Seed Library & Gardening

From the author of How to Grow Microgreens, this companion volume is all about growing edible plants when you only have limited space. With over 45 edible plants described, there is something for all tastes and seasons. Fionna includes delicious recipes with suggestions on how to use the produce you grow so that you can enjoy salads and cooked vegetables from your garden all year round.

Follow your zany muse and get creative with your vegetable garden. Niki Jabbour brings you 73 novel and inspiring food garden designs that include a cocktail garden featuring all the ingredients for your favorite drinks, a spicy retreat comprising 24 varieties of chile peppers, and a garden that's devoted to supplying year-round salad greens. Created by celebrated gardeners, each unique design is accompanied by both plant lists and charming anecdotes.

"Your patio, balcony, rooftop, front stoop, boulevard, windowsill, planter box, or fire escape is a potential fresh food garden waiting to happen. In Grow Great Grub, Gayla Trail, the founder of the leading online gardening community (YouGrowGirl.com), shows you how to grow your own delicious, affordable, organic edibles virtually anywhere. Whether you're looking to eat on a budget or simply experience the pleasure of picking tonight's meal from right outside your door, this is the must-have book for small-space gardens.

A hip, eco-friendly guide with fun and easy projects for all levels. Eating locally has many benefits--for the planet, your health, and your tastebuds--and you can't get much more local than your very own backyard. With more than fifty self-contained, doable projects, whether you have a yard, a terrace, a rooftop, or a windowsill, there are plenty of ideas and inspirations to choose from.

This volume explores the intersection of learning and food, within and beyond the classroom, all within the context of sustainability. Taking a broad pedagogical approach to the question of food, it focuses on learning and change in a number of key sites: schools, homes, communities, and social movements, because we need to learn our way in to more sustainable alternatives.

(2007-2013) This book reports on one of the European 7th Framework Program Science in Society's (FP7) funded projects named INQUIRE which was developed and implemented to support 14 Botanic Gardens and Natural History Museums in 11 European countries, to establish a collaborative learning network and expand their understanding of inquiry based science teaching (IBST).

This book goes beyond touting the benefits of learning gardens to survey them as a whole-systems design solution with a potential to address myriad interrelated social, ecological, and educational issues. Student voices and examples from urban schools provide practical understanding of how bringing life to schools can indeed bring schools to life.

This book seeks to bring together the two disciplines of informal and outdoor education, and challenges readers to think differently about outdoor and adventure education. It develops core ideas and thinking about informal education within outdoor settings, and explores how its principles and practice can enhance outdoor education.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that if we composted 100 percent of our food scraps, we could prevent the equivalent of more than 3.8 million vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions of carbon dioxide emissions each year. Composting is one of the easiest and least expensive ways to reduce household waste and improve your garden, and using worms in your compost bin will provide you with the best compost available.

Growing your own vegetables has never looked, or tasted, so good. Are heirloom vegetables more difficult to grow than conventional hybrids? The Beginner's Guide to Growing Heirloom Vegetables debunks this myth by highlighting the 100 heirloom vegetables that are the easiest to grow and the tastiest to eat.

Organic Gardening For Dummies, 2nd Edition shows readers the way to ensure a healthy harvest from their environmentally friendly garden. It covers information on the newest and safest natural fertilizers and pest control methods, composting, cultivation without chemicals, and how to battle plant diseases. It helps readers plant organically year-round, using herbs, fruits, vegetables, lawn care, trees and shrubs, and flowers.

With simple but effective techniques perfected over decades of dirty work, novice and experienced gardeners alike benefit from this handbook on the joys of rural and urban gardening in the northern United States. Emphasizing the use of products carefully formulated to positively impact the environment, each tip and explanation works toward the goal of demystifying the world of organic gardening.

Why save seeds when you can buy them so cheap? Seed saving allows you to grow a diverse, organic array of fruits and vegetables. It offers an opportunity to work closely with nature and be even more hands-on with the food you grow, cook, and eat.  The Manual of Seed Saving features information on how to maximize seed quality and yield for crop plants like asparagus, carrots, corn, rhubarb, spinach, squash, and tomatoes. Plant profiles include critical information on pollination, isolation distances, cultivation, harvest, storage, and pests and diseases.

The Brown Goose, the White Case Knife, Ora's Speckled Bean, Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter; are just a few of the heirloom fruits and vegetables mentioned in Bill Best's remarkable history of seed saving, the people who preserve both unique flavors, and the Appalachian culture associated with them. As someone at the forefront of seed saving and trading for over fifty years, Best has helped preserve numerous varieties of beans, tomatoes, corn, squashes, and other fruits and vegetables, along with the family stories and experiences that are a fundamental part of this world.

Urban areas have largely been disconnected from the processes associated with producing food, and community efforts have emerged to reconnect people in urban areas to fresh foods with expected benefits for public health. These efforts can be found in cities across the country and cross both economic and ethnic lines. Expansion of agriculture to non-traditional areas including community or kitchen gardens in urban or peri-urban environments has the potential to provide a range of ecosystem services as well as reduce stressors on non-urban environments.

Use seeds from this year's crop to grow your favorite vegetables, herbs, and flowers again next spring. Carolyn B. Turner shows you everything you need to know to harvest, dry, store, and sow seeds from more than 100 common garden plants, providing helpful tips on appropriately preparing your soil, testing seeds for viability, tending for your seedlings, and more. You'll discover that growing your own seeds is a fun and inexpensive way to enjoy beautiful and thriving gardens year after year!

In today's food system, farm workers face difficult and hazardous conditions, low-income neighborhoods lack supermarkets but abound in fast-food restaurants and liquor stores, food products emphasize convenience rather than wholesomeness, and the international reach of American fast-food franchises has been a major contributor to an epidemic of "globesity." To combat these inequities and excesses, a movement for food justice has emerged in recent years seeking to transform the food system from seed to table.

Documenting how racial and social inequalities are built into the food system, a growing food movement urges us to support sustainable agriculture by eating fresh food produced on local family farms. Many low-income neighborhoods and communities of color have been deprived of access to healthy and sustainable food, actively prevented from producing their own food, and living in "food deserts" where fast food is more common than fresh food. Cultivating Food Justice describes efforts to envision and create environmentally sustainable and socially just alternatives to the food system.

In the context of the global food crisis, a growing consensus is emerging among academics, health practitioners, farmers, policy-makers, businesses and consumers about the merits of building an alternative food system. Using a wide range of case studies, this book provides a critical overview, showing how and where theory and practice can converge to produce more sustainable food systems.

The Brown Goose, the White Case Knife, Ora's Speckled Bean, Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter; are just a few of the heirloom fruits and vegetables mentioned in Bill Best's remarkable history of seed saving, the people who preserve both unique flavors, and the Appalachian culture associated with them. As someone at the forefront of seed saving and trading for over fifty years, Best has helped preserve numerous varieties of beans, tomatoes, corn, squashes, and other fruits and vegetables, along with the family stories and experiences that are a fundamental part of this world.

The prospect of revamping your yard can be daunting. Where do you start? How do all the areas come together in a beautiful, cohesive way? The Beginner's Guide to Starting a Garden simplifies the process by showing you how to spend fewer hours (and a minimal amount of money) in the garden by tackling one small area at a time. You'll also learn the basics of good design, which plants offer the most bloom for your buck, and how to avoid the most common planting mistakes.

Using the author's personal experiences as its anchor, this handbook contains practical advice on establishing community and backyard vegetable gardens, keeping chooks and bees, and reducing water usage, along with insights into dealing with councils, sidelining supermarkets, and what pepole eat and why. A template is provided for those wishing to learn sustainability measures and put them into practice.

Even in winter's coldest months you can harvest fresh, delicious produce. Drawing on insights gained from years of growing vegetables in Nova Scotia, Niki Jabbour shares her simple techniques for gardening throughout the year. Learn how to select the best varieties for each season, the art of succession planting, and how to build inexpensive structures to protect your crops from the elements.

The Market Gardener is a compendium of La Grelinette's proven horticultural techniques and innovative growing methods. This complete guide is packed with practical information on: Setting-up a micro-farm by designing biologically intensive cropping systems, all with negligible capital outlay; Farming without a tractor and minimizing fossil fuel inputs through the use of the best hand tools, appropriate machinery and minimum tillage practices; Growing mixed vegetables systematically with attention to weed and pest management, crop yields, harvest periods and pricing approaches.