Soil and Composting

Building Soils for Better Crops

By Fred Magdoff and Harold van Es.
This book unlocks the secrets of maintaining a healthy ecosystem in the soil to improve crop health. Ecological soil management, as detailed by Magdoff and van Es, can raise fertility and yields while reducing environmental impacts. Building Soils contains detailed information about soil structure and the management practices that affect soils, as well as practical information like how to interpret soil test results. 240 pages.

Easy Composters You Can Build

By Nick Noyes
With clear instructions for first time builders or master craftsmen, this booklet sets out the principles of good composting and then suggests several simple plans for different styles of composters. Something for every yard and garden! 32 pages.

How to Make and Use Compost

By Nicky Scott
Every aspect of composting is covered in this clearly written and fully illustrated handbook. Creating the right mix, maintaining the ideal temperature and cultures, building various types of composters, safely using food and garden scraps to create beautiful, healthy soil. Includes a section on community and school composting programs. 200 pages.

Improving Your Soil

By Stu Campbell
Improving your soil both increases the yield of your garden and makes your garden eaiser to tend. This book covers the best ways to improve soil, including how to determine whether your garden soil is sandy, clay, or loam; how to identify the right time to work the soil; how to balance your pH; how to improve difficult soils, and how to use soil amendments. A great little book from the Story Country Wisdom Bulletin series. Updated and revised. 32 pages.

Let it Rot

By Stu Campbell
In 1975, Let it Rot! helped start the composting movement and taught gardeners everywhere how to recycle waste to create soil-nourishing compost. Contains advice for starting and maintaining a composting system, building bins, and using compost. Third Edition. 267,000 copies in print. 160 pages.

Life in the Soil

by James Nardi
Leonardo da Vinci once mused that “we know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot,” an observation that is as apt today as it was five hundred years ago. The biological world under our toes is often unexplored and unappreciated, yet it teems with life. In one square meter of earth, there lives trillions of bacteria, millions of nematodes, hundreds of thousands of mites, thousands of insects and worms, and hundreds of snails and slugs. But because of their location and size, many of these creatures are as unfamiliar and bizarre to us as anything found at the bottom of the ocean.

Lavishly illustrated with nearly three hundred color illustrations and masterfully-rendered black and white drawings throughout, Life in the Soil invites naturalists and gardeners alike to dig in and discover the diverse community of creatures living in the dirt below us. Biologist and acclaimed natural history artist James B. Nardi begins with an introduction to soil ecosystems, revealing the unseen labors of underground organisms maintaining the rich fertility of the earth as they recycle nutrients between the living and mineral worlds. He then introduces readers to a dazzling array of creatures: wolf spiders with glowing red eyes, snails with 120 rows of teeth, and 10,000-year-old fungi, among others. Organized by taxon, Life in the Soil covers everything from slime molds and roundworms to woodlice and dung beetles, as well as vertebrates from salamanders to shrews. The book ultimately explores the crucial role of soil ecosystems in conserving the worlds above and below ground.
336 pages
 

Mulch It

By Stu Campbell
Weeding. Watering. Soil improvement. Frost and heat protection. Wouldn't it be wonderful if these gardening and landscaping chores could be simplified with one easy method? They can! This book is a reader's guide to the gardener's secret weapon for healthy, carefree and beautiful gardens and landscapes - mulch. Advice on every kind of mulch and on how to use mulches on everything from landscape plantings to vegetable gardens makes this the one book that gives readers everything they need to know to use mulch most effectively.  128 pages.

Secrets to Great Soil

By Elizabeth P. Stell
Learn all the secrets for creating fertile, productive soil anywhere. With more than 300 detailed illustrations and at-a-glance charts, Secrets to Great Soil solves all your soil problems and gives you techniques for year-round soil building. In Secrets to Great Soil you'll find:

• The basics of soil pH and nutrients
• Quick methods for making compost
• Instructions for using organic mulches, soil amendments, and fertilizers
• Ways to customize your soil for a variety of vegetables, flowers, fruits, trees, shrubs, and lawns.

The Complete Compost Gardening Guide

By Barbara Pleasant & Deborah L. Martin
Turn the compost bin upside down with this natural Six-Way Compost Gardening System for keeping compost heaps right in the garden, rather than in some dark corner behind the garage. The compost and the plants live together from the beginning in a nourishing, organic environment. The authors’ bountiful, compost-rich gardens require less digging, weeding, mulching, and even planting. And here’s one of the best parts — no more backbreaking slogs from compost bin to garden. The authors even identify the plants that benefit most from compost and explain how the elements of a composted garden work together. 320 pages.

The Soul of Soil

By Joe Smillie & Grace Gershuny.
A soil building guide for master gardeners and farmers. This is a sensible, well focused and highly readable handbook that provides essential information on the creation and care of our most precious resource - our soil. At a time when the importance of organic certification is becoming widely reconized (and hotly debated,) this new edition, a classic work of practicality and inspiration, is more relevant that ever. 173 pages.