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Since 1984, Chelsea Green has been the leading publisher of books about organic farming, gardening, homesteading, integrative health, natural building, sustainable living, socially responsible business, and more. In 2012, Chelsea Green became an employee-owned company to help us remain an independent publisher, keep our roots firmly planted in Vermont, and ensure that the publishing vision started in 1984 lives far into the future.
The Vertical Veg Guide to Container Gardening
Paperback $34.95 Pre-Order
The Vertical Veg Guide to Container Gardening
How to Grow an Abundance of Herbs, Vegetables and Fruit in Small Spaces
From the creator of the wildly popular website “Vertical Veg” and with over 200k people in his online community of growers, comes the complete guide to growing delicious fruit, vegetables, herbs, and salad in containers, pots, and more—in any space, from window boxes to garden yards, no matter how small!
If you long to grow your own tomatoes, zucchini, or strawberries, but thought you didn’t have enough space, Mark Ridsdill Smith, aka the “Vertical Veg Man,” will show you how to make the most of walls, balconies, patios, arches, and windowsills.
Ridsdill Smith has spent over ten years teaching people to grow bountiful, edible crops in all kinds of containers in small spaces.
Inside The Vertical Veg Guide to Container Gardening, you’ll find:
- Mark’s “Eight Steps to Success”
- How to make the most of your space
- How to draw up a planning calendar so you can grow throughout the year
- Planting projects for beginners
- Compost recipes and wormery guide for the more experienced gardener
- Troubleshoots for specific challenges of growing in small spaces
- How growing food at home can contribute to wellbeing, sustainability, and the local community
With quick, proven results from his own tests, failures, and successes, Mark will show you how gardening in containers is not just a hobby, but a way of creating a significant amount of delicious, low-cost, high nutrition food.
Don’t be confined by the space you have—grow all the food you want with Mark’s Vertical Veg Guide to Container Gardening.
Living PCOS Free
Paperback $25.95 Pre-Order
Living PCOS Free
How to Regain Your Hormonal Health with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome
When faced with her own premature menopause, Dr. Nitu Bajekal, the “plant-based gynae,” learned that the Western medicine in which she had trained and practiced had too long ignored the real impact of nutrition and lifestyle on both health and disease. To allow women to achieve their full health potential, lifestyle medicine and conventional medicine can complement each other, offering an appropriate blend of solutions for the individual patient. Based on her research, 35 years’ clinical practice, and her personal experience of a plant-based diet—with input from her daughter, nutritionist and former PCOS sufferer Rohini Bajekal—she offers this practical lifestyle guide to recovery from polycystic ovarian syndrome. Dr. Bajekal shows how this endocrine condition can be managed via the six pillars of lifestyle medicine, with interventions of Western medicine available as adjuncts as needed. The book features a 21-day lifestyle plan for hormonal health together with tried-and-tested plant-based recipes by the authors and illuminating case histories.
A Food Forest in Your Garden
Paperback $28.95 Pre-Order
A Food Forest in Your Garden
Plan It, Grow It, Cook It
Grow your own seasonal food in a low maintenance, nature-friendly garden that feels like a woodland glade. Scottish plant expert Alan Carter shows you how to plan and plant a temperate forest garden for any sized plot—from a small terrace garden to an allotment or smallholding.
Learn how to successfully layer root crops, fruit, perennial vegetables and edible shrubs below tree crops, cultivating an edible garden that doesn’t look like a traditional vegetable plot. A forest garden is wildlife friendly, provides nutrient-dense and often unusual food through every season, and requires minimal work to maintain.
The first part of this in-depth, practical guide explains how a forest garden works, how to map your climate and design your own plot, and how to manage it with mulching, weeding and pruning. What’s not to like about Alan’s motto of “the more you pick, the more you get,” and intriguing concepts such as the Panda Principle?
The second half of the book is a detailed directory of more than 170 plants and fungi suitable for a wide range of temperate climates, complete with growing, harvesting and cooking tips based on over a decade of Alan’s own experience. Learn how to incorporate traditional fruit and vegetable crops, such as strawberries and beans, into your forest garden, and how to weave in more unusual crops, such as shiitake mushrooms and ferns.
Techniques from agro-ecology bring regenerative farming into the backyard, helping you to work towards greater self-sufficiency. Useful tips on seed saving and propagation help keep plant costs low, and there is practical advice on soil health, compost—essential for all no dig, organic gardeners—and pests and disease. A Food Forest in Your Garden will help you create your own productive forest gardens even in cooler climates.
The Orchard Book
Paperback $19.95 Pre-Order
The Orchard Book
Plan, Plant and Maintain Fruit from Garden to Field
Wonderlands of bounty and beauty, orchards offer an abundance of fruit in a wildlife haven full of diversity. A well-managed orchard works with nature to provide maximum harvest for minimal effort.
Wade Muggleton has distilled 20 years of orchard know-how into this practical handbook to help you plan, plant and manage your orchard, whatever your garden size or budget.
With his expert guidance you can have an orchard on any plot—garden, yard, allotment or smallholding—and both maximise your harvest and minimise your outlay. The book covers:
- Rootstocks and fruit varieties
- Planting plans
- Maintenance strategies
- Pruning
- Propagation
- Eco-friendly pest and disease management
- Harvesting
- Storing
- Preserving the harvest
The diversity, history and heritage of apples and other fruit trees is fascinating, and Wade’s passion for them is infectious. Let him draw you into a world of apples and pears, walnuts and cobnuts, cherries and plums; of ancient varieties such as quince, medlar and mulberry; and even of juicy apricots, figs and peaches. Imagine having organic fruit all year round from your own little nature haven and use Wade’s tried and tested experience to create your perfect orchard.
Eating Plant-Based
Paperback $29.95 Pre-Order
Eating Plant-Based
Scientific Answers to Your Nutrition Questions
Questions—and answers—about the virtues of a plant-based diet
Despite plant-based diets being associated with some of the best health outcomes, myths about the need for meat, dairy and eggs in the diet persist. Following a Q&A format, two medical doctors (who both specialize in cancer treatment, one in the UK and one in Canada) answer all the commonly asked questions and concerns raised when people first consider transitioning to a plant-based diet. How do you get enough protein? Is it safe for children? Is soya problematic for hormones? Simple and straightforward answers are supported with the scientific background making this book also the go-to guide for health professionals who are increasingly meeting patients and clients who have chosen a plant-based diet.
Restorative Practices of Wellbeing
Hardcover $49.00 Add to basket
Restorative Practices of Wellbeing
Drawing on cutting-edge neurophysiology and ancient awareness practices, a pioneering connection phenomenologist maps a medicine of the ancestral future.
The landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences study, the largest epidemiological study of trauma ever done, suggests that more than two thirds of American adults are carrying trauma from early childhood adversity. Yet the study did not even conceptualize social trauma: the impacts of racism, sexism, and other forms of structural oppression, or ecological trauma: the trauma of being disconnected from the Living World. By this metric, almost all modern people are traumatized.
Trauma activates the toxic stress response, which translates to a wide variety of stress-related adverse health outcomes later in life. It shapes how we feel in our bodies, our emotional landscape, and structures the thoughts we are able to think. It shapes how we see ourselves, how we interpret the world, and the behaviors available to us.
For the two million years that humans have lived on earth, we have sought to nourish thriving in our children by creating a kind of developmental nest for them. For humans, this nest is of culture and its function is to connect us with three things: ourselves, one another, and the Living World. When this is done properly, the human nervous system becomes baselined in safety and connection, turning on the Connection System, the physiological fountain of wellbeing and resilience.
Over the past 10,000 years, humans have deviated from this ancestral nest at an accelerating rate, which has intensified over the past 500 years. Most modern humans therefore do not feel safe, and are therefore not able to reside in the biology of wellbeing. Humans who are disconnected do not care for themselves, one another, or the Living World.
In this pioneering volume, connection phenomenologist Gabriel Kram addresses two fundamental practical questions: how do we address the trauma and disconnection endemic to the modern world, and how do we turn on the Connection System? Marrying cutting-edge neurophysiology with awareness technologies from a wide variety of traditions and lineages, this book maps a novel approach to the creation of wellbeing informed by the most cutting-edge science, and the most ancient of awareness practices.
It teaches over 300 restorative practices of wellbeing to connect with Self, Others, and the Living World. Learn practices for
- Assessing your defensive responses
- Down-shifting threat responses
- Turning on your Connection System
- Weaving Mindfulness into daily life
- Fine-tuning your senses
- Becoming more embodied
- Developing non-cognitive Ways of Knowing
- Building Healthier relationships
- Relating Across difference
- Connecting deeply with Nature
- Opening to creativity
- Using language restoratively
For anyone who has faced a difficult childhood, grown up with a sense that there is something missing in the modern world, or yearns for deeper connection with Self, Others, or the Living World, this book provides a map to a (r)evolutionary approach to wellbeing so ancient it hasn’t been invented yet.
Green Mother
Paperback $24.95 Pre-Order
Green Mother
Families Fit for the Future
A no-nonsense guide to pregnancy and child rearing for those who want to reap the advantages of modern Western life while avoiding its pitfalls
“Modern Western life is eroding the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health of our children so seriously that the very survival of our species is threatened. More children than ever are fat and fatigued, learning disabled and emotionally damaged, and the responsibility lies with us. We are killing with kindness in an attempt to provide a stress-free, safe environment for our most loved.”—Sarah Myhill and Michelle McCullagh
Green Mother is for those who want the best of both worlds—to reap the advantages of modern Western life but recognise its pitfalls. This book aims to give parents, would-be parents, grandparents, siblings and all members of the ‘tribe’ that surround a new baby the theoretical and intellectual imperatives to tread this difficult path, the practical day-to-day realities that must be overcome, and the encouragement to do so. The book is beautifully illustrated with 50 of Michelle’s sketches.
Contents include:
- Mothers and fathers: what to do pre-conception to reduce risks
- The Paleo-Ketogenic (PK) diet: the non-negotiable foundation for success
- Normal pregnancy: avoiding complications
- Childbirth and immediate postpartum: being informed and involved in decision-making
- Breastfeeding and weaning
- Sleep
- The baby who cries
- The ‘first brain’—the immune system: vaccination decisions, training the immune system
- Minor childhood ailments
- Serious avoidable childhood problems
- The ‘second brain’—emotional confidence
- The ‘third brain’—sub-conscious, conscious and intellectual
- Infertility and assisted conception
Our Wild Farming Life
Paperback $19.95 Pre-Order
Our Wild Farming Life
Adventures on a Scottish Highland Croft
As seen on the BBC’s This Farming Life
The inspirational story of Lynbreck Croft—a regenerative Scottish farm rooted in local food, community, and the dreams of two women.
Lynn and Sandra left their friends, family, and jobs in England to travel north to Scotland to find a bit of land that they could call their own. They had in mind keeping a few chickens, a kitchen garden, and renting out some camping space; instead, they fell in love with Lynbreck Croft—150 acres of opportunity and beauty, shrouded by the Cairngorms and deep in the Highlands of Scotland.
But they had no money, no plan, and no experience in farming.
In Our Wild Farming Life, Lynn and Sandra recount their experiences as they work out what kind of farmers they want to be, learning how to work with Highland cattle, become part of the crofting community, and understand how they can farm with nature to produce food for themselves and the people around them. “Through their journey to becoming farmers,” as The Guardian recently wrote, “it’s clear that nature and the health of the environment plays a central role in everything they do…” And through efforts like these, Lynn and Sandra have been able to combine regenerative farming practices with old crofting traditions to keep their own personal values intact.
Our Wild Farming Life is what happens when you follow your dreams of living on the land; a story of how two people became farmers—and how they learned to make a living from it, their way.
Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts
Paperback $34.95 Pre-Order
Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts
50 Easy-to-Grow Plants for the Organic Home Garden or Landscape
The easy-to-use resource for growing healthy, resilient, low-maintenance trees, shrubs, vines, and other fruiting plants from around the world—perfect for farmers, gardeners, and landscapers at every scale.
Illustrated with more than 200 color photographs and covering 50 productive edible crops—from Arctic kiwi to jujebe, medlar to heartnut—this is the go-to guide for growers interested in creating diversity in their growing spaces.
Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts is a one-stop compendium of the most productive, edible fruit-and nut-bearing crops that push the boundaries of what can survive winters in cold-temperate growing regions. While most nurseries and guidebooks feature plants that are riddled with pest problems (such as apples and peaches), veteran growers and founders of the Hortus Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, Allyson Levy and Scott Serrano, focus on both common and unfamiliar fruits that have few, if any, pest or disease problems and an overall higher level of resilience.
Inside Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts you’ll find:
- Taste profiles for all fifty hardy fruits and nuts, with notes on harvesting and uses
- Plant descriptions and natural histories
- Recommended cultivars, both new and classic
- Propagation methods for increasing plants
- Nut profiles including almonds, chestnuts, walnuts, and pecans
- Fertilization needs and soil/site requirements
- And much more!
With beautiful and instructive color photographs throughout, the book is also full of concise, clearly written botanical and cultural information based on the authors’ years of growing experience. The fifty fruits and nuts featured provide a nice balance of the familiar and the exotic: from almonds and pecans to more unexpected fruits like maypop and Himalayan chocolate berry. Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts gives adventurous gardeners all they need to get growing.
Both experienced and novice gardeners who are interested in creating a sustainable landscape with a greater diversity of plant life—while also providing healthy foods—will find this book an invaluable resource.
Going to Seed
Paperback $19.95 Pre-Order
Going to Seed
A Counterculture Memoir
An unforgettable firsthand account of how the hippie movement flowered in the late 1960s, appeared spent by the Thatcher-consumed 1980s, yet became the seedbed for progressive reform we now take for granted—and continues to inspire generations of rebels and visionaries.
At a young age, Simon Fairlie rejected the rat race and embarked on a new trip to find his own path. He dropped out of Cambridge University to hitchhike to Istanbul and bicycle through India. He established a commune in France, was arrested multiple times for squatting and civil disobedience, and became a leading figure in protests against the British government’s road building programs of the 1980s and—later—in legislative battles to help people secure access to land for low impact, sustainable living.
Over the course of fifty years, we witness a man’s drive for self-sufficiency, freedom, authenticity, and a deep connection to the land.
Fairlie grew up in a middle-class household in leafy middle England. His path had been laid out for him by his father: boarding school, Oxbridge, and a career in journalism. But everything changed when Simon’s life ran headfirst into London’s counterculture in the 1960s. Finding Beat poetry, blues music, cannabis and anti–Vietnam War protests unlocked a powerful lust to be free. Instead of becoming a celebrated Fleet Street journalist like his father, Simon became a laborer, a stonemason, a farmer, a scythesman, and then a magazine editor and a writer of a very different sort. In Going to Seed he shares the highs of his experience, alongside the painful costs of his ongoing search for freedom—estrangement from his family, financial insecurity, and the loss of friends and lovers to the excesses and turbulence that continued through the 70s and 80s.
Part moving, free-wheeling memoir, part social critique, Going to Seed questions the current trajectory of Western “progress”—and the explosive consumerism, growing inequality, and environmental devastation laid bare in our daily newsfeeds—and will resonate with anyone who wonders how we got to such a place. Simon’s story is for anyone who wonders what the world might look like if we began to chart a radically different course.
Toda la verdad sobre el COVID-19
Paperback $17.95 Pre-Order
Toda la verdad sobre el COVID-19
La historia detrás del gran reinicio, los pasaportes de vacunación y la nueva normalidad
USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Bestseller Internacional
“Una [crítica] elocuente, carismática e informada de un sistema corrupto.”—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,del prólogo
“El Dr. Mercola es un visionario, pionero y líder.”—Del Bigtree, anfitrión de The Highwire
El muchas veces ganador de libros más vendidos del New York Times, Dr. Mercola y Ronnie Cummins, fundador y director de la Asociación de Consumidores Orgánicos y Vía Orgánica, se unen para exponer la verdad – y terminar con la locura – sobre el COVID-19.
Mediante una robusta investigación, más de 500 referencias de artículos de revistas científicas arbitradas, estadísticas oficiales gubernamentales y descubrimientos de investigación de salud pública de todo el mundo, los autores muestran la necesidad urgente de un despertar global. Es hora de unirnos, exigir la verdad y tomar el control de nuestra salud. La Verdad Sobre el COVID-19 es tu invitación a unirte al Dr. Mercola y Cummins mientras educan y organizan un futuro sano, equitativo, democrático y regenerativo.
*Edición actualizada con un nuevo prólogo*
Follow the Pipelines
Paperback $19.95 Pre-Order
Follow the Pipelines
Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil
“Charlotte Dennett has written an excellent book summarizing the geopolitics of the Middle East historically through to current events. . . . This is an amazing piece of historical writing. . . . Students, foreign affairs ‘experts’ and officials should have this work as required reading.”—Jim Miles, Palestine Chronicle
Unraveling the mystery of a master spy’s death by following pipelines and mapping wars in the Middle East.
In 1947, Daniel Dennett, America’s sole master spy in the Middle East, was dispatched to Saudi Arabia to study the route of the proposed Trans-Arabian Pipeline. It would be his last assignment. A plane carrying him to Ethiopia went down, killing everyone on board. Today, Dennett is recognized by the CIA as a “Fallen Star” and an important figure in US intelligence history. Yet the true cause of his death remains clouded in secrecy.
In Follow the Pipelines, investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett digs into her father’s postwar counterintelligence work, which pitted him against America’s wartime allies—the British, French, and Russians—in a covert battle for geopolitical and economic influence in the Middle East. Through stories and maps, she reveals how feverish competition among superpower intelligence networks, military, and Big Oil interests have fueled indiscriminate attacks, misguided foreign policy, and targeted killings that continue to this day.
The book delivers an irrefutable indictment of these devastating forces and demonstrates how the brutal violence they incite has shaped the Middle East and birthed an era of endless conflict.
Follow the Pipelines also brings new questions to the fore:
- To what lengths has the United States negotiated with the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS to secure Big Oil’s holdings in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen?
- Was the Pentagon’s goal of defeating ISIS a fraudulent pretext for America’s occupation of Syrian eastern provinces and a land grab for oil?
- Did the infamous double agent Kim Philby, who worked for the British while secretly spying for the Russians, have anything to do with Dennett’s death?
- Why have the US and China made North Africa the next major battleground in the Great Game for Oil?
Part personal pilgrimage, part deft critique, Dennett’s insightful reportage examines what happens to international relations when oil wealth hangs in the balance, and she shines a glaring light on what so many have actually been dying for.
Charles Dowding’s Skills For Growing
Hardcover $31.95 Pre-Order
Charles Dowding’s Skills For Growing
Sowing, Spacing, Planting, Picking, Watering and More
The knowledge and techniques you need for successful vegetable growing, based on Charles’ decades of experience
- Grow vegetables easily throughout the year
- Use time creatively to maximise growth
- Learn cost-effective and productive-per-area methods
- Learn to plan, sow, multisow, transplant, space, water, harvest, and succeed with succession
- Improve growth while working alongside nature
Master gardener Charles Dowding explains the skills and understandings you need for successful growing. His approach sometimes diverges from the mainstream because he assays and develop new or lesser-known methods, for easier and better results.
Skills for Growing illustrates how you create planting plans and advises on succession and rotation, interplanting and multisowing, how to propagate plants and quick ways to set them in the ground.
It gives detailed information on spacing, harvesting methods and timings, watering, and using covers for both warmth and pest protection.
Dowding describes the skills needed for successful winter gardening, growing in containers and growing perennial vegetables and herbs.
The advice given in the book is based on having a clean and fertile area in which to grow vegetables. It may not be large, but that is fine: there are examples of how much food you can grow every year in just one bed, and in containers too.
The book comprises 18 chapters, grouped into 6 parts. Each chapter is illustrated with captioned, full-colour photographs from Dowding’s garden in Southwest UK.
Blind Trust
Paperback $24.95 Pre-Order
Blind Trust
How Parents with a Sick Child Can Escape the Lies, Hypocrisy and False Promises of Researchers and the Regulatory Authorities
An insider’s look into the world of pediatric drug trials: when research outcomes can quite literally represent life or death
Many parents of children with serious health problems may wonder why new medicines are initially not approved for minors and, if their condition is rare, why at the same time there is such pressure to enter any young person under 18 into drug trials. So-called ‘paediatric’ pharmaceutical studies have become an international multi-billion business, with many careers in academia, regulatory authorities and the pharmaceutical industry based on this work, yet much of this activity is founded on a series of flawed concepts that have led to an immeasurable waste of resources and serious, ongoing medical abuse. In this revelatory book, the former head of paediatric drug research at two major pharmaceutical companies provides a guide for parents and non-specialists interested in advancing the health of children—both individuals facing serious disease and groups of children enrolled in testing programs. Rose explains the key differences between clinically-directed and administratively-directed research, what will potentially benefit or harm children, and how laws need to change around the world so that true advances can be made.
Bringing Back the Beaver
Paperback $17.95 Pre-Order
Bringing Back the Beaver
The Story of One Man’s Quest to Rewild Britain’s Waterways
“Derek Gow might be the most colorful character in all of Beaverdom.”—Ben Goldfarb, author of Eager
Read the 2021 Profile of Derek on NewYorker.com: “An Ark for Vanished Wildlife”
Bringing Back the Beaver is farmer-turned-ecologist Derek Gow’s inspirational and often riotously funny firsthand account of how the movement to rewild the British landscape with beavers has become the single most dramatic and subversive nature conservation act of the modern era. Since the early 1990s—in the face of outright opposition from government, landowning elites, and even some conservation professionals—Gow has imported, quarantined, and assisted the reestablishment of beavers in waterways across England and Scotland.
In addition to detailing the ups and downs of rewilding beavers, Bringing Back the Beaver makes a passionate case as to why the return of one of nature’s great problem solvers will be critical as part of a sustainable fix for flooding and future drought, whilst ensuring the creation of essential lifescapes that enable the broadest possible spectrum of Britain’s wildlife to thrive.
“Bringing Back the Beaver is a hilarious, eccentric and magnificent account of a struggle . . . to reintroduce a species crucial to the health of our ecosystems.”—George Monbiot
“A treasure.”—Booklist
The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking
Paperback $20.00 Add to basket
The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking
Tools for the Transitions Ahead
The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking was born of a simple realization: The world we have inherited is no longer working.
The future of the planet and civilization as we know it are threatened, and the cries heard during the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests—“I can’t breathe”—continue to echo. By giving us tools for navigating the transitions ahead, this catalog helps us breathe more deeply.
The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking explains the transformational power of social collaboration by showcasing dozens of pathbreaking projects, books, websites, and activist initiatives. Commoners seek to prioritize people’s needs over market extraction, steward the Earth, relocalize the economy, and build new institutions of empowerment.
The emerging Commonsverse can be seen in relocalized food systems and community land trusts…in racial empowerment through collective action and mutual aid…and in free and open source software, peer production, and platform cooperatives.
Commoning is helping communities to managing scarce water supplies, farmers to develop regenerative agriculture, and artists to reclaim control of their creative lives. Ordinary people are becoming more self-reliant through timebanking and collaborative finance, care collectives and gift economies, and alternative local currencies.
The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking is an indispensable guide for understanding many profound social transformations now underway. In 25 thematic sections, The Commoner’s Catalog offers a rare collection of tools for navigating the transitions ahead and building a new world. It offers a portrait of the system-change activism that is creating an economics of sufficiency, a politics of fairness, and a culture of belonging.