Price : $7.45

Product Description

Roll out the welcome mat for butterfles and hummingbirds. Attracting Butterfles and Hummingbirds to Your Backyard reveals the secrets for creating irresistible gardens and a welcoming landscape, which will lure these amazing creatures up close and personal for your enjoyment and wonder. Author Sally Roth knows the best plants, feeders, and water features that appeal to butterflies and hummingbirds, plus she offers an entertaining and insightful guide to butterfly and hummingbird behavior.

Customer Reviews

Review date : 2008-07-12
This book is a beauitful learning tool and is so well done with illustrations. A definite buy.

Review date : 2008-03-13
This book has great information and lots of it. The author provides a lot of easy ways to attract life into a garden. Also, many plants are listed that thrive in midwest states (where the soil is like clay) were listed that I have never heard of before. It is explained why hummingbirds and butterflies are attracted to certain plants, which helps you to think for yourself when you are out plant shopping. There are some tips and techniques that cost practically nothing which are fun projects for couples or parents and their children. I really enjoy this book and it is one that I can look at over and again and still learn something new to use in the garden. It will be a great tool this summer to me.

Review date : 2007-10-28
I found the book extremely informative. There are numerous recommendations of different plant species to attract and nourish North American butterflies and their caterpillars. The book would make a wonderful project for young people and their parents to do together to explore the natural world, beautify their yard, support dwindling numbers of species and just have fun together. Information about hummingbirds is just as delightful.

Review date : 2007-05-15
This book was just what I needed to learn about attracting humming birds and
butterflies. This has been very useful for figuring out how to start my garden.
I am very visual, so the beautiful pictures in the book and the general text design layout
makes it easy to read.

Review date : 2007-02-07
This book is wonderful for anyone who wants to garden in nature’s best interest.

Price : $8.34

Product Description

How to Store Your Garden Produce: The Key to Self-Sufficiency has been completely revised and is the modern guide to storing and preserving your garden produce, enabling you to eat home-grown goodness all year round. The easy-to-use reference section provides applicable storage and preservation techniques for the majority of plant produce grown commonly in home gardens. Why is storing your garden produce the key to self-sufficiency? Because with less than an acre of garden you can grow enough produce to feed a family of four for a year. But without proper storage, most of it will go to waste since much of the produce ripens simultaneously in the summer. Learn simple and enjoyable techniques for storing your produce and embrace the wonderful world of self-sufficiency. In the A-Z list of produce, each entry includes recommended varieties, suggested methods of storage, and a number of recipes. Everything from how to make your own cider and pickled gherkins to how to string onions and dry your own apple rings. You will know where your food has come from, you will save money, there will be no packaging, and you’ll be eating tasty local food while feeling very good about it!

Customer Reviews

Review date : 2008-07-08
Piers Warren starts off with basic instructions for storage methods: clamping (storing large quantities of roots outside) and other methods of dry storage, freezing, drying (from oven to dehydrator), vacuum-packing, salting, bottling/canning, pickling, relishes & sauces, jams & jellies, and fermenting. This volume isn’t meant as a full-blown wine-making or jam-making resource, so these are only the most basic instructions.

The rest of the book covers individual types of produce in alphabetical order. Since the focus of this book is supporting yourself on your own produce, Warren discusses some topics you might not expect. For instance, how best to harvest a vegetable so as to encourage further harvest throughout the season. He discusses varieties that will have longer harvest times, or that will produce during different times of the year. He talks about how some plants can be started at different times so as to result in a longer harvest period as well.

One potentially useful feature is the section of recommended varieties. For example, the apples section lists out two good varieties of cooking apples, a crab apple, and a handful of eating apples, noting which ones keep particularly well or work best for wine-making or the like. However, in some cases this won’t be as useful outside of Britain (the book was written & published in Britain but is also being distributed in other countries). For instance, I don’t recognize many of the apple or tomato varieties. However, I do recognize a number of the carrot and chard varieties. It just depends on whether a particular type is available & grows well where you are.

The one other small potential snag is a couple of terminology issues. Most of them aren’t a big deal (what US readers call canning, Brits call bottling, but the author notes this). One or two types of produce might be listed under a name unfamiliar to you (plenty of people have heard eggplants called aubergines, but not everyone in the US knows them by that term). Don’t let this deter you from buying this book if you’re in the US, however—the information is incredibly useful, and in most cases there are enough informative notes included that you can substitute varieties as appropriate or easily figure out the terminology differences. Also, all measurements for recipes and such are given in both metric and English measurements.

If you want to become more self-sufficient, or you just want to make better and less wasteful use of your garden produce, I definitely recommend this book.

Review date : 2006-02-09
This unusual book saves so much time trawling through all my old gardening books looking for storage techniques for various vegetables and fruit. I use it a lot and have also given it to friends as presents and they are very pleased too! Highly recommended.

Price : $8.79

Product Description

Create your own private nature preserve-with dozens of ingenious ideas to turn a typical backyard into a beautiful natural habitat for birds and other wildlife.

Experience the gratification of watching birds gobble seeds and other treats from your homemade bird feeder. Look on with delight as a mother bird tends to her babies in the protective hideaway of a birdhouse you have lovingly constructed from a dried gourd. Create a sunflower plantation, a bird teepee, a tent-style twig feeder, a pedestal birdbath. Follow the step-by-step instructions in this book, and your yard will quickly become an enticing playground, breeding ground, and feeding ground for colorful songbirds. And that’s not all-there are also projects specially designed to attract beautiful hummingbirds and butterflies to your garden.

Among the book’s special features:
- Projects require only a few simple tools and supplies and most can be easily and inexpensively assembled using only scrap materials found around the house

- Information-packed sidebars include tips for identifying the nests and eggs of songbirds and unusual facts and figures about birds and bird behavior

- Instructions show how to create baffles and barriers to keep squirrels, raccoons, and other unwanted guess away from the birdseed-along with projects for tending to these feeder-raiding marauders too!

The simple pleasure of viewing birds in your backyard is something to treasure every day of the year. Whether you are a seasoned bird watcher or are new to the hobby, you will find a wealth of inspirational ideas here to attract more birds than ever before to your backyard. And you’ll increase your enjoyment of this soul-satisfying pastime.

Customer Reviews

Review date : 2008-07-18
Some great ideas…quite practical uses for otherwise discarded items and the birds really do respond! Highly recommend for group scouting project ideas because they generally don’t require specialized tools or unusual materials. I recycled several items that were otherwised destined to be thrown away. Thanks! Enjoy!

Review date : 2008-02-24
I own a good dozen or more books on how to attract birds to my garden. This book is definitely one of my favorites.

It contains a variety of very easy projects on best ways of providing seeds, making your own bird treats (like those expensive seed bells they sell in stores), creating feeding stations, planting habitats, setting up water stations, birdhouses and more. There is also a section devoted to hummingbirds and butterflies.

I really like that it isn’t a bird or plant identification book. One of my pet peeves with many of my other "project" books is that they dilute their content by including bird identification charts for instance - often up to 1/3 of the book with another third devoted to pictures and descriptions of the plants. I’d rather leave that to a specialized book and let my project books be filled with (imagine this) projects! There is a small amount of this type of information in this book, but it’s generally to the point and captured in simple and easy to read charts. I would suggest anyone looking for that type of material should buy appropriate field guides.

I love that the projects are pretty much entirely able to be made from recycled materials (like using the plastic tubes that tennis balls come in or metal coffee cans or plastic plant saucers for instance) and scrap wood. They are very easy and could be wonderful projects for engaging your kids with nature and getting fast results. Tips are also included for maintenance too (such as keeping feeding stations looking their best).

I also love the garden ideas - simple plans for small patches of specialized garden areas - there’s one for a self-renewing bird attracting garden with a ton of seed-producing annual flowering plants for instance; a garden for producing nesting materials, another for attracting butterflies by providing food for their caterpillars, one for hummingbirds and a number of others.

Overall, if you are trying to attract birds to your yard and especially if you are looking for ideas for projects you can do with your kids to give them an appreciation for nature, I think you can’t go wrong with this book.

Review date : 2007-12-27
This book will delight the Do-It-Yourself types who would rather put something together and attract birds to their backyards than to merely observe them in the wild. It’s a sturdy, glossy trade paperback with detailed line-drawings, tables, side-bars, and step-by-step project sheets.

It starts with a section of fast-and-easy projects for beginners to get your feet wet with the easiest of the various types of woodworking, cooking, and gardening projects you can do to attract birds.

Later chapters go into detail on each of the specialties (woodworking, cooking, gardening) so that you can either do it all or just focus on the chapters that address your talents.

The book also includes a Projects-at-a-Glance index so you can look up things to do involving Nesting, Water, Landscaping, et cetera. Highly recommended. Longer review at OrnateBirdGarden-dot-com.

Review date : 2007-02-21
This is a great book for anyone interested in backyard birding, no matter what size your backyard may be. There are articles on how to attract, feed, and house different birds.

Review date : 2007-02-16
I like this book. I’m a new bird watcher. I’ve made some of the projects mentioned in this book and they work quite well.