Our compost bays supporting the two IBCs which are filled with water pumped from the holy well which is then used to irrigate the polytunnel (located just over the hedge to the left). This structure is also buttressed either side giving us two chest height potting-on benches. Note the use of old pallets for aeration and bench tops and reclaimed railway sleepers for the small retaining wall to the right. In the foreground is our newly planted (spring 2004) osier willow patch - hope to try our hands at making some baskets. Incidentally, a few thousand of these willows planted in an appropriate place could stop a town from flooding.			Alternatives If you make the choice to live rurally you are quite definitely living outside the mainstream and this at times can be very frustrating politically, in a supposed democracy. You need to acquire various and numerous skills to survive. Out here, an ounce of common sense outweighs a ton of university degrees. If you have lots of common sense and practical aptitude then it's immensely rewarding and fun. If you don't, you can always write a book about it. If you make mistakes then you simply design things better next time. After a few years of necessity being the mother of invention, some of your solutions to problems will be intensely marketable and then you can start challenging mainstream thinking because you have constructed working alternatives which make sense. You should realise that a farmhouse and its surrounding area is a self-contained entity, its own micro eco-system capable of producing its own eco-footprint. Once you harness that footprint and make it sustainable then your alternative solutions can be used thousands of times over. Let's face it - mainstream thinking is massively polluting, unbelievable wasteful and insanely ignorant of its own imminent downfall. So, what kind of marketing opportunity is that? For starters you can stop building on flood plains, or if you do, build fewer houses - on stilts - and harness the water, have fish farms, plant willow, grow rice - new economies are staring you in the face. Forget the knowledge economy, the majority of academics possess very little of the common sense or practical ability required to make the changes that are necessary if we are to survive the 21st century.