Every year, the race to grow the biggest pumpkin in the world draws a rowdy crowd of obsessive gardeners to county fairs and weigh-offs across the country. The competition is furious; there's sabotage and treachery and the heartbreak of root rot, and many a weigh-off ends in tears. This year, more than just the grand prize is at stake. The Holy Grail is within reach: the world's first fifteenhundred-pound pumpkin. And Ron and Dick Wallace think they have what it takes to get it. Backyard Giants follows a tumultuous season in the life of a close-knit tribe of competitors as they chase down the ultimate pumpkin prize. In the grueling and gut-wrenching quest for truly colossal fruit, vacations are postponed, marriages are strained, and savings accounts are emptied. Backyards are converted into leafy laboratories of biogenetics and toxic chemicals-to say nothing of pumpkin sex. Riding shotgun with Ron and his father Dick, Wall Street Journal editor Susan Warren brings to life a winning and unforgettable crew of pumpkin lunatics: the newbie who shocked everyone by growing the big one last year; the pro-bono slime scientist; the groundhog assassin; and the safety trainer who risked electrocuting himself to save his patch. Funny, sharp, and engaging, Backyard Giants is a romp through a charming corner of American life, as quirky and enchanting as the big pumpkins themselves.

In the first essay in Garden Musings, this gardening writer states, "The evidence keeps racking up that I, the Hoosier-born offspring of several generations of farmers, chose through ignorance to garden in a delightful area combining the world's worst soil and an exasperating climate, all augmented by various man-made and natural catastrophes such as tornadoes, droughts, prairie fires, hail, drenching rains, ice-storms, late freezes, boiling summers, and seventy mile per hour winds. " Gardening, with all the pressures of struggle between the environment, wild animals, and the gardener, and particularly in the harsh Kansas weather, is not for the faint-hearted as demonstrated by the many essays in the book including Sweet (Corn) Pain, Weather-Weary, Midden Misery, and Soil Sorrows. While the essays are full of useful personal observations about gardening style, plant information, and garden practices, the author also turns his wry eye on tumbling a number of gardening tenets and institutions as he turns his attentions on composting, lawn maintenance, and landscape designers who work primarily in junipers, Japanese barberry and Stella de Oro daylilies. The timing and content of programming of the Home and Garden Television Network and the lack of availability of G-rated gardening statues are other topics that don't escape this garden curmudgeon. Gardeners searching for practical advice or simply for winter-reading pleasure will all find fulfillment within these pages.

DIVThe captivating story of an urban family who welcomes wildlife into their backyard and discovers the ups and downs of sharing habitat/div

The United States has shaped Latin American history, condemning it to poverty and inequality by intervening to protect the rich and powerful. America’s Backyard tells the story of that intervention. Using newly declassified documents, Grace Livingstone reveals the US role in the darkest periods of Latin American history, including Pinochet’s coup in Chile, the Contra War in Nicaragua and the death squads in El Salvador. She shows how George W Bush’s administration used the War on Terror as a new pretext for intervention; how it tried to destabilise leftwing governments and push back the ‘pink tide’ washing across the Americas. America’s Backyard also includes chapters on drugs, economy and culture. It explains why US drug policy has caused widespread environmental damage yet failed to reduce the supply of cocaine, and it looks at the US economic stake in Latin America and the strategies of the big corporations. Today Latin Americans are demanding respect and an end to the Washington Consensus. Will the White House listen?

In this exciting exploration of some of the biggest of the small, natures largest insects are brought under the magnifying glass for curious readers, young and old. Pamela Carroll's exquisite artwork has been deftly colorized for this new 2012 digital edition.

"Should there be any doubt that Gertrude Jekyll was among the greatest practitioners of the art of gardening (there isn't, of course), a survey of this book will quickly confirm her almost totemic status in twentieth-century ornamental horticulture."--Wayne Winterrowd, Horticulture, The Magazine of American Gardening "[This book] is scholarly, well-written, and based on original research. The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll is the most innovative study of the patron saint of modern gardeners since Jane Brown's pioneering Gardens of a Golden Afternoon appeared ten years ago. . . . [Bisgrove's] is the most detailed and comprehensive analysis ever made of Gertrude Jekyll's gardening."--Charles Quest-Ritson, Gardens Illustrated "The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll serves as a living complement to her gardening ideas, indicating the scope and variety her gardening vision could assume. Richard Bisgrove has mined extensive archives for Jekyll's most effective planning schemes, and illustrates them with photographs of her existing gardens. He helpfully divides chapters by types of gardenincluding formal gardens, rose gardens, wild gardens, steps and walks, and sun and shade."--Ann Geneva, Literary Review "Gertrude Jekyll is famous the world over as the mother of the lush English garden. . . . The stage is set for an updated revival of the Jekyll cult. Her philosophical commitment to native plants and gardens that incorporate existing heathland and woods makes her environmentally up to date."--Diana Ketcham, New York Times "The most comprehensive study I have seen of the garden-making ideas of this astonishingly prolific lady . . . This is a book that can be read cover to cover -- but one to which people will refer time and again over the years."--Arthur Hellyer, Financial Times "Richard Bisgrove must now be firmly established as one of our most authoritative, painstaking yet easy-to-read garden historians . . . The writing is a happy combination of scholarship and art . . . readers must be equally delighted with Andrew Lawson's magnificent photographs."--Graham Stuart Thomas, The Garden