Sean Conway's Cultivating Life focuses on helping you make your backyard living more enjoyable. The author's ideas will help turn overlooked space into focal points and create multipurpose living spaces for dining, entertaining and spending quality time with family and friends.

Plenty of photographs, along with simple instructions, will guide the reader through projects from something simple like creating a sun-print tablecloth, to a more complex task such as building a porch swing.

The book's fifteen chapters are designed around general themes such as "Water", "Outdoor Kitchens", "Stone" and "Herbs". Within each section you'll discover gardening, building / craft projects, and ideas for food / drink preparation. For example, you'll find the plans to make inexpensive tomato frames and a clever hanging herb garden as well as instructions for using a rotary grinding tool to create interesting designs in river stone.

I was particularly impressed with the author's single column trellis for climbing plants, the very unusual tabletop rice paddy, and the tip on how to create a gourd lamp. The recipes for maple scones, pine nut-crusted tomatoes, and pumpkin and cauliflower gratin look tempting too.

This is the type of book that you can browse through and try what captures your fancy. If you successfully complete just four or five of these projects you have easily defrayed the cost of the book. I'm willing to bet, though, that you'll discover far more things that interest you and, fortunately, none of this is rocket science!