12 Favourite Children's Winter Reads

We love reading, and shorter wintery days give us many more opportunities to cozy up near the fire with a good book.  We have a basket of winter reads nearby, and our daughter can choose books to help us celebrate and enjoy the winter season.  Here are 12 of our favourites.

The Mitten, by Jan Brett (and so many other Jan Brett books!)
Ollie's Ski Trip, by Elsa Beskow
How the Grinch Stole Christmas, by Dr. Seuss
Owl Moon, by Jane Yolen
The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats
The Tomten and the Fox, by Astrid Lindgren
First Snow in the Woods, by Carl Sams and Jean Stoick
The Story of the Snow Children, by Sibylle von Olfers
Findus at Christmas, by Sven Nordqvist
Over and Under the Snow, by Kate Messner
Snowflake Bentley, by Jacqueline Briggs Martin
The Night Before Christmas, by Barbara Reid
The Elves and the Shoemaker, by Jacob Grimm and Jim Lamarche

and all the lovely winter poems found in
Outside Your Window: A Child's First Book of Nature, by Nicola Davies

There are just so many lovely winter stories.  As an alternative to reading out loud together, we have also been enjoying listening to the audio winter stories by Sparkle Stories.   Sparkle Stories offers inspiring simple beautiful audio books about nature, family, community, celebrations, fairies, and more heartwarming themes, through their website (with lots of free sample stories as well).

Favourite homesteading/sustainability magazines

We do a whole lot of reading around here...we visit the library at least once a week and bring home stacks of wonderful children's books, keep our B&B stocked with books to inspire our guests, and have a hefty collection of gardening, permaculture, green building, country living, crafting and homesteading manuals on our own bookshelves.  Here are a few of the favourite magazines we've found that provide useful homesteading/sustainability/natural parenting info.  If any readers know of other similar magazines, please add a comment below.

In particular, I'm excited about Urban Farm Magazine which I've only just found and started subscribing to.  The recent May/June 2011 issue includes articles on rooftop gardens, permaculture, suburban homesteading, sustainable local economies, lasgana gardening, DIY dehydrator plans, garden bug identification, and understanding misleading food labels.

Urban Farm: Sustainable City Living
Alternatives: Environmental Ideas and Action
Organic Gardening
Permaculture Activist
Mother Earth News
Harrowsmith (the vintage 1970s and 1980s copies)
Mothering
Natural Life
Yes! Magazine: Journal of Positive Futures
Utne Reader
Orion
New Internationalist 
Back Home Magazine
Small Farm
Hobby Farms and Hobby Farm Home
Living Crafts

Reading: Farm City by Novella Carpenter

My partner and I both just finished Farm City:The Education of an Urban Farmer, by Novella Carpenter. This book is a good read for anyone interested in the quirky adventures in inner city farming, as Novella writes passionately about farming her garden, orchard, bees, and livestock in a formerly vacant lot, living "off the land" in a rough part of downtown Oakland.

In particular, the book focusses heavily on her experiment in raising chickens, turkeys, rabbits and pigs at her urban farm. It's important to note that Novella is by no means a vegetarian - her livestock raising project is not just for gaining eggs or manure, but in fact for meat. What starts with a coop full of hens, ends up including a beehive, and many more turkeys, ducks, rabbits, and two full grown pigs. She explores what it means to humanely, respectfully kill animals that she has raised herself from day 1 (with more than enough graphic detail of the slaughtering process - these are lengthy sections of the book, which need to be skipped or skimmed over by the vegetarian or vegan reader!). The book is hilarious, inspiring, insightful, and a nice addition to 100-Mile Diet literature. At one point in the book she embarks on a month-long 100-Foot Diet where she only subsists on food from her garden or wild harvested in the city.

There are various other amazing urban farmers you meet along the way, including Novella's friend Willow whose non-profit farm called City Slicker Farm provides produce and backyard gardening skills for inner city families thereby increasing food self-sufficiency in West Oakland where store-bought healthy produce is expensive and hard to come by.

One of the final paragraphs of the book sums up the importance of seeing urban farming as a community venture that can't be done alone - a network of many small projects, together adding up to something large and significant. She writes:

"Although my holding was small - and temporary - I had come to realize that urban farming wasn't about one farm, just as a beehive isn't about an individual bee. I thought of Jennifer's beehive and garden. Of Willow's backyard farms that dot the city of Oakland. Urban farms have to be added together in order to make a farm. So when I say that I'm an urban "farmer", I'm depending on other urban farmers, too. It's only with them that our backyards and squatted gardens add up to something significant. And if one of ours goes down, another will spring up."

www.cityslickerfarms.org
www.farmcity.wordpress.com