By the end of the video, he gets into lots of beautiful ideas about permaculture and food. I can’t recommend it enough.

Alcoholcanbeagas.com offers answers to my objections. If this guy is right…

* There is enough land to feed us and grow fuel-plants.
* Cars can be fueled on a small scale, without supporting giant oil companies.
* Growing our own fuel can help heal the earth.

Given the massive potential for polyculture yields, monoculture-study dismissals of ethanol production seem silly when viewed from economic, energetic, or ecological perspectives.

Wow. What if it’s true? :)

As a result, though, the “trash” we create when cooking isn’t boxes and packaging. It’s food scraps. And I began to get really tired of throwing them away. Working hard to grow food, then cutting part off and putting it in a landfill where it can’t feed us anymore, just seemed stupid.

Compost takes food scraps and makes them into more food. It completes a cycle of life. I wanted a compost pile. But I couldn’t have one, because we live in an apartment.

See, our garden is a community garden space, and it’s not close to home. Our own yard is small, and we aren’t allowed to tear up the grass to make garden space. We do have a little bit of dirt, but not enough to grow much of our food, and certainly not enough to locate a compost heap. But not composting our food scraps was not acceptable to me. What to do?

I got out a five-gallon bucket and started saving the scraps. I didn’t know where I was going to put them, and it seemed a bit strange, but I didn’t pay attention to those thoughts. I wondered once in a while, as I sliced and cooked, where I’d be putting them. I thought about hauling them to our community garden, but that would require the car, which also seemed dumb. (I usually bike there.) But none of this took up too much of my thinking. Mostly, I just sliced and put the scraps in the bucket.

Two days later, a compost pile appeared in my back yard.

Our neighbors to the back have a house with a lovely garden and a stand of trees back there (“the forest”).  We were chatting, and one of them mentioned compost, and how he has lots, and I told him of my dilemma. His wife overheard me, and said she wants to start composting kitchen scraps, rather than just yard waste, and before I knew it, the new community compost pile had been sited on the property line, and had been started with three wheelbarrows of compost from their garden.

Later that night my husband grinned at me, and said that when he saw the bucket of scraps, he knew a compost heap was coming. He thought we’d have to work at it somehow, but “Poof!” he told me. “It just appeared.”

According to the Abraham work by Esther and Jerry Hicks, you manifest things when you simply believe they are true. If you want something, you have to imagine it, feel it, know that it’s real and it’s in your future.  I can’t seem to remember that consciously, but when I remember it subconciously, the results are very cool. :)

I’m in love with the Oregon wild rice I found at the Saturday Market this week here in Eugene.

Here’s a news story about how it grows here.

My brown rice has been coming from at least California. This stuff is yummy, and local, and it replaces turf farms! How awesome is that?