The Great Giveaway

I've always wanted to have a giveaway, so why not include my friends at Native Plants & Wildlife Gardens and Beautiful Wildlife Garden.

Leave a comment ranking your choices in order of preference. I'll use a random number generator, and when I land on your comment, I'll go down the list and give you the first available prize (you can also just say "yo" and I'll randomly hand out a prize). I'll then hook you up with the author so they can send you the book.

You have until Saturday, December 8 at midnight central to enter. So, get to it! And please help me spread the word. Karma is a factor for the random number generator.

THE WINNERS

Pat Musick -- Urban and Suburban Meadows by Catherine Zimmerman
Gaia Gardener -- Energy-Wise Landscape Design by Sue Reed
Subversive Hippy -- Nature's Notes by Judy Burris
Jenny Brooks -- Florida Butterfly... offered by Suzanne Dingwell
Unknown (who are you?) -- Rocky Mountain Garden by Susan Tweit
Sunnyside Dru -- The Green Garden by Ellen Sousa
Diane S -- Sleep Creep Leap by moi (others were taken, so you win mine!)
Jchapstick -- Sleep Creep Leap by moi

Send me an email (bervogtATgmail.com) with mailing address so I can put you in touch with the authors!

#1

Urban and Suburban Meadows: Bringing Meadowscaping to Big and Small Spaces 

60 minute companion video

Catherine Zimmerman (like her at The Meadow Project)

The video brings into focus the amazing diversity of life inhabiting meadows and prairies and the beautiful imagery inspires meadow and prairie creation! The 60-minute video is formatted to be screened in one sitting or the viewer can click on individual chapters with meadow experts Michael Nadeau, Larry Weaner and Neil Diboll, who walk the viewer through meadow site preparation, design, planting and maintenance. In the chapter, Why Native Plants, entomologist, Doug Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home, explains the intricate connection between native plants, native insects and the soil food web.

The video and book address the problems caused by the extensive planting of pesticide-ridden, non-native grass lawns across America. While it is impractical to eliminate lawn, we cannot ignore the environmental consequences of such landscape planning as ecosystems are being destroyed and replaced with chemically maintained monocultures.

#2

Energy-Wise Landscape Design: A New Approach for You Home and Garden

Sue Reed (visit her here)

Residential consumption represents nearly one quarter of North America’s total energy use and the average homeowner spends thousands of dollars a year on power bills. To help alleviate this problem, Energy-Wise Landscape Design presents hundreds of practical ways everyone can save money, time, and effort while making their landscapes more environmentally healthy, ecologically rich, and energy efficient.

Intended for homeowners, gardeners, landscape professionals, and students, the design ideas in this book will work in every type of setting—large or small, hilly or flat, urban or rural. Written in non-scientific language with clear explanations and an easy conversational style, Energy-Wise Landscape Design is an essential resource for everyone who wants to shrink their energy footprint while enhancing their property and adding value to their home.

#3

Nature's Notes

Judy Burris and Wayne Richards (visit them here)

Regardless of age, we all enjoy the fun of discovering new insights to our natural world.
Nature's Notes delivers this joy using bite-sized learning text and dazzling close-up photos to unlock scores and scores of fascinating secrets. The fast-paced format features mini articles and sidebars interspersed with fun and affordable projects as well as backyard explorations revealing hidden natural treasures.

Nature's Notes unique spiral-binding and flexible jacket make this eye-popping book both sturdy and outdoor-friendly . Author/photographers Judy Burris and Wayne Richards have had their work featured in national and worldwide magazines, while their award-winning books, The Secret Lives of Backyard Bugs and The Life Cycles of Butterflies are national nature-category best sellers.

#4

Florida Butterfly Caterpillars and Their Host Plants 

Marc Minno, Jerry Butler, Donald Hall

offered by Suzanne Dingwell 

This book will become the classic guide to southern butterfly caterpillars and their host plants.

With hundreds of color photographs and concise information in a format that can easily be carried into the field, it offers an unprecedented tool for all butterfly gardeners, teachers, naturalists, students, and scientists in the southern United States.

No other book offers such a comprehensive discussion of Florida butterfly caterpillars and their host plants. It covers caterpillar anatomy, biology, ecology, habitat, behavior, and defense, as well as how to find, identify, and raise caterpillars. The book contains sharply detailed photos of 167 species of caterpillars, 185 plants, 18 life cycles, and 19 habitats. It includes 169 maps. Photos of the egg, larva, pupa, and adult of representatives of 18 butterfly families and subfamilies provide life cycle comparisons that have never been illustrated before in such an accessible reference.

#5

 Rocky Mountain Garden Survival Guide

Susan Tweit (visit her here)

Rocky Mountain gardeners of all skill levels can now breath a sigh of relief. Keep gardens healthy and productive with the quick, expert advice provided in this easy-to-use pocket-size guide. Within these pages you will find the necessary resources and tools to adjust to the challenges of living in the rugged Rocky Mountains. Gardeners in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and Alberta and British Columbia, Canada, will find down-to-earth tips on:
*Growing the right plants for your geographic area
*Working with soil
*Understanding unique weather challenges
*Getting rid of "invaders"—weeds and pests

#6

The Green Garden

Ellen Sousa

This practical, comprehensive and inspirational guidebook for New Englanders looking for low-cost, beautiful and earth-friendly ways to green their landscapes and outdoor spaces and supply habitat for a variety of declining species, including birds, native pollinators, honey bees, amphibians and turtles.

Includes an extensive Plant Guide, detailing the best wildlife-friendly plants suitable for the varied conditions and microclimates across New England, cultivation hints and tips, and the wildlife attracted by each plant.

#7

Sleep, Creep, Leap: The First Three Years of a Nebraska Garden

Benjamin Vogt

Peeling off sheets of skin from a sunburned back. Spending $1,000 at five nurseries in an afternoon. Raising 200 monarch butterflies. Hearing the wing beats of geese thirty feet overhead at sunset. How one piece of mulch can make all the difference. These are the stories of Benjamin Vogt’s 1,500 foot native prairie garden over the course of three years. After a small patio garden at his last home teases him into avid tinkering, the blank canvas of his new marriage and quarter acre lot prove to be a rich place full of delight, anguish, and rapture in all four seasons.

Full of lyrical, humorous, and botanical short essays, Sleep, Creep, Leap will leave you inspired to sit a while with your plants, noticing how the smallest events become the largest—and how the garden brings us down to earth so that we can come home to our lives.