Poetry and science, as Popova writes in her introduction, are instruments for knowing the world more intimately and loving it more deeply. In 15 short essays on subjects ranging from the mystery of dark matter and the infinity of pi to the resilience of trees and the intelligence of octopuses, Popova tells the stories of scientific searching and discovery. These stories are interwoven with details from the very real and human lives of scientists--many of them women, many underrecognized--and poets inspired by the same questions and the beauty they reveal. Each essay is paired with a poem reflecting its subject by poets ranging from Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to Maya Angelou, Diane Ackerman, and Tracy K. Smith, and is stunningly illustrated by celebrated artist Ofra Amit. Together, they wake us to a reality aglow with wonder.

Craft a soothing aloe lotion after an encounter with poison ivy, make a dandelion-burdock tincture to fix sluggish digestion, and brew up some lavender-lemon balm tea to ease a stressful day. In this introductory guide, Rosemary Gladstar shows you how easy it can be to make your own herbal remedies for life's common ailments. Gladstar profiles 33 common healing plants and includes advice on growing, harvesting, preparing, and using herbs in healing tinctures, oils, and creams. Stock your medicine cabinet full of all-natural, low-cost herbal preparations.

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.

Stretch the resources of your small backyard garden further than ever before, without devoting hundreds of hours to canning! This informative and inspiring guide shows you not only how to construct your own root cellar, but how to best use the earth's naturally cool, stable temperature as an energy-saving way to store nearly 100 varieties of perishable fruits and vegetables.

Create change in the world with this inspiring guide to social activism, from the artist and craftivist behind Badass Cross Stitch.

Craftivism, or the space where art and activism meet, is a powerful, ever-evolving social justice movement that continues to grow and diversify as more voices and mediums take part in it. In Let's Move the Needle, Shannon Downey, an outspoken voice in the craftivist movement for over a decade, provides a roadmap and accessible toolkit for burgeoning art activists.

Filled with self-reflective activities, exercises, prompts, and stories, Let's Move the Needle educates and empowers creatives to center their art around collective action in service of political, social or community issues they are most passionate about; affirming that everyone can be a changemaker and that change-making can be generative, enjoyable, and a bit sassy!

This comprehensive guide to homesteading provides all the information you need to grow and preserve a sustainable harvest of grains and vegetables; raise animals for meat, eggs, and dairy; and keep honey bees for your sweeter days. With easy-to-follow instructions on canning, drying, and pickling, you'll enjoy your backyard bounty all winter long.

Also available in this series: The Backyard Homestead Seasonal Planner, The Backyard Homestead Book of Building Projects, The Backyard Homestead Guide to Raising Farm Animals, and The Backyard Homestead Book of Kitchen Know-How.

More and more, people are turning to poetry as an antidote to divisiveness, negativity, anxiety, and the frenetic pace of life. How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope offers readers uplifting, deeply felt, and relatable poems by well-known poets from all walks of life and all parts of the US, including inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and others. These poets capture the beauty, pleasure, and connection readers hunger for.

How to Love the World invites readers to use poetry as part of their daily gratitude practice to uncover the simple gifts of abundance and joy to be found everywhere.

Includes a reading group guide that can be used to facilitate discussion in a classroom or in any group setting.

Even in winter's coldest months you can harvest fresh, delicious produce. Drawing on insights gained from years of growing vegetables in Nova Scotia, Niki Jabbour shares her simple techniques for gardening throughout the year. Learn how to select the best varieties for each season, the art of succession planting, and how to build inexpensive structures to protect your crops from the elements. No matter where you live, you'll soon enjoy a thriving vegetable garden year-round.

Brighten your meals with the tasty tang of homemade vinegar. Chef Bill Collins shows you how to make your own vinegars, including wine, apple cider, malt, white, and rice vinegars, and then flavor them with herbs for exactly the taste you want. You'll also learn how to use your custom-made vinegars in everything from a basic Italian salad dressing to Asian coleslaw, sweet potato salad, caponata, sauerbraten, caprese sliders, pickles, chutneys, and even chocolate chip cookies.

Plant parsley and asparagus together and you'll have more of each, but keep broccoli and tomato plants far apart if you want them to thrive. Utilize the natural properties of plants to nourish the soil, repel pests, and secure a greater harvest. With plenty of insightful advice and suggestions for planting schemes, Louise Riotte will inspire you to turn your garden into a naturally nurturing ecosystem.

Told from Akeem's perspective, Akeem Keeps Bees! begins with the arrival and installation of a package of bees and follows Akeem and his Dad throughout the year as they inspect the hive, find the queen, deal with a swarm, harvest honey, and prepare for winter.

Every part of the process is illustrated for young readers, teaching them the special role that bees play on a farm. The author, Kamal Bell, is a leading voice among Black farmers educating and inspiring Black youth about farming and beekeeping. Perfect for children ages 6 through 10.

Gather some basic tools and supplies from a hardware store, garage, basement, woodshop, or recycling bin. Now get ready to tinker, explore, and engineer with screws, bendy wire, metal washers, plastic pipes, dowels, electronics, LED lights, and more! Makerspace educator Ryan Jenkins inspires kids aged 8 to 12 to look at familiar supplies in new and unexpected ways, to think with their hands, troubleshoot tricky constructions, and sharpen their problem-solving skills. Kids are invited to imagine how to use the supplies on hand with projects, such as building Flexible Forts with cardboard and screws, making Art Robots with hobby motors, constructing a Water Factory with plastic pipes, balancing Sky Trams on strings, and engineering Surprising Switches with wire and foil. As they build, they'll learn about balance, center of gravity, comparative measuring, electricity, and more. Engaging photography jump-starts hours of curiosity and creativity. Start with a string, PVC pipe, cardboard ramp, or flexible tube--and see where it leads!

Become more resilient in the face of global crises and prepare yourself for supply chain disruptions by learning to grow your own food. Author Sam Coffman shows you how to select and grow the most valuable crops in the least amount of space, using few or no store-bought amendments. He also shows you how to grow food quickly (in as little as five days) in an emergency situation, choose and plant perennial food plants for longer-term harvest, grow mushrooms, forage from the backyard, and store food for the long term.

From the editor of the bestselling poetry anthologies How to Love the World and The Path to Kindness, a collection of accessible, uplifting poetry celebrating the small wonders and peaceful moments of everyday life.

As James Crews writes in the introduction: Wonder opens our senses and helps us stay in touch with a humbling sense of our own human smallness in the face of unexpected beauty and the delicious mysteries of life on this planet.

The anthology features a foreword by Nikita Gill and a carefully curated selection of poems from a diverse range of authors, including Native American poets Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Kimberly Blaeser, and Joseph Bruchac, and BIPOC writers Ross Gay, Julia Alvarez, and Toi Derricotte. Crews features new poems from popular writers such as Natalie Goldberg, Mark Nepo, Ted Kooser, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jane Hirshfield, and Jacqueline Suskin, along with selections from emerging poets.

Readers are guided in exploring the meaning and essence of the poems through a series of reflective pauses scattered through the pages and reading group questions in the back. This anthology offers the perfect intersection for the growing number of readers interested in mindful living and bringing poetry into their everyday lives.

A New England Book Award Winner
A USA Today Bestseller

Written for all levels of stitchers, The Art of Embroidery Design teaches the value of establishing a creative practice, with hands-on sketching and stitching exercises to help anyone build confidence in their design skills. Author Christi Johnson provides a workshop experience for readers looking to start from scratch. She breaks the design process down into approachable steps, including:

-developing a vision
-choosing a color palette
-using variations in line weight to create dimensionality
-achieving a range of textural effects.

Dozens of colorful photos of the author's own work are accompanied by historical examples from artisans in Mexico, India, Peru, China, Nigeria, and more, as well as profiles of some of the most inventive contemporary embroidery artists-it's a complete workshop in a book.

Nautilus Book Awards, Gold Winner

Everyone can be an activist with the guidance of Omkari Williams, a life coach who guides readers in identifying their activist archetype and mapping a personal action plan for engaging in small, change-making activities with potentially big impacts.

With a touch of humor and quirky full-color illustrations, kids will learn about the life-recycling system happening all around us--in the sea, in the soil, and even inside our own bodies. Profiles of decomposers such as hungry fungi and familiar worms, poop-slurping butterflies, and slimy banana slugs offer something to pique the curiosity of every kid. Readers will also learn the heroic role decomposers might play in fighting climate change and eating plastic.

See the world in a whole new way with acclaimed illustrator Julia Rothman's beautiful nature guide book.

Nature Anatomy combines art and science in this exciting and educational guide to the structure, function, and personality of the natural world. Explore the anatomy of a jellyfish, the inside of a volcano, monarch butterfly migration, how sunsets work, and much more. Rothman's whimsical illustrations are paired with interactive activities that encourage curiosity and inspire you to look more closely at the world all around you.

Also available in Julia Rothman's Anatomy series - Nature Anatomy Notebook, Ocean Anatomy, Food Anatomy, Farm Anatomy, and Wildlife Anatomy.

Serious poultry farmers and backyard bird raisers have relied on this best-selling reference for more than 20 years. The fourth edition of Gail Damerow's comprehensive handbook is now completely revised and redesigned, making it more accessible and informative than ever. You'll get the most up-to-date details on shelter, food, health care, eggs, chicks, and meat, and recent research into chicken behavior and communication makes the sections on flock management truly authoritative. New color photos and illustrations provide more specificity and information about chicken breeds, anatomy, and health.

From worms, birds, and spiders to trees, flowers, and clouds, young explorers learn what to look and listen for wherever they are--whether in a nature preserve, an urban park, or a suburban backyard. Seek-and-find lists, on-the-trail art projects, and discovery games get kids engaged in hands-on learning about nature, and a real pull-out magnifying glass helps them get a close-up glimpse of leaf veins, seed pods, and tiny insects. Filled with activities, checklists, and stickers, this interactive nature guide belongs in every kid's backpack.

Now nature-curious kids can play and learn with the companion Backpack Explorer online game!

​Gold Mom's Choice Award Winner