The easy-to-use resource for growing healthy, resilient, low-maintenance trees, shrubs, vines, and other fruiting plants worldwide is perfect for farmers, gardeners, and landscapers at every scale.

Illustrated with more than 200 color photographs and covering 50 productive edible crops—from Arctic kiwi to jujube, medlar to heartnut.

Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts is a one-stop compendium of the most productive, edible fruit-and nut-bearing crops that push the boundaries of what can survive winters in cold-temperate growing regions. While most nurseries and guidebooks feature plants riddled with pest problems, veteran growers and founders of the Hortus Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, Allyson Levy and Scott Serrano, focus on familiar and unfamiliar fruits that have few, if any, pest or disease problems and an overall higher level of resilience.

Inside Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts, you’ll find:

•  Taste profiles for all fifty hardy fruits and nuts, with notes on harvesting and uses
•  Plant descriptions and natural histories
•  Recommended cultivars, both new and classic
•  Propagation methods for increasing plants
•  Nut profiles including almonds, chestnuts, walnuts, and pecans
•  Fertilization needs and soil/site requirements
•  And much more!

With beautiful and instructive color photographs throughout, the book is also full of concise, clearly written botanical and cultural information based on the authors’ years of growing experience. The fifty fruits and nuts featured to provide a nice balance of the familiar and the exotic: from almonds and pecans to more unexpected fruits like maypop and Himalayan chocolate berry. Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts gives adventurous gardeners all they need to get growing.

Experienced and novice gardeners interested in creating a sustainable landscape with a greater diversity of plant life and providing healthy foods will find this book invaluable.

Small is beautiful, and these 15 real farm plans show that small-scale farmers can have big-time success. Compact Farms is an illustrated guide for anyone dreaming of starting, expanding, or perfecting a profitable farming enterprise on five acres or less.

The farm plans explain how to harness an area's water supply, orientation, and geography to maximize efficiency and productivity while minimizing effort. Profiles of well-known farmers such as Eliot Coleman and Jean-Martin Fortier show that farming on a small scale in any region, in both urban and rural settings, can provide enough income to turn the endeavor from hobby to career. These real-life plans and down-and-dirty advice will equip you with everything you need actually to realize your farm dreams. 

With the surging interest in foraging for mushrooms, those new to the art need a reliable guide to distinguishing the safe fungi from the toxic. But for beginner foragers who just want to answer the question “Can I eat it?” most of the books on the subject are dry, dense, and written by mycologists for other mycologists.

Frank Hyman to the rescue! How to Forage for Mushrooms without Dying is the book for anyone who walks in the woods and would like to learn how to identify just the 29 edible mushrooms they’re likely to come across. In it, Hyman offers his expert mushroom foraging advice, distilling down the most important information for the reader in colorful, folksy language that’s easy to remember when in the field. Want an easy way to determine if a mushroom is a delicious morel or a toxic false morel? Slice it in half – “if it’s hollow, you can swallow,” Hyman says. With Frank Hyman’s expert advice and easy-to-follow guidelines, readers will be confident in identifying which mushrooms they can safely eat and which ones they should definitely avoid.