 Hello again. Today's question is, I've just done a permaculture course and I don't know what to do first. I've learned so much. Yes, I can fully relate to that. I remember coming off my permaculture design course, PDC, in 1996 thinking, my God, what do I do now? And I spent about six months trying to figure it out and I would say probably the essence of what I did was to reconnect with food. One of the first things I did was think about where my food was coming from and not just to grow it for myself, although that was something I really wanted to do a lot of, and I'd learnt a little bit about growing food back in the 1980s but had been sidetracked a little bit. I'd done quite a lot of forest gardening because with my busy life and work that I had, working with trees was nice and easy. You plant trees and you prune them a little bit but essentially they, as long as you put them in a good place and they get pollinated then you get fruit every year and we had soft fruit bushes and so on. So that was kind of the essence of my food growing but I was also eating a lot of other things, particularly as going through a stage of raw food at that time. I started to assess where many of the things that I was eating came from and that included quite a lot of orange years and tropical fruits and things in addition to the things that we were able to grow here in Britain and it was quite an interesting time for me because I was quite stuck with this idea of not wanting to eat anything cooked because of the harm it was doing my body but then being faced with this idea that food coming from a distance, even if it's organically grown and I guess you can never be totally sure that it is what it says, then that had an environmental consequence associated with it as well. So and that culminated really in me going to live in Ireland for a year in a particular place that was as off-grid as you can imagine there was no electricity of any sort at all. We had water from a spring, a wellspring, very beautiful. We grew food for ourselves, we didn't have money, we didn't have any modern clothing of any kind, we wore bare foot, we changed houses, we moved every few months and so on. So the whole bunch of different things there but one of the things that they really connected me with was growing food for ourselves and what we could grow in our climate and my own experience of feeling for the first time in my life fully at home somewhere which ironically was a different country from the one I was born in and I took that sense really from the fact that I was eating from the land for the first time in my life and and my waste products were going back to the land so I was in complete connection with the land I was made of the land if you like and for me that gave some very powerful sense of home and so I would say reconnect with food and as much as possible local food and it doesn't mean that you have to grow it yourself although growing food for me is something that's very not just empowering but just some sense of kind of real satisfaction about wow this has come out of the garden and particularly when it's real kind of proper perennial food that you do virtually no work for except perhaps go out and pee on a tree occasionally so reconnect with where your food comes from support local food growing projects either by just buying food from them or maybe even going and getting involved and helping out community gardens a really great place to go and learn from other people and many of us don't have any food growing knowledge I didn't learn that at school or at home it was something I picked up later and and so it can be very daunting to think of well if I need to grow food where how am I going to do that we'll go learn sometimes there are places that groups that have an allotment and they divided up into little beds so you can go and learn how to grow food for yourself and if you're feeling confident at that point with the support you get you can then take on an allotment okay so an allotment is something it might not translate to anywhere in the world it's a piece of land basically in Britain there's a system that because many people live in towns and cities here that if people want to grow food for themselves there are a number of plots and you can apply for a plot and pay a small amount of money to rent that plot for a year to grow food for yourself and because you'll be with other people who are also growing there's the opportunity to learn from each other so which brings me I think to the next one which is the next thing to do is to connect up with like-minded people and I think doing a permaculture course is a great way to do that because immediately you're learning with people who want to learn the same thing who are coming from the same place in their heart and someone about how the world is and what they want to do about it but also look for people in your local community particularly if you've done a course a residential course somewhere else and you've come back home seek out the people who are local to you as permaculture has been growing there are many small permaculture groups dotted around the world now certainly there's quite a few in Britain so it's very often possible to connect in with people who are already doing permaculture or at least something along the lines of permaculture growing food in your locality and try and find those people because again it's very important to feel not alone supported that you have people you can connect to talk to about and learn from learn from so I think for me the things to do first are to look at where your food comes from and also for us very much where did our water come from you know there was a point where like anybody else most people in Britain I was drinking just drinking the water out of the tap wasn't thinking too much about it I started to assess where the water had come from what's gone in it how it was treated and so on and then started to look at places moving somewhere where is my water going to come from I don't want to just drink from the tap I want to know that there's a good water source somewhere and start to assess those things as well so grow food as whatever you can even if it's just sprouting things in your kitchen doing a bit of fermentation connect with like-minded people seek out your local food your local seasonal food and stay connected to the network