Visit the acclaimed 19th-century Maryland farmstead that serves as home and studio to James Cramer and Dean Johnson—two greatly admired artists and craftsmen with a love for old-fashioned gardens, natural handcrafts, and homespun holiday celebrations. Season by season, through lush watercolors and photos, you’ll see how the grounds and the projects evolve.

Lavishly illustrated with original watercolors and more than 300 color photographs, this enchanting volume chronicles a year at Seven Gates, a 19th century farm in the rural town of Keedysville, Maryland. In its season-by-season tour, the book offers and inspires countless ideas for how to create the country look through displaying collectibles and making homespun holiday decorations.

A hardcover book with 136 pages of beautiful photos of Seven Gates Farm's gardens and the antique garden collections of James Cramer.

Presents ideas and advice on creating decorative window box arrangements for every season, and includes over 150 photographs.

The son of legendary investor Warren Buffet relates how he set out to help nearly a billion individuals who lack basic food security through his passion of farming, in forty stories of lessons learned.

At Home invites the reader into the early American home to learn firsthand what it was like to live in and manage a house before electric lighting, central heating, and modern medicine. Drawing on diaries, letters, household inventories, and novels, Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett offers a richly documented analysis of early American middle-class home life.Handsomely illustrated with period paintings, drawings, and prints, At Home takes us from the parlor through to the bedchamber, portraying families gathered around a candlelit table, roaring kitchen fires used both to cook and to heat, and a weekly laundry without the benefit of washing machines. Readers will be both fascinated and charmed by this revealing glimpse of a once-familiar way of life. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

At 4:00 am, Leonida Wanyama lit a lantern in her house made of sticks and mud. She was up long before the sun to begin her farm work, as usual. But this would be no ordinary day, this second Friday of the new year. This was the day Leonida and a group of smallholder farmers in western Kenya would begin their exodus, as she said, "from misery to Canaan," the land of milk and honey. Africa's smallholder farmers, most of whom are women, know misery. They toil in a time warp, living and working essentially as their forebears did a century ago. With tired seeds, meager soil nutrition, primitive storage facilities, wretched roads, and no capital or credit, they harvest less than one-quarter the yields of Western farmers. The romantic ideal of African farmers -- rural villagers in touch with nature, tending bucolic fields -- is in reality a horror scene of malnourished children, backbreaking manual work, and profound hopelessness. Growing food is their driving preoccupation, and still they don't have enough to feed their families throughout the year. The wanjala -- the annual hunger season that can stretch from one month to as many as eight or nine -- abides. But in January 2011, Leonida and her neighbors came together and took the enormous risk of trying to change their lives. Award-winning author and world hunger activist Roger Thurow spent a year with four of them -- Leonida Wanyama, Rasoa Wasike, Francis Mamati, and Zipporah Biketi -- to intimately chronicle their efforts. In The Last Hunger Season, he illuminates the profound challenges these farmers and their families face, and follows them through the seasons to see whether, with a little bit of help from a new social enterprise organization called One Acre Fund, they might transcend lives of dire poverty and hunger. The daily dramas of the farmers' lives unfold against the backdrop of a looming global challenge: to feed a growing population, world food production must nearly double by 2050. If these farmers succeed, so might we all.

Jimmy Carter re-creates his boyhood on a Georgia farm.

"Pretty and proper style is about decorating once... for a lifetime. It is about the creation of timeless, tailored interiors rotted firmly in English tradtion. The rules of this style are like a secret code that has been whispered from other to daughter over generations. These secrets have always been inherited -- until now" -- cover, page 4.

Each day, Bob Sheasley leaves Lilyfield Farm and heads into the city. And each day, he brings along a basket of eggs for his coworkers at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Depending on the breed of hen, these eggs may be white, green, rose, blue, or as brown as chocolate. And they are all deliciously fresh, a taste of the rural way of life that people have enjoyed for millennia, one in which chickens have played a supporting role for nearly as long. In Home to Roost, Sheasley tells of the intertwined relationship between humans and chickens. He delves into where chickens came from, what their DNA tells us about our kinship, how we’ve treated our feathered fellow travelers, and the roads we’re crossing together. This is a story of agriculture and human migration, of folk medicine and technology, of how we dreamed of the good life, threw it away, and want it back. Modern farming has changed the lives of both bird and man over the past century. But backyard farmers like Sheasley offer hope for a return to the pleasures of locally grown food, as diverse as the chickens he’s raised on Lilyfield Farm. With wit and personal insight, Home to Roost examines of how our lives can be changed for the better, with something as simple as a backyard coop.