Landscaping with Wood: The Practical Guide to Building Outdoors

Most gardens need some kind of structural help to create edging, raised beds, trellises, fences, dividers, and retaining walls. Wood has traditionally been one of the most common and versatile materials to enhance and beautify the garden. Scott McBride, a well-known gardener and professional woodworker, nicely outlines many of the wooden structures that can be used in the garden in this well-illustrated and comprehensive guide. He lays out the planning process; the selection of proper grades and varieties of wood; and the basics of borders and steps, retaining walls, raised beds, fences, gates, arbors, trellises, and pergolas. Individual plans are provided with descriptions of the basic process to create customized projects with beautiful results. --Mark A. Hetts

Price: $19.95

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Building Countryside Paths and Tracks

Building Countryside Paths and Tracks aims to introduce the reader to the methods required to construct rights of way, from knowing how to navigate a path's definitive line using a map and compass to the inclusion of footbridges across streams and rivers. A practical step-by-step guide to creating, repairing, and restoring a path or track, this book also discusses important safety procedures, materials, and tools. Although aimed primarily at somebody wishing to embark on a practical countryside career, this book is also an essential guide for anyone interested in the background of countryside maintenance. Furthermore, the projects herein can be used in garden projects or for agricultural purposes, and therefore are useful for all those involved in the maintenance of the countryside or landscape gardening.

Price: $34.95

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Building With Awareness: The Construction of a Hybrid Home DVD and Guidebook

Constructing a straw bale solar home requires the merging of solar design with alternative building techniques. Books are useful for accessing information on these topics quickly and easily, while videos are a great way to show actual building methods and techniques firsthand.
 
The Building with Awareness DVD/guidebook combination brings you the best of both worlds. The award-winning DVD is inspiring and informative, with over five hours of material on every aspect of building a green home. The handy reference guidebook complements the DVD, with color photographs, diagrams, suggestions, and step-by-step methods, all condensed into a nuts-and-bolts format. Used together, these two valuable resources provide a visually dynamic and easy-to--understand library of information.
 
• Take a front-row seat on the work site, learning from the experts as they notch and stack the straw bales and mix the mud.
• Learn about foundations, post-and-beam wall framing, roof construction and insulation, interior thermal mass walls for improved efficiency, rain-water cisterns, electrical wiring, and photovoltaic systems.
• Learn earth-plastering techniques that create beautiful wall finishes.
• Understand how window placement and other structural elements can help to heat and cool your home and lower your energy bills.
• See how the structure works as a whole and how both energy efficiency and superb aesthetics can come from the same materials.

Price: $39.00

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Sustainable Landscape Construction: A Guide To Green Building Outdoors

"Sustainable Landscape Construction" re-evaluates the assumption that all built landscapes are environmentally sound, and offers practical, professional alternatives for more sustainable landscape construction, design, an d maintenance. Packed with clear concepts and never-before-compiled resources on "green" landscape work, the book is an inspiring overview of important practices and concerns.Organized around ten key principles of sustainability, the book offers specific methods that can help accomplish those principles. Techniques and materials of landscape construction -- both alternative and conventional -- are evaluated, using criteria such as energy savings or non-toxicity and renewability in manufacture. Topics covered include: keeping healthy sites healthy constructing for and with plants working with a site's water regime reducing the impacts of paving using local, salvaged, or recycled materials estimating energy costs over time respecting the need for darkness and quiet evaluating the resource costs of conventional landscape maintenance and more More than 100 projects from around the world are described and illustrated, proving that sustainable methods are viable today -- economically, functionally, and aesthetically. The book's extensive lists of resources for further information are an invaluable tool for implementing the ideas discussed, and for adapting them to local and regional conditions."Sustainable Landscape Construction" will be an important complement to basic landscape construction texts, and is a one-of-a-kind reference for professionals in landscape architecture, construction, and maintenance; students in landscape construction and related design courses; andlandowners, community groups, and others concerned with the health of specific sites.

Price: $45.00

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The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage: The Real Goods Solar Living Book

Are you ready for the Cob Cottage? This is a building method so old and so simple that it has been all but forgotten in the rush to synthetics. A cob cottage,cobb, however, might be the ultimate expression of ecological design, a structure so attuned to its surroundings that its creators refer to it as "an ecstatic house."

The authors build a house the way others create a natural garden. They use the oldest, most available materials imaginable?earth, clay, sand, straw, and water?and blend them to redefine the future (and past) of building. Cob (the word comes from an Old English root, meaning "lump") is a mixture of non-toxic, recyclable, and often free materials. Building with cob requires no forms, no cement, and no machinery of any kind. Builders actually sculpt their structures by hand.

Building with earth is nothing new to America; the oldest structures on the continent were built with adobe bricks. Adobe, however, has been geographically limited to the Southwest. The limits of cob are defined only by the builder's imagination.

Cob offers answers regarding our role in Nature, family and society, about why we feel the ways that we do, about what's missing in our lives. Cob comes as a revelation, a key to a saner world.

Cob has been a traditional building process for millennia in Europe, even in rainy and windy climates like the British Isles, where many cob buildings still serve as family homes after hundreds of years. The technique is newly arrived to the Americas, and, as with so many social trends, the early adopters are in the Pacific Northwest.

Cob houses (or cottages, since they are always efficiently small by American construction standards) are not only compatible with their surroundings, they ARE their surroundings, literally rising up from the earth. They are full of light, energy-efficient, and cozy, with curved walls and built-in, whimsical touches. They are delightful. They are ecstatic.

The Hand-Sculpted House is theoretical and philosophical, but intensely practical as well. You will get all the how-to information to undertake a cob building project. As the modern world rediscovers the importance of living in sustainable harmony with the environment, this book is a bible of radical simplicity.

Price: $35.00

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