Make your own wine, beer, cider, juice and cordial using everything imaginable from your garden – including flowers, fruits, vegetables and even weeds!
Comprehensive guide on everything you need to start brewing at home, and what to use from your garden and when
A delightful revised digital edition of a classic book, Drink Your Own Garden will appeal to anyone seeking a more self-sufficient lifestyle. This is a wonderfully imaginative guide to making the most of your delicious garden produce, from damson and marigold wines, through to honey mead and rhubarb cordial.
With guidelines for each step of the way, including equipment and ingredients, a seasonal guide to what to grow when, and a list of potential problems and remedies. Over 140 recipes for berry and bush wines, flower wines, fruit wines, grain wines, herb wines, leaf and sap wines, vegetable wines, mead and beers, as well as non-alcoholic choices such as refreshing fruit juices, cordials and teas.
Accompanied by vintage-style colour illustrations throughout, this handy and accessible guide will ensure that before long you will be making the most of the seasonal fruits and vegetables from your garden and enjoying a glass of delicious home brew.

Poker has never been more popular. It’s played in all sorts of places – in serious international tournaments, at the casino, socially with friends and, of course, online. If you don’t know how to play it, you’re missing out, and here’s where this book comes in! It gives you all the information you need to go off and play your first poker game. In clear, easy-to-follow text, backed up with helpful diagrams and amusing cartoons, and concentrating on the most popular poker variant, Texas Hold ‘Em, the author shows you how to set up a game, how to bet (when to raise and when to fold), the values of the different hands, and the different versions of poker you can play. It also covers the essential psychological skills used by the best players. Armed with the information in this book, you’ll become an expert poker player – in extra-quick time!

Always wanted to play backgammon but haven’t much time to learn? This handy little eBook will show you how in just 10 minutes Introduces how to arrange the checkers, how to move, scoring and notation, and explains simply and effectively how gameplay works Informative diagrams and quirky illustrations help the information stick The classic board game backgammon has been called ‘the perfect combination of skill and luck’. It may look complicated on first glance, but this absorbing, fun game really couldn’t be simpler. This helpful, portable eBook gives you all the information you need to go off and play your first game. In clear, easy-to-follow text, backed up with helpful board diagrams and illustrations, the author shows you around the board, explains how to set up your checkers, the basics of running, blocking and hitting, and an impressive array of handy tips and hints to help you win the game. It also covers how backgammon notation works, how to score and the best places to play backgammon online. Armed with the information in this book, you’ll become an expert backgammon player – in super- quick time!

Batsford’s Walking Guides is an exciting new gift series of walking books, aimed at the weekend, family walker. These ebooks have an attractive retro feel, with nostalgic line drawings and hand-drawn maps.

Each of the 20 walks have been carefully selected to appeal to family walkers, most are circular and none are too strenuous. Each walk contains the following:

• Clear, easy-to-follow route directions
• Detailed hand-drawn maps
• Refreshments and pubs
• Parking information
• OS map references

In addition, each walk contains information on wildlife, or other special attractions to watch out for while walking. The ideal gift for anyone wanting to explore the countryside within easy reach of London.

This eBook has an attractive retro feel, with nostalgic line drawings and hand-drawn maps.

Each of the 20 walks have been carefully selected to appeal to family walkers, most are circular and none are too strenuous. Each walk contains the following:

Clear, easy-to-follow route directions

Detailed hand-drawn maps

Refreshments and pubs

Parking information

OS map references

In addition, each walk contains information on wildlife, or other special attractions to watch out for while walking. The ideal gift for anyone wanting to explore the countryside within easy reach of London.

Author Information

Jilly Macleod studied Zoology at University College, London before joining a leading publishing company as a book editor. She worked on the successful Natural History list at HarperCollins and recently helped compile The National Trust Book of the Countryside. She is a keen walker and British countryside enthusiast and recently hiked Hadrian’s Wall.

More and more textile artists are using natural processes in their work, from dyeing with rust to working with found and scavenged items, and this book is the first to bring these increasingly popular techniques together. It promotes a way of working creatively with what is close at hand, whether gathered on walks by the seashore or collected in your garden, and working in tune with natural processes, bringing the rhythms and unpredictability of nature into your work.

Examples of this type of working include rust dyeing embroidered fabric to give it a natural patina, dyeing with garden fruits or seaweed, weaving with pieces of beachcombed fibre and printing with found objects. In all of this work nature is directly harnessed to make its mark.

The book is illustrated with the finest examples of contemporary embroidery and textile-art work using nature, by artists whose practice is tied up with their experience of and respect for the natural environment, often capturing a very strong sense of place and a feeling of calmness and contemplation.

Our bodies are amazing. The microscopic elements of the human body are profoundly fascinating – and also beautiful. We unearth some of the most wonderful microscopic images of the human body ever created, now made possible by technology. We get to see the wonder of our brains, our cells, our veins, our hormones, even our diseases and the medicines to treat us. The images are as beautiful as any art. 

This stunning collection of images can be enjoyed purely as a visual voyage but also as a way to understand more of the science behind the image. Whether it’s the work of a white blood cell, the power of human hormones, the tiny hairs on our arms, the movement of human cancer cells, the jagged edges of caffeine crystals, or the wonderful shapes of nerve cells, the powerful images will draw you into discovering more about the human body. Each image will include the scale of the photography as well as the scientific details in layman’s terms.

Those special occasions in life all need to be marked with words bigger and better than those we could compose ourselves. This beautiful collection includes some of the best readings and poems to help you mark anything from a birth to a death, an engagement to a retirement, a wedding to a memorial service. Poems and readings from the best British and American writers and poets are arranged into the chapters: New Life, Childhood, Love, Unions, Getting Older, Solitude and Loss. The works of poets Longfellow, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson rub shoulders with those of William Blake, Wordsworth and W.H. Auden. The readings come from writers ranging from Churchill to Shakespeare. Mixed in are Apache prayers and Irish blessings to make this a rich reference for anyone looking for the right word at the right moment. It is lavishly illustrated with nostalgic images, making this a wonderful gift.

This is a celebration of children, of childhood and, in many ways, of being a parent. It covers some of the best poetry ever written about the charms, beauty, and love of children. British poets such as William Blake, Christina Rossetti, Milton, and Wordsworth rub shoulders with the best American poets, such as Walt Whitman and Longfellow. The poems range from the pain of losing a child to the humour of childish talk through to the profound love that being a mother or father can bring. Beautifully illustrated throughout, this is a book that would be enjoyed by any poetry enthusiast but also by anyone touched by a child in their life. 

Every chess player needs to know how to handle his pawns. Pawns form the ‘playing fields’ of chess games, a semi-permanent ‘structure’ that can determine whether a player wins or loses. This comprehensive guide to pawn structure teaches the reader where pieces are best placed, which pawns should be advanced further or exchanged, and why certain structures are good and others disastrous. This invaluable book is a major update of this chess-world classic, first published in 1975 and unavailable for several years. 

‘The garden to strive for is one that has no off-moments but is interesting and attractive whatever the time of year.’ So says Margery Fish in her introduction to the original edition of this book. In the 21st century this may seem like stating the obvious but in 1958 it was a more surprising notion. The strength of this book is that it proves the point.
Starting as a gardening journalist then gaining a reputation as a lecturer, Margery caught the attention of more gardeners, and made a more lasting impact, with her first book, We Made a Garden. Having completed the tribute to her late husband, in this, her second book, she set out in detail how to achieve her aim of a garden that looks good all the year round.
This is a confident Margery Fish, making her own garden in her own way and writing about it with natural enthusiasm to help gardeners break away from the traditional idea of empty and desolate gardens in winter. In particular she focuses on the plants themselves, highlighting those that can be relied upon to flower in winter, on evergreen foliage plants that fill the garden with long-term interest, and on plants with unusually long seasons of colour.
Recognising that the period from autumn through to the bulbs of spring is the most difficult time for most gardeners planning an all-the-year garden, Margery highlights hellebores and hardy cyclamen, plants which in the 1950s were not considered particularly significant. Through her persuasive prose, based as ever on her own experiences at East Lambrook Manor, she raises them to the first rank. She also stirred interest in heathers as winter flowers, in peat gardening, and her infectious delight in collecting plants, like hellebores and the old hose- in-hose primroses, still delights us.
And all the while, her own appreciation of the way her plants grew and her understanding of how to encourage them to give their best adds fundamental horticultural wisdom to her natural enthusiasm for the plants themselves. This is a book that changed the way we garden.              

• One of the world’s greatest chess players reveals the secrets of how he plans his play
• Packed with invaluable information on how to mobilise your forces, avoid threats and win the game
• Illustrated with a wealth of annotated examples from the author’s own games
The legendary Anatoly Karpov has won over 250 Grandmaster tournaments, many more than any other player in chess history, and his games are characterised by his gradually and patiently pushing an opponent back to the wall, before finally finishing him off with a deadly blow. In this unique book, aimed at ordinary club players, Karpov gives a wealth of tips on how to incorporate this dramatic style of play into your own repertoire, through careful planning and evaluation of positions: looking at the fire-power of your forces, being aware of threats to your own king and how to safeguard it, and careful control of open lines. As he says himself: ‘Finding the right plan is the key to success’. Warmily and accessibly written, but with Karpov’s usual air of authority, this book makes you feel like you are spending an evening with the man himself, and will help you to absorb a little bit of the Karpov magic.