The Scything Handbook

The Zen approach to mowing lawns, wacking weeds, harvesting crops, and building modern homesteader abs! Dreading the weekly law mow? Need to whack the weeds in your orchard? Cringing at the drudgery and incessant blare of the mower? Imagine instead long sweeps of an elegant scythe cutting your grass and pesky weeds in blissful, meditative silence. That is the power of the "scythe revolution" sweeping North America. Written by a master of the scythe, professionally trained in Austria, and drawing deeply on research into original German texts, The Scything Handbook brings centuries-old scything techniques into the twent-first century. Detailed illustrations cover scythe assembly, perfecting the stroke, blade selection, honing, peening, and aftercare, as well as background on how scythes are forged. Also covered are the basics of making hay and mulch by hand, and how to grow and harvest gains at the home and homestead scale for self-sufficiency. Scything promotes health, flexibility, mind-body connection, and a meditative contemplation of the natural world while producing beautiful lawns and luscious mulch for the modern gardener and homesteader. This is truly an heirloom tool to master. Join the scythe revolution! Ian Miller followed a career in music with a degree in Agroecology from UC Santa Cruz. During a two year stint on a biodynamic farm in Austria he learned how to scythe and delved into historic scything texts in German. He has worked for Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa and is developing a twemty-acre scythe-based homestead near Decorah, Iowa, where he grows his own grain for bread making and makes hay by hand.

Principles and farm-tested practices for no-till market gardening--for healthier, more productive soil! From the host of the popular The No-Till Market Garden Podcast—heard around the world with nearly one million downloads! Discovering how to meet the soil’s needs is the key task for every market gardener. In this comprehensive guide, Farmer Jesse Frost shares all he has learned through experience and experimentation with no-till practices on his home farm in Kentucky and from interviews and visits with highly successful market gardeners in his role as host of The No-Till Market Garden Podcast. The Living Soil Handbook is centered around the three basic principles of no-till market gardening: Disturb the soil as little as possible Keep it covered as much as possible Keep it planted as much as possible. Farmer Jesse then guides readers in applying those principles to their own garden environment, with their own materials, to meet their own goals. Beginning with an exploration of the importance of photosynthesis to living soil, Jesse provides in-depth information on: Turning over beds Using compost and mulch Path management Incorporating biology, maintaining fertility Cover cropping Diversifying plantings through intercropping Production methods for seven major crops Throughout, the book emphasizes practical information on all the best tools and practices for growers who want to build their livelihood around maximizing the health of their soil. Farmer Jesse reminds growers that “as possible” is the mantra for protecting the living soil: disturb the soil as little as you possibly can in your context. He does not believe that growers should anguish over what does and does not qualify as “no-till.” If you are using a tool to promote soil life and biology, that’s the goal. Jesse’s goal with The Living Soil Handbook is to provide a comprehensive set of options, materials, and field-tested practices to inspire growers to design a soil-nurturing no-till system in their unique garden or farm ecosystem. "[A] practical, informative debut. . . .Gardeners interested in sustainable agriculture will find this a great place to start."—Publishers Weekly "Frost offers a comprehensive, science-based, sympathetic, wholly practical guide to soil building, that most critical factor in vegetable gardening for market growers and home gardeners alike. A gift to any vegetable plot that will keep on giving."—Booklist (starred review)

The Chicago metropolitan area is home to far more protected nature than most people realize. Over half a million acres of protected land known as the Chicago Wilderness are owned and managed by county forest preserve districts and other public and private sector partners. But there’s a critical factor of the Chicago Wilderness conservation effort that makes it unique: a pioneering grassroots volunteer community, thousands strong, has worked for decades alongside agency staff to restore these nearby natural areas, learning how to manage biodiversity in an altered and ever-changing urban context. A Healthy Nature Handbook captures hard-earned ecological wisdom from this community in engaging and highly readable chapters, each including illustrated restoration sequences. Restoration leaders cover large-scale seeding approaches, native seed production, wetland and grassland bird habitat restoration, monitoring, and community building. Contributions from local artists bring the region’s beauty to life with vibrant watercolors, oil paintings, and sketches. A Healthy Nature Handbook is packed with successful approaches to restoring nature and is a testament to both the Chicago region’s surprising natural wealth and the stewards that are committed to its lasting health.

RSPB The Nature Tracker's Handbook is a complete guide to how to interpret the signs that animals leave behind. The art of nature tracking is very much like learning to read, but instead of reading words the tracker reads traces. Every animal leaves different traces as it goes about its everyday business. If you learn to read the signs left by footprints, leftover food, droppings and scrapes in the earth, you will soon be able to tell the story of an animal's life, packed with fascinating details and hidden meanings. The RSPB Nature Tracker's Handbook explains with extensive photography and detailed diagrams how to find and interpret the evidence that animals leave behind – from a pile of mangled feathers to a delicately nibbled mushroom. Nick Baker also demonstrates useful tracker activities, such as how to mount a discarded nymph skin and how to dissect an owl's pellet to reveal its last meal. There's a nature detective in all of us, so get out there and get tracking.

Anyone who wants to learn basic living skills—the kind employed by our forefathers—need look no further than this eminently useful, full-color guide. Dye your own wool, raise chickens, weave a rug, make jam and cheese, and much, much more! With hundreds of projects, step-by-step sequences, photographs, charts, and illustrations, The Back to Basics Handbook will help you dye your own wool with plant pigments, graft trees, raise chickens, craft a hutch table with hand tools, and make treats such as blueberry peach jam and cheddar cheese. The truly ambitious will find instructions on how to build a log cabin or an adobe brick homestead. More than just practical advice, this is also a book for dreamers—even if you live in a city apartment you will find your imagination sparked, and there’s no reason why you can’t, for example, make a loom and weave a rag rug. Complete with tips for old-fashioned fun (square dancing calls, homemade toys, and kayaking tips), this is the ultimate concise guide to voluntary simplicity.

Spanning ancient Egyptian culture (ca. 3200 B.C.E. to C.E. 400), the Handbook of Egyptian Mythology is the only complete survey of Egyptian mythology of its kind available in English. In this comprehensive introduction to Egyptian mythology, author Geraldine Pinch shows how the mythology of Ancient Egypt must be pieced together from a variety of written and visual sources. Relationships between deities changed, and the Egyptian myths were never gathered by priests into an "authorized version." Handbook of Egyptian Mythology provides a brief discussion about the nature of myths; the concept of time in Egyptian mythology; a historical overview of the sources of Egyptian myth; and a dictionary of deities, themes, and concepts, which concentrates on the prominent gods and goddesses in Egyptian myth. The book also includes references to general works on Egyptian culture, religion, and myth; translations of ancient texts; and a selection of literature influenced by Egyptian myth.

This volume offers theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the issues pertaining to ergativity, a grammatical patterning whereby direct objects are in some way treated like intransitive subjects, to the exclusion of transitive subjects. This pattern differs markedly from nominative/accusative marking whereby transitive and intransitive subjects are treated as one grammatical class, to the exclusion of direct objects. While ergativity is sometimes referred to as a typological characteristic of languages, research on the phenomenon has shown that languages do not fall clearly into one category or the other and that ergative characteristics are not consistent across languages. Chapters in this volume look at approaches to ergativity within generative, typological, and functional paradigms, as well as approaches to the core morphosyntactic building blocks of an ergative construction; related constructions such as the anti-passive; related properties such as split ergativity and word order; and extensions and permutations of ergativity, including nominalizations and voice systems. The volume also includes results from experimental investigations of ergativity, a relatively new area of research. A wide variety of languages are represented, both in the theoretical chapters and in the 16 case studies that are more descriptive in nature, attesting to both the pervasiveness and diversity of ergative patterns.