When Carlos Alonso and his sister Camino were looking for a country home for their extended family, they stumbled upon an abandoned stable in rural Extremadura, Spain and recognized it as a special place.

High on a hill and far from city water or an electrical grid, the crumbling cow...

In 1974, fresh out of the army, Michael Garnier went to rural Oregon to try to make a living off the woods. He tried making furniture, fences, pole barns and selling organic, psychedelic picture propellers, but finally it was a treehouse that got him all the attention.

Modeled after the...

In the Saumur region of France there are over a thousand miles of underground tunnels and thousands of caves, known as "troglodytes," used as homes, hotels, restaurants, museums, wineries, farms (silkworms, mushrooms, snails) and even a disco and a zoo.

What makes this land so perfect for underground dwellings is...

The hardest part was picking the cars because cars that end up in junk yards are in pretty bad shape usually so not only was I selecting on condition, no dents, as few nicks as possible and paint not coming off in sheets.

Wanaselja designed the home with Cate Leger, his partner in life and business (Leger Wanaselja Architects). They liked the look of the old cars, but they also believe firmly that reusing trumps recycling. "You know the metal is melted back down -- that requires more energy," explains Wanaselja. "So if we grab the materials before that happens it's actually that much better for the environment."

They reused more than just cars to build their home. The lower half is sided in poplar bark, a waste product of the North Caroline furniture industry. Exterior wood is salvaged redwood and the fences and windowsills are on their second life.

It sounds good, but it also looks good. The car roofs overlapped like fish scales leave the impression of slate, the side window awnings feel nautical and the poplar bark grounds the entire work.

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My family doesn't buy Christmas gifts and I think because of that our holidays are more festive. Instead of shopping, we sing. Instead of stressing, we play games. And we do a lot of baking and decorating.

Though just because we don't buy gifts doesn't mean we don't...

For Alex Hozven, food is either living or dead. At her Cultured Pickle Shop in Berkeley, California, she tends 20,000 pounds of vegetables that "breathe" carbon dioxide. She's simply pickling vegetables, but to most of us used to "dead food," it's a foreign concept.

"People don't really tend to think about their food as being alive. In sort of a modern industrial food sense when you say food is alive that tends to freak people out. But you know eating really denatured dead food obviously causes a whole host of problems."

For millennia, fermented foods were part of every culture's diet -- e.g., sauerkraut, kimchi, pickled herring, giardiniera, miso, kombucha, kefir -- but today, with our modern industrial food system, even our "pickles" aren't usually pickled. Instead, they are simply cucumbers soaked in vinegar and heat-treated to kill any pathogens.

Instead of using the modern shortcut (vinegar and pasteurization) Hozven pickles her vegetables (cabbages, carrots, radish, beets, etc.) relying on the slower method of fermentation that adds flavor, nutrition and makes them easier to digest.

Some come to the Cultured Pickle Shop looking for a miracle cure -- after all, fermented foods are credited with being everything from antioxidants to anti-inflammatories -- and while Hozven warns against treating these foods as medicine, she admits there's no doubt they're good for your gut.

"Your whole digestive system in an ideal world is an ecosystem, and so you need to have this whole sort of colony community system of beneficial bacteria that is both going to help digest your food and assimilate the nutrients from them, but also sort of make sure that any pathogenic bacteria which are going to enter your system, which is inevitable, are kept in sort of check, in balance."

Perhaps the most fun part of fermentation is cultured soft drinks. The earliest sodas used fermented vegetables for the fizz. Even as recently as a century or two, it wasn't so uncommon to drink a "root beer" or a "ginger ale" truly cultured from roots.

Today, with the push for a healthier alternative to our modern sodas, even Red Bull has a fermented option with a drink that uses a kombucha culture. Those at Red Bull say "Kombucha's secret lie in the Chin dynasty, 221 b.c."

Hozven also makes a kombucha. She describes the culture (a colony of bacteria and yeast) as a jellyfish-type blob that eats tea and sugar.

"No one knows totally where it came from. Some people think it originated in China. It could have been just like the scum that formed on someone's teapot at some point and it made it sort of sour and bubbly and 'hey, don't we all love sour and bubbly beverages.'"

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Danny Kim grew up in Portland where everyone was DIYing stuff, so he set out to DIY a truck. Seven thousand labor hours and a year and a half later, he had converted an old Land Rover to run on biodiesel, doubling its fuel efficiency from 15 to 31 mpg.

Steve Jobs, in his Stanford commencement speech in 2005, called The Whole Earth Catalog "one of the bibles of my generation."

"It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions".

A handbook for...

My father was showing me his old fishing haunts in his former hometown -- the now very touristy, upscale town of Sausalito, CA (my father was born here before the Golden Gate Bridge had gone up, along with home prices) -- when we stumbled upon a hip-looking couple barbecuing outside...

San Francisco-based artist Eric Staller built a bike for eight people as an art piece. He wanted to take his work out of the gallery and into the streets. His multi-person cycle got so much attention he decided to commercialize it as a bike for seven.

Staller...

Monica Martinez thinks Americans are ready to embrace entomophagy (bug-eating) and she's launched an edible bug food cart (Don Bugito) as well as a home mealworm farm (Wurmhaus) to prove her point.

Before you write off the idea as novelty, consider what most of us in the western...

Derek "Deek" Diedricksen's backyard is filled with what to the untrained eye might appear children's forts, but these tiny dwellings are actually how he makes his living (mostly).

Ask him his job title and he'll reply, "I call myself a tinkerer or I've come up with bizarre-chitect or lark-chitect being kind of a fake architect."

Diedricksen's obsession with tiny architecture began unsurprisingly, with the backyard forts of his youth. But he wasn't your average construction-minded kid.

Timeline of a micro home builder

At age ten he built his first cabin, complete with electricity, insulation, heat and a platform bunk. When he was 14 he read Lester Walker's book Tiny Houses and discovered there were others out there like him.

By the time he stumbled upon the Small House Movement a decade or two later, he had already built dozens of tiny structures.

Tiny architecture, micro architecture seems very newsworthy these days. I've been doing this for literally almost 20 years or so and up until a few years ago I never realized there was a whole movement. I was just some schmo in my basement with a gigantic collection of tiny housing books, building cabins in the woods as an adult.

In 2009 he self-published (from his basement) his own hand-illustrated ode to tiny dwellings: Humble Homes, Simple Shacks, Cozy Cottages, Ramshackle Retreats, Funky Forts.

A $110 sleeper hut and a $80 micro office

Today, his backyard is filled with tiny cabins, forts, retreats, shelters, shacks and no two are alike. Most of his dwellings are multi-purpose: there's the 20-square-foot travel trailer/emergency homeless shelter (Gottagiddaway), the roughly 6-square-foot treehouse/chicken coop (the Wedgie) and the somewhere around 11-square-foot kiosk/single-sleeper (the Gypsy Junker).

He builds small and he works with a micro-budget. His Gottagiddaway AKA "$100 homeless hut" was built for about that (or perhaps as high as $110). His 32-square-foot micro-office (where he filmed his interview) was built for $80 from barn sale/ barn demo materials.

His materials are salvaged from old buildings, lumber mills, recycling and the dump. His windows are made from old office water coolers, soda bottles, pickle jars and even a washing machine window (a side from the same machine has become one if his drop-down tables).

Tiny homes as punk rock

Building tiny is also a way to rebel a bit. "There's almost this whole outlaw aspect of it. I've kind of been a little anti-authoritarian most of my life playing in punk bands and what-not and a lot of the housing codes and rules to me, while some of them make good sense, a lot of them are just ridiculous and very antiquated."

None of Diedricksen's backyard creations are lived in full-time though he has camped in at least a few of them, uses them for a bit of shed-working for writing his blog and reserves the right to send unwanted guests in that direction.

His mini-dwellings are mostly just prototypes for "larger" 100- or 200-square-foot homes, but through his micro-structures, he hopes to show the world that living small is normal.

Living small to add years to your life

"It's the way I grew up, I just love it," says Diedricksen who grew up in a small home and today lives with his wife and two children in a 900-or-so-square-foot home.

Why waste most of your life paying for a house you're never going to be in because you're out working 80 hours a week to afford it, but you're working so many extra hours for this huge house that you need to heat, you need to furnish, you need to maintain, you need to clean. The bigger the house, the more of your short and finite life you're using up to make those ends meet when you don't really need a house like that.

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• TrashKEA home design: trash + IKEA + design = eco-cheap chic


• Transforming a tiny apartment for a growing family (kid...

Except for notions (buttons, zippers, etc), everything in Rebecca Burgess' wardrobe has been grown and designed within 150 miles of her home. But until putting her closet on a diet one year ago, nearly all her clothing was produced far from home, and that made her a very typical American.

Photographer Jérémie Buchholtz wanted an affordable apartment in Bordeaux, but he wasn't finding anything he liked. Then he stumbled upon a listing for a garage.

There was no house, it was just an abandoned garage for sale. "My friends said, it's impossible, you will do nothing with that," explained Buchholtz,...

When I visited Rob Torcellini in his Connecticut backyard, he took me inside his 10-by-12-foot greenhouse and showed me how his plants grow so tall they curl around the ceiling. He explained to me his gardening advantage: no soil, continuously circulating water and fish poo as fertilizer. (For...

Luke Clark Tyler is in a serial relationship with tiny homes. His last New York City apartment was just 96 square feet. His current place is even smaller.

When I visited Luke in his 78-square-foot shoebox studio, he had his back to one wall while reading on the...

Most Americans have never seen one before. When Stephen Mosca takes his out on the street, he says he's treated like a mini Mini Cooper.

A bike/car hybrid

A velomobile is a part bike, part car. It guarantees you protection from rain, sun and even cold, but you still need to pedal. Because underneath the aerodynamic shell that gives it the sleek look of a minicar lies a recumbent bicycle.

The fairing (shell) not only helps protect drivers against the elements (and even collisions to some extent), but it gives it an aerodynamic advantages making it one of the fastest bicycles on the road.

The smallest car-looking vehicle on the streets of New Jersey

Mosca bought his first velomobile about ten years ago when he was looking for something that would protect him on his daily commute. Today, he pedals the 15 miles to work in a full business suit with his briefcase and morning coffee tucked in alongside.

It's technically a bike, but some call it a bicycle car and it does straddle the line. It has both a bell and a horn. It's human-powered, but his ride is equipped with headlights, backlights, turn signals, odometer, and iphone dock.

DIY EV

There's even the option to install an electric pedal assist kit to really blur the line between human-powered vehicle and something more like an electric vehicle.

It draws enough attention- there are only a few dozen owners in the U.S.- that Stephen set up shop and now sells these bicycle cars online.

In this video, Stephen takes us for a ride- in full work attire- from his home through the streets of Maywood, New Jersey in his Mango velomobile.

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I have a friend who is a connector (according to Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, "the kinds of people who know everyone") and he just bought an electric car.

Given that his green cred is far outweighed by his credentials as a connector -- he makes connections (he's in...

At a time when many of us -- due to finances, the environment or increasing urbanization -- are trying to put our homes on a diet, there's one obvious place to cut: our bedrooms.

"The bed is dead", says Ron Barth of Resource Furniture. To Barth, the idea of occupying...

I stepped onto the roof of the West Village restaurant Bell, Book and Candle and caught a glimpse of the future. I was surrounded by 60 white plastic towers seemingly sprouting from the floor. Seventy varieties of herbs, vegetables and fruits dripped from the towers, but there was no dirt...