Look at it like this: why not grow something that you don’t have to do any work for? It’s true: you don’t do anything. You just get an inoculated log or something else that is inoculated with the spores from the mushroom, place it in a cool damp place, and enjoy your delicious mushrooms. I mean, I grow a lot of different stuff in my garden, but it never really dawned on me to grow my own mushrooms until very recently. It’s amazing too, since I grow a whole lot of stuff that requires a whole lot more work to take care of than these mushrooms could ever need.

The best way that I can think of for a budding mushroom keeper to get started is to buy an inoculation kit. These kits can be bought through a number of different vendors, and there are a lot of local vendors that can supply these to you. If you want to save a little money, you should consider going the online route when you shop for your mushroom kit. The Daily Grommet Mushroom Kit is a great way to get started, and it will provide you with at least two “flushes” of mushrooms that you can harvest from the comfort of your own home. The best thing about these kits: you know they’re safe. Obviously, it’s too dangerous for a non-expert to just run off into the woods and start chowing down on mushrooms. Even the experts can make mistakes since mushrooms are so widely variable. These kits guarantee that you’re eating safe mushrooms and they’re grown right in your own home.

The Leeners Ultimate Cheese Making Kit is a great way to get your feet wet with cheese making. Not only does it contain all of the regular gear that you’d need to get to make cheese, but it also contains the ingredients and recipes that you’ll need to start making cheese right out of the box. When it comes to ease of use it really doesn’t get any better than that. One of the great things about this setup is that it doesn’t get you into making anything that would be beyond the capability of a beginner. You won’t be making really exotic cheeses or anything, but you’ll be left with something very edible that you’ll be very proud of.

You don’t have to be part of a Little House on the Prairie episode to get into doing all this stuff for yourself. If the eco-friendly movement has shown us anything it’s that there is a lot of joy to be found in the simplicity of making your own stuff. Whether it’s building a chicken coop, making your own lip balm, making your own soap, or making your own beer, there is definitely something to be said for doing it yourself.

For the rest of us, getting a good kit is essential for getting decent wine out of your experiment. There are even some very fancy sets out there that give you special wine pressing equipment and all of that. I’m not going to get into anything that crazy, but I can recommend a great beginners kit that I haven’t personally used but that a friend of mine has used with great success. It’s called the Strange Brew Wine Making Kit, and as a home brewer I can tell that this thing is well worth the money and time.

One thing that is great about this set is its simplicity. Some sets are full of confusing home brew components that can make the whole process seem way more complicated to a newbie than it has to be, and there’s really no good reason for that. Another thing that I love is that it has a glass carboy. The carboy is the thing that you’re doing the actual fermentation in before you do the initial bottling, and having a glass one is great because it allows you to actually see the fermentation going on. When it comes to wine fermentation, this is a great way to keep an eye on the fermentation process so you can see when it’s done. Aside from that, this kit has a very sturdy build and none of the parts that come with it are built out of that cheap, shaky plastic that makes you shake your head in shame at having spent money on them.

One of my favorite things to do in the world is brew my own beer. I wouldn’t exactly call myself the next Master Brewer at Sam Adams or anything, but I like to have fun and come up with different types of beer. These days, I use my own setup that I put together after years of trial and error, but I really wouldn’t recommend that any budding home brewers start off building their own sets. I started with a set that doesn’t even exist anymore, but there are a lot of great starter sets for anyone looking to get into home brewing. One of the best that I’ve found for the money is the Maestro Home Brew Kit.

Just so you know, I do have some pretty specific criteria here– the most important of which being a balance between price and usefulness for beginners. I mean, the reality is that the first time you make your beer you will suck at it. There’s really no getting around that. It’ll be drinkable and it will get you drunk, but you won’t really get into your stride. However, this doesn’t mean that you should just start using a crappy set just because it’s cheap. Even brewers with a lot of potential can be put off by a bad first experience with a cheap starter kit that produces crappy beer. The great thing about this set is that it also includes an automatic siphon, which is a lifesaver when you finally get into bottling. All in all, it’s a great set to get started on, and it won’t break your bank if it turns out that you’re really not as into home brewing as you may have thought.

It’s called “Homegrown and Handmade”, and it’s by a woman named Debbie Nieman who owns a small farm in middle America. This is really the resource to look for when it comes to branching out your small operation into something a little more far reaching. The book talks extensively about the ins and outs of both vegetable and animal production, and it does so with the use of anecdotes rather than dry text. The book itself is pretty engaging, and it really helps you get excited about maybe getting a few goats and some chickens.

There are only a few different books out there that can inspire the amount of self-sustainable passion as this book. One of the most difficult things in the world of urban homesteading and self-reliance is that there are a lot of books that dryly talk about specific aspects of those subjects. This book does is much more entertainingly, and it also shows how everything comes together to work smoothly. If there is only one book you get on this subject, make it this one. It really is a great primer to further research, but it’s in-depth enough to make a small farm a reality for anyone that has the impetus to accomplish it.

See? It’s not all that bad to love books. In fact, you can end up saving yourself a lot of money and a whole lot of questions over where your food comes from when you buy books like this. The simple informational access is worth the price alone. It really is amazing just how much money you can save by just doing all this stuff for yourself.

One of the best ways to get that across any time of the year is with a good book. It’s sad that these days people look at books like this archaic thing that you only read because you have to while you’re in school. There is so much useful information inside of most books that it’ll make your head spin, and when you find a great one written by a knowledgeable expert on something then it really helps things coalesce better. I’m talking, of course, about buying books that can actually lead you down the road to better choices and a more sustainable lifestyle. These books exist– these tools of knowledge that free you from the shackles of bad food and degradation– and these books are called “Urban Homesteading” books. They’re great.

No article about urban homesteading would be complete without first mentioning the book “Urban Homestead” by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen. This is the first book that really took on the whole urban homesteading thing head-on, and it provides some really choice knowledge about things that are of practical importance to people that live in cities. The greatest thing about this book is that it’s tailored specifically for city-folk, and it provides solutions to all those little “space” problems we all think we have. This book shows you how to think outside the box (or apartment), and it shows you how to move your way to a sustainable future. I’m on board with that.

There are a few really great books out there that talk about this subject, but this is one of the first and arguably one of the best. Stay tuned for the next couple books in this series of awesome sustainable books.

What I mean is that it can be tough to find little bundles of food that suit your lifestyle that are geared specifically for the holidays. And that stinks, because there are a lot of different types of people that fruit baskets and the like are perfect for.

Generally, fruit baskets are something that I only give to people that I don’t know very well. That’s not to say that I think that these baskets aren’t “good enough” for people I know really well, but it is to say that they are a fairly “generic” type of gift. That’s what makes them so great for people you don’t know well– they’re generic. I mean, seriously it saves you a lot of time wracking your brain trying to figure out the perfect gift for someone you barely know.

In the end, who doesn’t like good, organic fruit?

There are a lot of different companies out there that offer these types of gifts, but one of the standouts is really Eco Express. They have an organic treat tower that is full of tons of different types of food that you can’t really find in a lot of places. For example, they have organic mangoes in their arrangement and they’re not that easy to find in some places. Since you are more or less guaranteed to be eating GMO mangoes if you’re not eating certified organic ones, I call that a pretty great gift.

While these gifts aren’t necessarily what I’d call “great for everyone”, there is definitely a time and a place for these types of gifts. Whether you’re finding something for someone you barely know, or you just know your best friend would love some beautiful organic fruit for the holidays, the towers by Eco Express can really go the distance.

Now, I’ve been buying organic coffee for years. I buy organic everything because I don’t want to eat GMO products and eating organic is literally the only way to avoid them. Recently, I stumbled upon some coffee at the store that I had never used (named Javatopia), that carried the moniker “Bird Friendly”. My first instinct was to ask “What the hell does bird friendly mean?”

Well, here’s what it means.

Traditionally, coffee was grown as an understory crop. It was grown beneath a canopy of trees using sustainable growing/harvesting methods, and was part of a full “food forest” model. It was a self-replenishing cycle that basically allowed the coffee to grow itself. This older method created huge tracts of habitat for many different bird species, however it did not produce uniform crops. As the industry developed into an international sensation, big agricultural interests took over and changed the entire way coffee is produced. They cut down all the trees and converted these “shade grown” and “bird friendly” coffees into “sun grown” coffee plantations. They turned it into monoculture farming.

This monoculture in coffee farming has had the same overall negative effects that monoculture farming has had in all types of agriculture. It turns this once thriving habitat into a genetic wasteland– creating inferior crops and making the land unlivable for any of the birds that once thrived here. Companies like Javatopia are going back to that older way of farming, producing a much more complex product that is much better for the environment.

Who knew growing coffee was such an involved process? It’s just one more example of how we can all make better choices in our purchases. Often, these are choices that we would have never thought of until someone told us about them.

In this context, I’m talking about chickens. Specifically, my chickens. We live in an urban neighborhood with a small back lot, but thankfully in a city that loves chickens as much as I do. They provide us with entertainment, with food, and with a valuable source of nitrogen for the garden boxes. Aside from all of that, they provide something else: food security. With food prices spiking wildly throughout the year, and safety becoming a larger concern,  it is pretty great knowing that you’re getting at least some of your food straight from your own home. Growing plants, chickens, or whatever else is a key component of being truly eco-friendly. The less you take out of the overall system, the better. The less we all take part in the industrial food system, the better. Plus, I have to say… there is something pretty awesome about going outside in the morning to grab a couple eggs for breakfast.

There are a lot of farm stores near just about any city that you can buy chicks from, but most people buy from online breeders. This is because they get a MUCH bigger selection in terms of what breed of chicken they get, and they get a pretty big discount too. People that do this generally get a bunch of their interested friends, neighbors, and family to pitch in since the minimum order from these places can be a little high. Since most cities won’t let more than 2 chickens on an urban lot, it’s important to have people waiting to help thin out the herd, so to speak. While it will be a little work to keep them fed and taken care of, my experience has shown me that it’s well worth the extra work.

If you’re looking for organic beer that won’t come with the price tag you might be expecting, try looking for Fish Tale beers. Fish tale is part of a medium-sized group of beer manufacturers that operate out of the Pacific northwest. Since they’re not just a tiny brewery on its own anymore, Fish Tale can provide its beer with a pretty decent price tag. However, since they’re not part of a major conglomerate, they have a much higher level of quality control. It’s really a give and take kind of thing, but in the end you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how inexpensive it is for the quality you get.

If you’re willing to go a little higher on the price scale for organic beers, then you could also try the organic Samuel Smith’s. It’s a great beer from a well-known brewer, but it is a bit steeper in price than the Fish Tale.

No matter what kind of beer you get for your holiday revelry, remember that you get what you pay for. Most of these organic beers are more expensive because the process they have to undergo to retain their certification is a bit time consuming. It seems that beer has lost a bit of its standing as a “luxury” item, and as such it seems like people are willing to buy copious amounts of cheap beer instead of moderate levels of good beer. It’s up to you, but I sure prefer the good beer.