ventured into his eight-hundred-square-foot backyard to maintain the first farm in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in generations. His goal was simple: to subsist on what he could produce on this farm, and only this farm, for at least a month. The project came at a time in Manny’s life when he most needed it—even if his family, and especially his wife, seemingly did not. But a farmer’s life, he discovered—after a string of catastrophes, including a tornado, countless animal deaths (natural, accidental, and inflicted), and even a severed finger—is not an easy one. And it can be just as hard on those he shares it with.

Manny’s James Beard Foundation Award–winning New York magazine cover story—the impetus for this project—began as an assessment of the locavore movement. We now think more about what we eat than ever before, buying organic for our health and local for the environment, often making those decisions into political statements in the process. My Empire of Dirt is a ground-level examination—trenchant, touching, and outrageous—of the cultural reflex to control one of the most elemental aspects of our lives: feeding ourselves.

Unlike most foodies with a farm fetish, Manny didn’t put on overalls with much of a philosophy in mind, save a healthy dose of skepticism about some of the more doctrinaire tendencies of locavores. He did not set out to grow all of his own food because he thought it was the right thing to do or because he thought the rest of us should do the same. Rather, he did it because he was just crazy enough to want to find out how hard it would actually be to take on a challenge based on a radical interpretation of a trendy (if well-meaning) idea and see if he could rise to the occasion.

A chronicle of the experiment that took slow-food to the extreme, My Empire of Dirt tells the story of one man’s struggle against environmental, familial, and agricultural chaos, ...

This book shows you how to have a healthy soil and recommends environmentally safe products and even some homemade remedies to control pests and disease in your garden. You'll get nuts and bolts information on companion planting and the use of beneficial insects.

This book describes every type of regional flora--from seaside foliage and wildflowers to grassy meadows, shrubs, vines and aquatic gardens.

This charming and personal exploration of Scandinavian food and culture from one of public television's most charismatic cooks engages readers with personal anecdotes and flavorful recipes. Andreas shows the best way to cure gravlaks, make butter, prepare a poached salmon feast, and flambé a pork tenderloin with Scandinavia's favorite spirit aquavit. He shares his passion for traditional recipes such as Pork Rib Roast with Cloves, Mashed Rutabaga, and Norwegian Pancakes filled with berries.

In Kitchen of Light readers are transported to Viestad's Norwayâ??fishing for cod, halibut, and salmon; gathering chanterelles, porcini, and wild berries. More than 100 recipes emphasize fresh, simple ingredients in delicious and elegant dishes such as Pepper-Grilled Oysters and Scallops and Roast Dill-Scented Chicken with Leeks and Potatoes. This inspired cookbook, a companion to the public television series New Scandinavian Cooking, is perfect for home cooks, armchair travelers, cultural food enthusiasts, and anyone who yearns for the simple life.

Set in the tiny village of Orient, Long Island, and in New York City, Into the Garden with Charles is a memoir about falling in love. As a boy in suburban New York in 1940s, Clyde Wachsberger daydreams about storybook gardens where magic happens under the huge leaves. Through the 1960s and 1970s, when most gay men disdained monogamy, the author—an artist and set-designer in New York City—searches unsuccessfully for a soul mate. In 1983, approaching middle-age and having given up on finding love, he moves to a three-hundred-year-old house on a third of an acre, where he channels his passion into creating a garden appropriate to his historical home. Then remarkable circumstances lead him to Charles—a connoisseur of art, a gardener, and the man who will become his life-partner. Together they create a garden of sensuous wild beauty.

Into the Garden with Charles is infused with the author’s artistic sensibility and is written in a voice that is unaffected, generous, and straightforward. Enriched with the author’s paintings—giving it the look and feel of an antique children’s book—Into the Garden with Charles is a unique and moving memoir about growing old and falling in love.

In All Flesh Is Grass: The Pleasures and Promises of Pasture Farming, Gene Logsdon explains that well-managed pastures are nutritious and palatable—virtual salads for livestock. Leafy pastures also hold the soil, increase biodiversity, and create lovely landscapes. Grass farming may be the solution for a stressed agricultural system based on an industrial model and propped up by federal subsidies. The pasture farming that Gene Logsdon practices can also produce grains, fruits, herbs, mushrooms, and salad greens for human consumption. The book explains historically effective practices and new techniques that have blossomed in recent years for the care and sustenance of horses, cattle, sheep, hogs, and poultry on pasture. Logsdon's warm profiles of successful grass farmers offer inspiration and ideas. His narrative is enriched by his experience as a "contrary farmer" on his own artisan-scale farm.The culmination of a lifetime's experience, this book is vital for owners of small acreages, home food producers, horse enthusiasts, and sustainable commercial farmers.

Sprout Garden , now is in its sixth printing, presents a comprehensive guide to the art and science of home sprouting. From aduki beans to wheat kernels, it explains the best methods and optimal conditions for growing and preparing the many varieties of fresh sprouts, and offers essential advice so that even beginners can succeed.

With a generous helping of puns and subtle humor, the book entertains as it explains how to cultivate wholesome fresh food at home, the latest health research about broccoli sprouts and alfalfa, and mail order sources for sprouting equipment and seeds.

Also included is a collection of radicle vegetarian recipes intended to tantalize the gourmet's palate not just with salads but also with entire dinners and delicious desserts.

Sprout Garden provides an indispensable resource for every whole foods vegetarian kitchen.

Explore exciting options for a career in landscape architecture

Blending aesthetics and environmental consciousness, landscape architecture is one of the fastest growing fields, according to the US Department of Labor. Becoming a Landscape Architect gives you a comprehensive survey of the field as it is practiced today, and explains how to get started and how to succeed in this exciting, creative, and in-demand profession.

Featuring more than thirty-five interviews with leading landscape architects and more than 250 illustrations, the guide covers everything an aspiring landscape architect needs to know- from education and training, design specialties, and work settings to preparing an effective portfolio and finding a job in residential, ecological, commercial, and parks design.

• Complete guide to the profession of landscape architecture, one of today's fastest growing fields
• More than thirty-five interviews with leading landscape designers and educators give you an idea of what it's really like to work as a landscape architect
• Over 250 striking illustrations and a lively interior make the book visually appealing as well as informative
• Explains different educational paths and their prerequisites and requirements
• Author Kelleann Foster is Associate Professor and Assistant Department Head, Department of Landscape Architecture, Pennsylvania State University and Managing Partner, Visual Interactive Communications Group

This volume looks at the landscape of 28 cultures, ranging from ancient Mesopotamia to the present day, and shows how the environment is conditioned by the philosophy and religion of each civilization. A selection from Geoffrey Jellicoe's "The Atlanta Historical Garden" is included.