other forays into urban food production

This whole idea of producing or at least increasing notable parts of my food supply has started to go a little bit past the stage of "hobby" for me. I think it's really fascinating. I have environmental and conservtionist leanings to begin with and upon learning more of the details of the tremendous wastefulness and pollution of the convetional food industry, I've tried to detach myself from it as much as I reasonably can. That amount increases as I get more creative. The running joke in college was that I chose to major in dirt and water, and since those are the two things which the status quo of agriculture most degrades (besides the livelihood of small farmers) it's a natural cause for me to latch on to.

But I'll leave the preaching for now - there may be a little during winter, when all my garden is doing is composting itself - to tell you about some of my other efforts and ideas. First, I am sewing up an old hemp skirt to make a "sprouting bag," which is essentially the same as a normal bag but for the fact that you use it to sprout bean, radishes, greens, whatever else. I am doing this because with a little water and a little time, you can about quadruple the amound of food afforded by beans and many other seeds. I already have a fair few seeds left over which I will not be using in the spring because I'm switchig to heirloom plants. As an added bonus, a 60 cent bag of dried beans can be turned into a great deal of bean sprouts for use in salads, stir fries, etc. That is cool, because even while my cheap instincts tell me to buy dried beans, they are pretty nasty.

Also, I purchased a small, inexpensive "mushroom kit" of a variety of (purportedly delicious) mushrooms which will grow from spores in a sterile substrate in my kitchen. Or my office, if Alli makes me move them. It will only yield for three or four months, but after that I can dump the well established spores into the composting material in my garden and they will occur randomly beneath my plants for the next several years. Actually, since I probably won't live here that long, they will occur under someone else's plants. And really freak them out.