Two books on growing food, keeping it, and wasting none of it.

Better than thirty scraps, two chapters deep. Beet tops, broccoli stems, cabbage core, potato peel, onion skins, citrus peel, leek greens, herb stems, apple cores. Each one names what you bin and what they charge you for it.

The water you pour down the drain. Bones, drippings, a grease crock kept right. Eggshell, coffee grounds, wood ash.

Stale bread, soured milk, limp vegetables, honey gone hard — and a straight list of what does not come back. A hard rule on the seeds and pits you must never eat.

A whole week written out from one chicken and a bag of potatoes. Two tear-out pages at the back for the cupboard door.

No garden anywhere in it. Everything here works with food you carry home from the store.

Part One, the garden — 20 chapters. What to plant when the cellar is the goal. Potatoes under straw. Tomatoes laid on their side for three times the roots. The bugs crop by crop. Bringing it in at the right hour, the step folks skip and the reason a cellar rots out by November.

Part Two, keeping it — 40 chapters. A root cellar without building one. Six chapters on drying, five on fermenting with the salt weighed, not guessed. Salt and brine. Curing meat. Eggs in lime water. Butter and hard cheese. Soap from your own saved fat.

Part Three, the year — 10 chapters. Month by month, the lean stretch in late winter, and a straight account of what it saves.

Sixty pages of reference at the back: the keeping guide crop by crop, master tables, planting amounts, a symptom index.