For hard-working urban professionals Kristy Athens and husband Michael, living in the country was a romantic dream. After purchasing seven acres in Washington’s beautiful Columbia River Gorge, Athens and her husband were surprised to learn just how challenging rural life could be.

Get Your Pitchfork On! provides the hard-learned nuts-and-bolts of rural living from city folk who were in over their heads. Practical and often hilarious, Get Your Pitchfork On! reads like a twenty-first century The Egg and I. (more…)

*A Living Now Book of the Year award winner!*

This celebrated, essential handbook for the urban homesteading movement shows how to grow and preserve your own food, clean your house without toxins, raise chickens, gain energy independence, and more. Step-by-step projects, tips, and anecdotes will help get you started homesteading immediately. The Urban Homestead is also a guidebook to the larger movement and will point you to the best books and internet resources on self-sufficiency topics.

Written by city dwellers for city dwellers, this copiously illustrated, two-color instruction book proposes a paradigm shift that will improve our lives, our community, and our planet. By growing our own food and harnessing natural energy, we are planting seeds for the future of our cities.

New projects include:

• How to sterilize jars and bottles
• How to make infused oil
• Six ways to preserve a tomato
• How to make soda bread
• How to store grain with dry ice
• How to make a tomato can stove
• How to make a Viet Nam light
• How to make a Euell Gibbon’s crock
• How to make L’hamd markad, or preserved, salted lemons
• How to make a bike light

“The Urban Homestead…touches on vegetable gardening, poultry, DIY cleaning products and beer making all outlined with a sense of play and fun.” — Whole Life Times

“…a delightfully readable and very useful guide to front- and back-yard vegetable gardening, food foraging, food preserving, chicken keeping, and other useful skills for anyone interested in taking a more active role in growing and preparing the food they eat.” — Boingboing.net

Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen are creators of the blog Root Simple, a green living and self-sufficiency resource for urbanites. They live in Los Angeles.

Check out the book’s Facebook page!

The fifth title in Process’ Self-Reliance series demystifies medical practices with a practical approach to 21st Century health and home medicine, particularly helpful for stressful moments in a financial downturn.

When There Is No Doctor is smartly designed and full of medical tips and emergency suggestions. It should be no further than an arm’s reach in your household at a time when our health system has become particularly susceptible to strain.

“This is a book about sustainable health, primarily having to do with your health and what you can do to protect it in bad times certainly, but also in good. I will help you ensure the health of those you love, yourself and, should you so choose, your community, if and when the world changes. World may come to mean your little town or the whole globe. It could change for a few days or weeks, or for a few years. It could change because of a flood, financial crisis, flu pandemic, or failure of our energy procurement, production or distribution systems.”

“I will not teach you to be a lone survivalist who anticipates doing an appendectomy on himself or a loved one on the kitchen table with a steak knife and a few spoons, although I will discuss techniques of austere and improvised medicine for really hard times.” from When There Is No Doctor

Author Dr. Gerard Doyle teaches and practices Emergency Medicine at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he also plans the hospital’s response to disasters. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin with his wife and children.