Futuresteading is a practical and inspirational guide to living in a way that values tomorrow: a slower, simpler, steadier existence that is healthier for you, your home and the environment. Whether you live in a city apartment, in the suburbs or on twenty acres, the principles of futuresteading offer easy-to-understand information and hands-on ideas. Learn to grow delicious food and medicinal plants; share rituals with loved ones through the seasons; feast on healthy home-cooked food for the family; nourish body and soul with outdoor expeditions and moments of rest; and create wonders with your hands. This welcoming handbook begins by showing how futuresteading works in an accessible and practical explainer, before venturing through six seasonal chapters - Awakening, Alive, High Heat, Harvest, The Turning, and Deep Chill - filled with inspiration for the garden, including making fences and wicking beds, along with 30+ rewarding recipes for slow, nourishing and easy meals. Grow, store, eat, preserve and share food that deepens the connections you have with your household, your soil and those around you.
“[A] lyrical portrait of a central Illinois sustainable farm . . . Brockman covers her subject with hard-earned expertise and organic passion.” —Publishers Weekly Henry’s Farm, run by Henry Brockman, is in central Illinois—some of the richest farming land in the world. There, he and his family—five generations of farmers, including sister Terra, the author—have bucked the traditional agribusiness conventional wisdom by farming in a way that’s sensible, sustainable, and focused on producing healthy, nutritious food in ways that don’t despoil the land. Terra Brockman tells the story of her family and their life on the farm in the form of a year-long memoir (with recipes) that takes readers through each season. Studded with vignettes, digressions, photographs, family stories, and illustrations of the farm’s vivid plant life, the book is a one-of-a-kind treasure that will appeal to readers of Michael Pollan, E. B. White, Gretel Ehrlich, and Sandra Steingraber. “Here’s what you get when the farmer’s sister turns out to be a masterful writer: a compelling argument for rebuilding our nation’s food security that is threaded within a lyrical, funny, suspenseful narrative of life on her brother’s Illinois farm.” —Sandra Steingraber, author of Having Faith “Terra Brockman's new book is such a delightful synergy of poetic inspiration and realistic descriptions of life on a farm. Here is everything from the joy and satisfaction of growing garlic and raising turkeys, to tending fruit trees and growing vegetables . . . Given the recent renewed interest in gardening and urban farming, the appearance of this inspiring book could not be more timely.” —Frederick Kirschenmann, president, Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture
This “must-read” memoir of human-scale agriculture offers an insider’s view of today’s food system by a leading voice in sustainable farming (Daniel Boulud). After years of working at the ends of the earth in human rights and development, Brent Preston and his wife were die-hard city dwellers. But when their second child arrived, the shine came off urban living. In 2003 they bought a hundred acres and a rundown farmhouse, determined to build a farm that would sustain their family, nourish their community, heal their environment—and turn a profit. The New Farm is Preston’s memoir of a decade of toil and perseverance. Farming is a complex and precarious business, and they made plenty of mistakes along the way. But as they learned how to grow food, and to succeed at the business of farming, they also found that a small, sustainable, organic farm could be an engine for change, a path to a more just and sustainable food system. Today, The New Farm supplies top restaurants, supports community food banks, hosts events with leading chefs, and grows extraordinary produce. Told with humor and heart, The New Farm is a joy, a passionate book by an important new voice.
When Christie Purifoy arrived at Maplehurst that September, she was heavily pregnant with both her fourth child and her dreams of creating a sanctuary that would be a fixed point in her busily spinning world. The sprawling Victorian farmhouse sitting atop a Pennsylvania hill held within its walls the possibility of a place where her family could grow, where friends could gather, and where Christie could finally grasp and hold the thing we all long for--home. In lyrical, contemplative prose, Christie slowly unveils the small trials and triumphs of that first year at Maplehurst--from summer's intense heat and autumn's glorious canopy through winter's still whispers and spring's gentle mercies. Through stories of planting and preserving, of opening the gates wide to neighbors, and of learning to speak the language of a place, Christie invites readers into the joy of small beginnings and the knowledge that the kingdom of God is with us here and now. Anyone who has felt the longing for home, who yearns to reconnect with the beauty of nature, and who values the special blessing of deep relationships with family and friends will love finding themselves in this story of earthly beauty and soaring hope.
Through enchanting prose and delightful activities, avid writer, gardener and placemaker Christie Purifoy helps readers capture the curious magic of the garden and bring its life and joy into their homes. A flower garden is a place where endless possibilities are contemplated (and celebrated), where reason bows to beauty, and practicality gives way to whimsy. It’s where we sink our roots deep, lean into the rhythms of each season, and wish for beautiful things to grow. This fully photographed guide shows you how to enjoy the many gifts the garden offers inside your own home, transforming your living spaces into places filled with warmth and wonder. Each season, Christie shares her notes on what to plant and walks you through easy projects that will surely become lifelong practices that help you bring the outdoors in. Learn how to grow your house into a home in bloom.
In this poignant, delicious memoir, American tax preparer and food writer Steve Hoffman tells the story of how he and his family move to the French countryside, where the locals upend everything he knows about food, wine, and learning how to belong. Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to the small, rural, scratchy-hot village of Autignac in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he’s made a terrible mistake. Life here is not holding your cigarette chest-high while walking to the café and pulling off the trick of pretending to be Parisian, it’s getting into fights with your wife because you won’t break character and introduce your very American family to the locals, who can smell you and your perfect city-French from a mile away. But through cooking what the local grocer tells him to cook, he feels more of this place. A neighbor leads him into the world of winemaking, where he learns not as a pedantic oenophile, but bodily, as a grape picker and winemaker’s apprentice. Along the way, he lets go of the abstract ideas he’d held about France, discovering instead the beauty of a culture that is one with its landscape, and of becoming one with that culture.
Since his first visit to the Hamptons in 1985, designer Mark Zeff has had a love affair with the region's wide-open farmland, rugged beaches, and the classic vernacular of barn structures that dot the landscape. His longstanding love affair has come to full fruition with the design and construction of BLACKBARN, a dream home he built for his family near his favorite beach in the Northwest Harbor. BLACKBARN is a 256-page intimate look at Zeff's home via a superbly illustrated tour that reveals for the first time how he practices what he has preached for nearly 30 years - redefining what modern and luxury mean today. Not just about design, BLACKBARN is about a lifestyle that redefines luxury, where the cornerstone is finding the right location and creating a home that is authentic to its surroundings. This coffee-table tome features striking photography by photographer Eric Laignel, with whom Zeff has collaborated for over 15 years and who also wrote the foreword. There are also personal photographs by Zeff documenting his world travels. In addition, Zeff shares his innovative ways of combining high and low elements, the rare and the utilitarian, and collected objects paired with contemporary art and design. The book provides practical ideas for decorating, planning, storage, maximizing indoor/outdoor living, and how to use humble materials to create unforgettable spaces. BLACKBARN takes readers on a journey through Zeff's home and synthesizes the influences in his life that have affected the way he designs. The Approach showcases all the elements that inspire Zeff, from the beach to the dunes to landscapes that lead to the approach of BLACKBARN. Arrival is what you are about to experience from BLACKBARN. Indoor/Outdoor shares how to mix outdoor elements inside the home and how to take the indoors out. Gathering Spaces focuses on the kitchen and dining areas. Collecting shows how a lifetime of travel and collecting influences his interiors. Textures highlights a host of patterns, shadows, and materials found in BLACKBARN. Garden punctuates Zeff's approach to designing the outdoors, and Sanctuary is all about the home's intimate nooks and havens. There is casualness in BLACKBARN but also a bit of theater. The home is equal parts nature and culture, industrial and artful. For all these reasons, BLACKBARN is also the purest expression of Zeff's creative worldview, embodying a lifetime of travel, influences, ideas, and experiences.
A wide-ranging collection of poems, aphorisms, and black-and-white photographs by an American writer and public policy scholar born in California in 1953 and raised in the American South and Pacific Northwest. Topics include faith and its loss, nature and the environment, war, social justice, friendship, teaching, chronic pain, mental health, and the struggle to communicate with others when ordinary words fail. The photography emphasizes California and the Northwest, but includes images from the American South and from Japan. Many of the writings and images convey nautical themes or nature themes. A major section addresses the Portland, Oregon, of the 1990s. This is a collection that can be read in any order or sampled a little at a time, and it can be revisited many times with new insight and delight.
Picked up for TV by Hivemind after a multi-studio bidding war with long-time producing partners Sean Daniel and Jason Brown, Bad Robot veteran Kathy Lingg, and former Valiant Entertainment CEO and Chief Creative Officer Dinesh Shamdasani. From the bestselling creative team behind Old Man Logan and Green Arrow comes a character-driven meditation on obsession, mental illness, and faith. The legend of the Black BarnÑan otherworldly building alleged to have appeared and reappeared throughout history, bringing death and madness in its wakeÑensnares and entwines the lives of two very different men. Plus, this collection includes a variant cover gallery from some of comics best artists, including CLIFF CHIANG (PAPER GIRLS), JOCK (WYTCHES), SKOTTIE YOUNG (I HATE FAIRYLAND), and more! Collects GIDEON FALLS #1-6
