Non-Fiction Books
Grapes are among the most desirable and best-known fruits, prized for their beauty, their succulence and varied flavors, their noble metamorphosis into wine, and their more utilitarian roles as sources of fresh juice and tasty jellies. For most growers, the triumph of harvesting fragrant clusters of dusky-bloomed grapes in rose, blue-black, amber, purple, or light red bunches is its own reward--a test of gardening skill. In Great Grapes , you'll learn all you need to know to grow superb grapes, including how to: -Choose the most suitable cultivars for your area -Choose the right site -Prepare the soil -Build trellises -Plant and train the vines -Prune for maximum yield -Propagate new vines -Control pests -Harvest the grapes at the peak of ripeness
Learn how to make delicious homemade cider! With a supply of apples and a few pieces of essential equipment, you can take part in the timeless fall tradition of making your own fresh cider. This 32-page booklet has all the information you need to get started, from advice about buying a cider mill to notes on which apples to use. Making the Best Apple Cider includes: An overview of the equipment needed for cider-making A list of the apple varieties that make the best cider Step-by-step instructions for making fresh cider Information about storing and preserving sweet cider Advice about making basic hard cider Recipes for cooking with cider
An illustrated guide to growing fruits and vegetables includes a basic gardening section for novices and complete listings of gourmet seed companies and garden suppliers
Created and edited by Pulitzer Prize wining author Annie Proulx, this frank, funny, richly textured portrait of legendary writer Robert F. Jones features 15 of his best stories, both fiction and non-fiction. The book also includes 17 wonderful tributes by some of America's greatest outdoor writers and a collection of Robert Jones' images by renowned photographer Bill Eppridge.
Part autobiography, part natural history, Bird Cloud is the glorious story of Annie Proulx’s piece of the Wyoming landscape and her home there. “Bird Cloud” is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it—a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen. Bird Cloud is the story of designing and constructing that house—with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor, and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region—inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho, and Shoshone Indians—and a family history, going back to nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers. Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time.
Shortlisted, Finalist, ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards, Environment Category, 2008 A vast expanse of rock formations, sand dunes, and sagebrush in central and southwest Wyoming, the little-known Red Desert is one of the last undeveloped landscapes in the United States, as well as one of the most endangered. It is a last refuge for many species of wildlife. Sitting atop one of North America's largest untapped reservoirs of natural gas, the Red Desert is a magnet for energy producers who are damaging its complex and fragile ecosystem in a headlong race to open a new domestic source of energy and reap the profits. To capture and preserve what makes the Red Desert both valuable and scientifically and historically interesting, writer Annie Proulx and photographer Martin Stupich enlisted a team of scientists and scholars to join them in exploring the Red Desert through many disciplines—geology, hydrology, paleontology, ornithology, zoology, entomology, botany, climatology, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, and history. Their essays reveal many fascinating, often previously unknown facts about the Red Desert—everything from the rich pocket habitats that support an amazing diversity of life to engrossing stories of the transcontinental migrations that began in prehistory and continue today on I-80, which bisects the Red Desert. Complemented by Martin Stupich's photo-essay, which portrays both the beauty and the devastation that characterize the region today, Red Desert bears eloquent witness to a unique landscape in its final years as a wild place.
From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx—whose novels are infused with her knowledge and deep concern for the earth—comes a riveting, revelatory history of our wetlands, their ecological role, and what their systematic destruction means for the planet. A lifelong environmentalist, Annie Proulx brings her wide-ranging research and scholarship to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important yet little understood role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that greatly contribute to climate change. Fens, bogs, swamps, and marine estuaries are the earth's most desirable and dependable resources, and in four stunning parts, Proulx documents the long-misunderstood role of these wetlands in saving the planet. Taking us on a fascinating journey through history, Proulx shows us the fens of 16th-century England to Canada's Hudson Bay lowlands, Russia's Great Vasyugan Mire, America's Okeefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, and the 19th-century explorers who began the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Along the way, she writes of the diseases spawned in the wetlands—the Ague, malaria, Marsh Fever—and the surprisingly significant role of peat in industrialization. A sobering look at the degradation of wetlands over centuries and the serious ecological consequences, this is a stunningly important work and a rousing call to action by a writer whose passionate devotion to understanding and preserving the environment is on full and glorious display.