When my husband first began teaching, he was amazed at the number of textbook offers he got each semester - publishers who wanted him to review and rate existing textbooks. Some even wanted him to suggest ideas for new ones, and they offered to help him submit manuscripts. "This is ridiculous!" he would often say. "Why would I write my own textbook when there are so many others out there?"

After a few years of teaching, however, he began to see why this idea was so appealing. One book might have excellent information in one area, but another area was under-represented or poor; if he was teaching a complex course, he'd have to pool together information from several texts. And some information seemed to have been left out of all the books completely; in those cases, he'd assign reading from periodicals or even (gasp!) websites.

R. J. Ruppenthal began writing Fresh Food From Small Spaces: The Square Inch Gardener's Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting and Sprouting after a similar experience. In the introduction, he writes, "I know firsthand of the need for this book, because I have been searching for it for many years." An staunch urbanite, he wanted to know how he could make the most of the space he had to grow usable, practical foods - enough for his family, and perhaps a little left over to share, barter or sell. (He got points in my book for using "grow" in a more expansive sense: not just fruits and vegetables but also honey, sprouts, eggs and mushrooms.) So he set to work doing research, and he came up with this collection of information.

The problem with the book, then, is exactly what makes it so useful to Ruppenthal: it's very personal. Not personal in the way of gardening memoirs, which use narrative to communicate important information; personal in the way of prioritizing according to fancy. For instance, there's a small section on cold frames (that actually references this book) but the author stops there, casually mentioning that you can buy a kit for around $100 online before moving on. When he comes to self-watering planters, however, he spends several pages detailing exactly how to make your own - and includes several down-and-dirty photos of what looks like a project he completed in his garage. Most of the ideas in this book suffer from similarly thin research; the three "t's" of vertical gardening (terracing, trellising and tumbling) are described in very little detail and without enough information to actually do it yourself, without getting some more books. A section on beekeeping is admittedly drawn from "books and from others who have raised bees and told me about it." The compost section contains both too much detail (charts detailing the N-P-K content of common manures) and too little (an interesting story about a sheet composting that takes a nosedive when the author admits he "cannot yet report on the results because the pile is still decomposing.") It reads very much like a personal journal, which it more useful at some times than others. The presence of many stock photos also erodes some of his credibility; it's as if he cobbled all of this information together to make a presentation, and he waited until the night before to look for visual aids.

The good points: There is a lot of good, solid information about fruit-bearing plants, both where to buy them and what to expect from them. Again, there is a disproportionate amount of information about pollination, but that was obviously a personal interest of his. The section on sprouting is also quite useful, including several recipe ideas to use up your bounty. The chapter about fermented foods (yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, etc.) is interesting, although I found Nourishing Traditions a far more thorough and well-researched source of information. I also thought the chapter titled "Survival During Resource Shortages" was both wise and timely.

This book falls into the category of books whose first chapter really, really excited me, but it failed to deliver. It could have been much more successful as a compendium of resources and data - where to find out more information about topics that interest you - or as a meandering memoir of a city-dweller with a conscience and a strict budget. I wish I could have read that book. But maybe that means I'll have to write it myself!

As a political conservative, it’s taken me some time to get used to the label “environmentalist.” To me, the word conjures up images of angry unshaven protesters who care more about the spotted owl than about their fellow human beings. But over the years, especially after reading Rod Dreher's excellent manifesto Crunchy Cons, I’ve come to a new definition of the word “conservative.” Conservation is the reason I started my humble garden – I wanted a way of making our land useful, of turning some ground that was already there into a useful commodity that would also bring beauty to our home. Conserving means making do, most of the time, with something that works perfectly well – not upgrading every six months to a newer model of vacuum or handbag or car. It means cherishing the wisdom of the past, moving cautiously toward truly useful innovation, and wasting neither funding nor time nor resources.

What better or more valuable resources do we have in this great country than our air, our water, and the land that grows plants that fill our bellies and delight our eyes? Many an author has waxed eloquent in considering these precious gifts and the urgent need to protect and cherish them. Such is the premise behind American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. Numbering over just over a thousand pages, this scrupulously complete collection (of essays, poetry and excerpts from longer works) aims to trace the history of American thought since our first inklings that we might not have an unlimited supply of tall trees and rich soil.

As the title makes clear, Thoreau is the first author represented in the anthology. In the Introduction, the editor warns that “Walden is almost scriptural in its pithy discursions. There are five ideas a page; it’s no wonder that the book has never faded.” But even this description hadn’t prepared me for the depth of thought with which Thoreau analyzes the meaning of a fenced-off huckleberry field, formerly open to the public, or the exact cost of his famous cottage ($28.13, of which $1.40 paid for transportation; “I carried a good part on my back”).

Since a complete accounting of the hundred or so represented authors would be impossible, I’ll share some of the most interesting surprises:

• John Burroughs, who in his day was more famous than President Theodore Roosevelt himself. (Roosevelt is also present in the anthology, though only in a few rather disappointingly formal letters.) The editor says Burroughs virtually invented the nature essay; this one, The Art of Seeing Things, is a fascinating discourse about what happens when you walk through a field or forest and really stop to look.


• Gene Stratton-Porter, a naturalist who wrote novels to pay the bills, details a painfully poignant account of what was quite possibly the last passenger pigeon spotted in the wild. It begins when the land was full to overflowing, and farmers used to cut down every tree that stood between him and a piece of arable land: “Nowhere was there even one man who had the vision to see that the forests would eventually come to an end.” It ends with the author alone, staring up at a pigeon whose plaintive call of “See! See!” came across as “a blasting accusation.”


• You cannot top The Fog for sheer environmental horror; the result of a freak temperature inversion wherein lighter polluting gases sank close to the earth instead of rising above it. Centered around Donora, Pennsylvania, home of several industrial mills, it follows a pair of doctors through an appalling week of ministering to sick and dying residents, who eventually come to number in the thousands. It took this kind of disaster to decide that factories shouldn’t just be able to belch out whatever chemicals they please. This story actually had more of an impact on me than Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which is also represented here in part.


• Sigurd Olson has a beautiful meditation called Northern Lights – perhaps it appealed to me because seeing them is one of my top 10 life goals. Skating along a frozen pond, he has the incredible experience of seeing the swirls of color both above and beneath him: “At that moment I was part of the aurora, part of its light and of the great curtain that trembled above me.”


• Lyndon Johnson’s Remarks at the Signing of the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 was extremely inspiring. The editor points out that the act was really the brainchild of his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, but the remarks still belong to the President, and they were quite moving: “This bill does not represent everything that we wanted. It does not represent what we need. It does not represent what the national interest requires. But it is a first step, and there will be other steps. For though we must crawl before we walk, we are going to walk.”


• Probably the most amusing entry in the group is Colin Fletcher’s A Sample Day in the Kitchen. A famous hiker whose Complete Walker has sold over half a million copies, Fletcher humorously details a day in the life of a hiker who eats, cooks, plans and dreams in his sleep sack.


• A close second in the “most entertaining” category, especially for anyone who’s read the original, is Gary Snyder’s Smokey the Bear Sutra: “Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; curs the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war!”


• Two of my favorite modern conservatives (and I take devious joy in calling them so) are Barbara Kingsolver and Michael Pollan, whose work argues for a simpler, deeper, more careful existence. Kingsolver has an excellent essay, written before Animal, Vegetable, Miracle but about the same piece of property, a summer home that later becomes a year-round residence. Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is another excellent, if somewhat grisly, warning against the unnatural feeding practices of recent years: in this excerpt, he visits a Midwestern feedlot to see what his own steer (purchased for this reason) actually eats. The answer? Lots of corn, some medicine and fertilizer, and well, other cows. (You should really read the whole book; it’s not all this disheartening, but it’s just as fascinating and well-written.)

Two features also worth mentioning are a chronology of American events that begins at 15,000 BC and runs through the present (there are considerably more entries around the time of the latter) and a few dozen color and black-and-white illustration plates that provide a helpful visual for the many people and scenes depicted in the book’s pages.

Bottom line? It’s a great book, the perfect gift for any conservative on your holiday gift list. And if you think they might bristle at that name, buy it for them anyway. If I can call myself an environmentalist, they can handle “conservative” just fine.

You can pick up American Earth on Amazon.com for $26.

If you're like me, you think of yourself as just a little more self-sufficient than most people. My friends oohed and aahed, for instance, after finding out that I make my own butter from raw cream I buy from an Amish farmer. I shrugged it off; I pick up the food from a drop point about 10 minutes from my house, I told them, and "churning" butter is as easy as shaking a sealed jar for 20 minutes or so while checking my e-mail with the other hand.

But secretly, I enjoyed that praise. I enjoyed thinking of myself as the kind of person who doesn't use paper towels or own a television. I flattered myself that I could "rough it" as well as my great-grandmother, Amish herself. Then my brother dealt me a cruel hand: he embarked on a solo road trip from Baltimore to Montana, where he spent the summer wrangling horses in the wilderness, camping outside and growing his hair into one giant dreadlock. And before he left, he gave me this book.

Don't get me wrong - Country Wisdom & Know-How is about as good a manual for living as you'll find anywhere. It's exhaustive and exhausting all at once. There is almost no domestic or agricultural task that is not represented here; the printing is tiny and the pages are large, no-nonsense newsprint with hundreds of carefully labeled line drawings. But if you thought you were pretty countercultural, it will school you within an inch of your life.

The book is a compilation of information from Storey Publishing's Country Wisdom Bulletins, small booklets which were published in the 1970's during the "back to the land era." They were simply and directly written, with easy-to-follow diagrams, and millions of copies were sold to eager do-it-yourselfers. The Bulletins have been divided into six basic categories, all of which are tied in some way to agriculture and gardening, in keeping with the belief that natural is better.

Animals: Here is where you can easily get lost for hours learning how to identify, attract, feed, bathe, house and care for all kinds of wild birds (including a formula to be fed to abandoned babies, every fifteen minutes for twelve hours a day, until you can get more professional help: dog food, egg yolk and baby cereal!) Or you could learn what to look for in buying a horse, how to build a beehive, or the ten most useful herbs to improve feline health. And if you ever need to butcher anything, you can consult the diagrams here to ensure you do it correctly.

Cooking: This is far from an exhaustive primer, but there are very detailed sections on a dozen different ingredients, from winter squash to green tomatoes and basic breadmaking. The dairy section is especially useful; people used to know how to make clabbered cream cheese and use a spoonful of yogurt to start another batch, and once you've done either, you'll be hard-pressed to continue buying an inferior product at an inflated price. The section on preserving food is also a great place to start, if you've never done canning or pickling before; there are lots of recipes for simple jams and relishes, vinegars, and (woo-hoo!) a whole section devoted to homebrewing, from hard cider to beer and wine.

Crafts: Try to imagine the exact opposite of the plaques with misspelled, pithy sayings you've seen at craft fairs! All of these goods are useful as well as beautiful, from candlemaking to quilting and basketweaving. In every case, the instructions are comprehensive and clear, and the projects simple enough for a complete novice to attempt. The best section, "Gifts from Nature," features ideas like wreaths, soap and gingerbread houses (think elevations and fretwork details, not graham crackers and Tootsie Rolls). Having long believed that the best gifts are the ones made by hand with love, I couldn't wait to try some of these.

Gardening: In this section you'll learn to grow the plants you'll use for projects all over the book. It begins with a thorough tutorial on types of soil and seed, garden planning and layout and prevention of weeds and pests. Then there are over a hundred pages (roughly a fifth of the book) devoted to individual types and categories of plants, from flowers to herbs, vegetables, roots and fruits. You can find out how to grow the grapes you'll later make into wine; propagate lavender for use in medicinal salves; or transform an existing field into a meadow of wildflowers. Each section contains detailed information about growing conditions, transplanting, maintenance and harvesting.

Health and Well-being: Not to worry, there is no "miracle cure" being promoted here - just the sensible advice of generations who have relied on plants to keep their bodies in balance. There are recipes for bath salts and aromatherapy oils, primers on the care and use of healing herbs like echinacea and goldenseal, and ideas for herbal teas, soups and medicines thought to be beneficial for a variety of ills.

Home: More proof that this book will appeal to both genders! This section runs the gamut from fairly quick (repairs to leaky faucets or broken windows) to very involved (construction of sheds, fences and root cellars.) But both are treated with equal efficiency, and as always, quality and beauty remain important. Ever wanted to learn how to cane a chair, braid a rug or sew a curtain? All are detailed here.

Overall, the best feature of this book is its unpretentious and direct language. No stone is left unturned, no aspect of a project ignored, but the editors have taken care to retain the down-to-earth quality you'd expect from a book based on passed-down knowledge from largely agrarian societies. If you fancy yourself a lover of nature, you will find this book a joy to read for all the years it will take you to do so!