just sayin...

Well the message is pretty clear - don't do both.
It will be interesting to have an ethanol economy where the stuff people drink is the same as the stuff that runs their cars. Maybe then we'll think twich before we pop open a cold one.

A horse or a sail boat.
With a horse you have a constant supply of fertilizer for the garden.

Either one demands that you inhabit a some what different world than most other Americans.
I used to ride a lot when I was young,  and sail as well. My parents had an old wooden sloop and they took me a long on a lot of their cruises so i developed an affection for the floating life.
The thing is that I can't see going back to the “old ways”. because of how limited and parochial that was.
I do see people trying to work out some kind of balance back in the eighties when i moved to this town, I was up doing my laundry, I was pouring rain and there was an appaloossa and a pinto pony at the seven eleven. two wet kids from a commune down the road had ridden up to get some cokes.  I thought it was pretty cool because i'd just come from a commune in Tennesse. Kids ridding bareback in the rain seemed normal.  Of course gas was like 60 cents a gallon and it wasn't uncommon to drive a couple of hundred miles on a weekend .
The commune where the two kids had  come from is gone now. the city shut them down a long time ago. and the land has been buit up with mini-mansions –  most uninhabited. Its kind of sad because none of those places has enough land to squat on – and the commune used to sell their extra veggies and eggs. about the same number of people living on the same land too, just no horses.

Yeah, horses and sailboats don't really make for a happy child hood. ( i can somhow imagine my mother screaming, “but we gave you horses and sailboats!”) all that ended when i turned fourteen and was sent off to boarding school.
The land where i live noy is very sandy. We did cultivate for many years but it was under a misguided plan that depleted the soil. now i'm letting it grow somewhat wild to accumulate more organic matter in the soil. And I have a pile of composted leaves for small beds. i doubt if i could grow enough to eat though. If the land use was different, i could keep a horse, if i could ride him on the streets. thats the trouble theres just very little land around here and the city govt. has spent the last decade trying to build on every square foot. A lot of old neigborhoods were removed from the down town to make room for new condos, which are not fully occupied, and people have moved here from a town to the south that has raised its taxes about twenty percent in the last year.
The people who ran the commune here moved to a smaller municipality nearby. they still have a 'hippiespace' where they host a kind of informal party a few times a month. Drum circles and so on. They don't have horses, chickens or a big garden anymore. Its more like wild vegetation, sculptures and places for people to hang out.
As it turns out, that kind of place to go is very precious as a resource. I suppose that it has evolved into something more like a coffeehouse / party scene, with a few unrelated people living at the same house.
The farm in Tennesse was a situation where a bunch of families got together and bought land and farmed it, even milled their own timber for log cabins. they actually made a town, although for a whole it was an open door commune. when i lived there they had stopped farming and people had their own veggies gardens. everything ran on a twlve volt electric system and the water supply was piped around from a well, through some pipe scavenged from a skatig rink. They were a little bit over the idealism of back to the land, and more concerned with medecine and schooling for their kids.
Of course they still don't allow beer there.