 Hey everyone, Rob Greenfield here, and today is a milestone day. It is day 200 of growing and foraging 100% of my food. So I've just made it past the halfway point a couple of weeks ago in my year-long project. I have to say I'm relieved, I'm excited, and it's a little hard to believe that I've gotten here. I'm over six months into growing and foraging literally everything that I eat for an entire year. At the same time, it's a little daunting because it's been a long time and I've realized I'm only halfway. So I still have a really long way to go. But today, I want to update you on the project, how it's going, take you to my different gardens and show you what I'm growing, what I'm eating, and just really take you in and mercy you and update you on how everything is going. So first things first, we will jump right in to the front yard garden here at my tiny house homestead. So one year ago, this was just a front lawn, just grass growing and no food growing at all. So one year later, pretty bountiful, lots growing on and I'm going to show you here today. So right here where I'm standing right now, this is sort of the annual section. This is set up on drip irrigation. I've got collards, kale, swiss chard, different herbs growing here, plantago or broadleaf plantain, celery. So this is one of my big green section. We're kind of in the transition period right now between spring and summer. So a lot of this isn't really filled out. I've recently planted peanuts and okra, some different peppers, and then I just planted a whole bunch of eggplant. These are starting to really produce. There's some really nice eggplants on here and I'm excited about that. And then I do a lot of perennial greens as well. Right here, this is one that I'm pretty excited about at the moment. This is called Chaya and Chaya is a super food and you can see, I mean, look at the size of this mess of greens. This is some serious greens here. Right here is New Zealand spinach, also a perennial. That means it just keeps coming back and coming back. Over here is Suriname spinach growing and this one is a nice tender one, super productive. I got a papaya tree here. So far that's been a slow grower but finally getting some papayas from this. Then there is, this is called the curry plant or the curry tree plant. This is katuk. This will get into a nice big bush. I just planted a meringa here, also called the tree of life or the vitamin tree. At my other garden you'll see some big examples of that. Here is pigeon pea or gandules and this has been super productive. And then here is amaranth. So amaranth is a great crop. This is self seeding. All I did was scatter some seeds and you can see it all over the garden now. If you just look into my hand there you can see all those little black or dark brown seeds. So that's a grain. That's called amaranth. Now also in this section, this is the native pollinator section so this is all flowers that are native to Florida and that are great for bees, butterflies, all the different beneficial insects you want in the garden that we want to support. Over here this is the community fruit tree. This is the mulberry. So this tree has been planted for a year. Just running out of mulberries for the season but there was a nice crop. And then right here this is some of the yucca that's left or cassava. Most of that's been eaten in this yard but I'm going to show you some of those plots. My three main staples as far as calories are sweet potato, yucca or cassava and yam. And I'll talk about all those today. I'm going to show you where I grew about 400 pounds of sweet potato in this small little area. So this little patch right here, maybe less than 10 feet by maybe 20 feet, I grew about 400 pounds of sweet potato which was about a three month supply of eating a lot of sweet potatoes. So I've replanted them here and you can see they're starting to come up. This is probably six weeks, eight weeks old and I hope to get another couple hundred pounds out of this area. Now typically you're not supposed to plant the same crop in the same spot but I'm a beginner still making some beginner mistakes. We'll see how that works out. I'll at least only do it once. Also the leaves of the greens of sweet potato are super nutritious. This is one of the plants that I would recommend growing the most. So I mentioned that we're moving into summer so it's a difficult time. Summer is really the time when a lot of gardeners in central Florida just take off especially people who grow a lot of annuals just because the heat and the humidity is so brutal. So a lot of, I've really harvested a lot of food already and I stored the bounty. The spring was really just a busy time and I've stored a lot of that so I'm going to take you back to the tiny house and show you what I have stored. So this here is the dried goods section and I've got a lot stored away here. Just going to show you a whole bunch of it. I've got thyme, oregano, tarragon, red pepper, green pepper, yapan-holi which is my tea. It's the Yerba mate of North America. I've got ginger and turmeric and garlic cloves and holy basil, dill, cilantro, coriander. Lots of great stuff here. I want to show you a few things in particular right now. One of the great things is I've been making, well this in particular is moringa powder and this is one of the most nutrient dense plants on earth. So this is basically like my vitamins. I obviously, for this year of growing and foraging on my food, no vitamins, no supplements, none of that. Just right here is my natural vitamin and it's like one spoonful of this a day is just amazing. So that comes from the moringa tree. I also make other green powders. Garlic, you can see right here some of my garlic cloves. The garlic did really well and I have some garlic here as well. People say you can't grow garlic in Florida but since if I couldn't grow garlic I couldn't eat garlic. I had to grow garlic and I'm happy to say that it did really well. I've got my sea salt here and this is from harvesting from the ocean, boiling it down and I'm left with the salt after the water evaporates. Coconut oil right here, this is all I have. So far coconut oil has been kind of a big failure but I'm hoping to succeed with that. So for the last six and a half months I really have had almost no oil in my life. Got my medicines as well, reishi mushroom from foraging, elderberry from foraging as well. It's the time of year where I'm going to go out and get loads of elderberry. And I'm really happy to report that so far I haven't been sick at all. I mean there's been difficult times but I have not been sick yet and my medicines that I forage and I grow have been a huge part of that. I mean speaking of medicine, here's honey. You saw that I did really well with honey last fall. My bees are doing great and I'm hoping to have a spring harvest. I just checked about last night and there's probably, there's quite a few jars of honey in there so I'm pretty excited. This right here is garlic preserved in honey so this is a great medicine right there. And up here are the pigeon peas and the southern peas. So really great protein source. I've also been making flour and I haven't really used this yet. I'm just getting to the point of really experimenting with this but this is the yucca or the cassava flour. First I fermented it and so I'm going to hopefully make some flat bread with that. This is banana flour using the green bananas. And then this is going to be yam flour. So yam dehydrated, shredded and dehydrated and then I'm leaving it rather than making it into a flour it's better to store it this way because it'll stay good for longer, less exposure to oxygen. So this will be ground up into a flour so I've got a whole bunch of this so really excited about those. Right now the freezer is pretty full. I actually removed some things and set them aside to make it a little less cluttered so I can actually show you what is in here. I'm pretty happy with the amount of food that I have stored away. I'm going to show you a couple of the different things that I do. So I freeze a lot of fruit. This is white sapote. I freeze papaya. This summer I'll be harvesting a lot of mango foraging. There are, this is more white sapote, bananas from foraging. And then I also have from this spring cernam cherries and so there's a whole bunch of different fruit. I make a lot of smoothies with this fruit. And then another thing that I do is I make green juice. So last time around I made about 12 green juices all at once so that I can just have them in the freezer and just take one out each day and thaw and that saves me a lot of work. I do the same with meals. I'm trying to do a lot of meal prep to reduce the amount of time in the kitchen and be more efficient. So this is yam and pigeon peas and greens and herbs all mixed together and I can just take this out throw it in my backpack and have it later if I'm traveling or just wake up in the morning take it out and then have it unthawed for lunch and then reheat it. So doing a lot of meal prep that's really been beneficial. I have to say never did I expect to be using plastic bags. You saw that I have some of these reusable bags but it would be hundreds of hundreds of dollars to use all those reusable bags. And so I found myself using plastic bags which I never thought I'd go back to but that's one of the challenges of this project is there's a big difference between being zero waste and just being able to go to the grocery store once a week or a couple times a week and being what you would call self-sufficient and storing lots of food. As you can see I store a lot of food in jars but it's difficult. I mean they're just nowhere near space efficient anyway. So that's one of my challenges but I am reusing these. These bags are I did I caught a fish called bofin and I smoked them and made individual servings that I can pull out and I've eaten about 10 or so species of fish. Mullet is one of the main ones and so fish is one of my main sources of protein along with the the pigeon peas and the southern peas and then tons of protein from the greens as well just eating so much greens. So there is a lot going on in this freezer. A lot of stuff I'm pretty excited about and I'm gonna show you my seminal pumpkins now. If you saw some of my earlier videos and photos you would have seen this this whole shelf was pretty much seminal pumpkins. I had I think five whole shelves. I'm down to just this one but I have to say how magical these are because no air conditioning in this house it's hot. We're going through right now a almost record-breaking heatwave for May. It's been about 95 to 97 every day for the last few days and these seminal pumpkins are a year old. These are pumpkins that I harvested last summer and so these have lasted through the whole winter and fall and into the summer now in this heat. Seminal pumpkins they are truly amazing. Now you can see here this one's actually been being eaten by cockroaches unfortunately and the pumpkin itself is still good. It just shows how resilient these things are. I think these things could possibly store for two plus years in a house with air conditioning and a pantry of sorts. The cockroaches yeah they're not a major problem but they have been a little bit of a problem. Two nights one got into bed with me which was just not fun. The other day I was drinking a smoothie and I tasted something I felt something chewy and at first I thought it must be I spit it out and I thought oh it's just some roselle that didn't get blended so I put it back in my mouth I ate it and then I was drinking my smoothie more and I felt something again and it was a cockroach leg and I realized that wasn't roselle that was a freaking cockroach and then it was like what do I do do I waste this smoothie and I just thought I'm not making another smoothie so I still drank the whole thing but that just makes me a little queasy thinking about it. So I'm currently battling the cockroaches a little bit and going to find some natural ways to get rid of those but here in Florida whether you're living in a tiny house like this or in a house with air conditioning and all that I know a lot of people that are dealing with cockroaches. So speaking of the heat of summer fermentation another problem right now I did great with fermentation through the winter but the thing about fermenting is it somewhere in the mid-seventies or so is the sort of the best temperature Fahrenheit that is you know up in the mid-nineties fermentation it's just not the time for that for most of this. This is my Jun and I'll show you this has got a nice layer of mold not a nice layer of mold really I mean and so I think I'm done with with most fermenting for the summer I think I'm just going to be taking it off it's been a little hard and doing this without a refrigerator is another thing I mean I have the freezer but without a refrigerator it's really challenging if I do this project again I'm probably going to need to do not need to but I'm going to do it with a refrigerator. So since last time I did come up with a way to preserve the food for a little longer to keep it cooler and I'm pretty excited about that I feel like I've said I'm excited about a lot of things when I am but I'm going to take you outside to my little place to store ferments. So in temperate climates they use root cellars but in Florida that doesn't really work because of our shallow water table and probably some other things that I'm just not super knowledgeable on but I was able to do a minor seller here and the idea is to keep things cooler using the insulation of the ground. So I haven't opened this for a few weeks but this is somewhat cool to the touch so it does still seem to be working even though it's 95 degrees outside this looks good and is pretty cool to the touch so this is looking good I don't know if these can really last for the summer but at least for a while and then I've also got my vinegars in here and it feels and looks pretty good so you know this is all still an experiment for me this is the first time I've built a little seller. Now I've also I'm also using a cooler and putting ice packs in there that I take out of the freezer so I'm going to show you that as well so here's the cooler and it's nice and cool around the backside of my house so this is a good spot for it and it's still cool in here and I haven't put new new ice in there in here for about four days so it's looking pretty good and there is the sauerkraut so looks great doesn't look discolored or anything like that and the main thing I'm doing is just freezing a big block and that stays cooler for longer so you know that's the difficulty I'm one of the difficulties I'm dealing with keeping things cool but doing all right job now here oh this is the wild yam deascoria or diascoria allata however you say that that's the genus and species these yams get up to a hundred fifty pounds in the wild and this is one of my great sources of calories this is what I made the yam flower out of I cook this up you use it just like you would potatoes and on the outside it looks you know pretty rough but just scratching it back you can see nice white flesh inside there it's similar to potatoes you can cook it any way you would making mashed potato mashed yam boiled yam baked yam any of those sorts of things so I harvest this from the wild and that is good stuff I got me and my friends harvested of good over a hundred pounds in a few hours a couple weeks ago I mentioned my sweet potatoes are done which is a little sad I mean I just love sweet potatoes I have just a little bit left of these purple ones that I'm saving to make a nice meal because they are just a beautiful color and I've got some sweet potatoes that I'm just letting grow that's how you that's how you plant sweet potatoes is just by letting the letting the slips grow out you pluck those off and you plant them now up here I do a lot of foraging for bananas so let me take these off so you can actually see I have been dealing with some possums hanging around you know they're just they're just around and I don't blame them this is their their land as well but I am trying to keep them from eating my bananas so this is the little solution that I have for that and yeah I haven't pulled these off for about 48 hours so it's looking like time to harvest a bunch of these and freeze them and so these are all from foraging bananas are growing wild around central Florida around Florida you know formerly domesticated they're not native to here but spread throughout in different places like abandoned homesteads or areas where they just got dropped in the woods not the banana themselves but the corns so bananas definitely one of my favorite foods so great to be able to have those let me take you through the kitchen now right now we are in a very dry spell the rainy season is coming soon hopefully in the next couple of weeks and right now the rain barrels are the lowest they've ever been but I have not run out of rain yet which is really great this is my Berkey filter where I harvest the rain water off the roof filter it through this and that's my main source of drinking water and so haven't ran out yet and then back here is where I store the coconuts and I harvest the coconuts from coastal Florida southern Florida is much better Fort Lauderdale and Fort Myers have been my two main areas and I use these for making coconut milk coconut flakes drinking the water just eating as a snack this is definitely one of my main sources of of calories of protein of fats it's also how I'm going to be making my oil when I finally champion that so really important source of food down here for me this year and then of course a lot of you have been asking what about my meals like how am I putting all this together into foods that's probably the main question the main thing a lot of you are wondering so I'm going to share a lot of the main meals that I make with you seminal pumpkin carrot and coconut soup I make a lot of either sweet potato yucca or yam along with greens and pigeon peas I make a lot of collard wraps and that can be collard wraps with yucca and fish or collard wraps with seminal pumpkin I often make large batches of pigeon peas and then freeze them and then I can add those to any meal one of my absolute favorite meals is green papaya coconut curry and I don't make that as often because it's a little more time intensive but it's one of my absolute favorite meals I make coconut milk a lot and that's used as the base for different soups and meals as well as smoothies I make a lot of green juice which is just whatever greens are abundant at that time and I make tea on many days and that is a mixture of yapan holly or green tea, reishi mushroom, turmeric and ginger, mint and holly basil. For breakfast on many days I make smoothies or any time of day and that consists mostly of whatever fresh fruits are abundant at that time of year there's usually coconut in it to give it a nice creaminess and then often mango, sapodilla, star fruit, banana, papaya usually I'll throw some greens in there like moringa powder so that's some of the most common meals that I've been making and now I want to take you to some of the other locations where I'm growing food to make those meals. So this is my other main front yard garden and I've just arrived you can see on my bike trailer I'm carrying this 55 gallon drum the reason being is that right now I'm having a little bit of trouble with fertility I started off with mushroom compost and have lost fertility I have not honestly been thinking long-term enough hadn't really focused on it had a little bit too much going on and noticed some of my you know plants not doing as well so now I'm going to be working on fertility it's been something I've been focusing on over the last two months right next to me is tithonia also called Bolivian sunflower and what I'm going to do is just chop a bunch of this down stick it into this barrel fill that with rainwater and then let it I don't know if it would be ferment or degrade in there and that makes a I guess you can call that a compost tea or a fertilizer I just did that back at my other garden and now I'm going to be doing it here to really you know boost those plants and make them healthy so I'm going to show you the garden so again not that long ago just a year and a half ago this was just a front lawn growing nothing but grass and no food and after some work and some love this has produced thousands of dollars with the food right now it's not at its full glory we are in the transition from spring to summer stage and so so what I did is I set this up for summer the summers here are brutal the weeds just come on strong and I wanted to set myself up for not a back breaking summer so I planted easy to grow foods that cover the area so I did a deep mulching that'll keep the weeds back and then I'm planting foods that will really cover the ground so sweet potato is the big one that's this whole area in front of me seminal pumpkin okra egg plant sunflower peanut and Roselle so there won't be a huge diversity in this garden through the summer but they'll definitely be some good crops and some good calories I want to tell you a little bit about what I've had great success within this garden as well as some failures right here I've got the papaya trees they are they have produced just hundreds of pounds of papayas and I planted these from seed when I started this garden right here are two pepper plants I've got this ghost pepper here I believe it's ghost and these things are just I mean I think there's some of the spiciest peppers on earth so I'm not sure I'm gonna use these now this pepper plant here is what I've really been using just look at all the peppers there I have harvested probably over a thousand peppers from this plant and this has just been producing since this garden first started so Moringa has just been an absolute success this is what I make the the Moringa powder out of a super food the tree of life one of the greatest plants on earth here is something I'm pretty excited about and this is my first rack of bananas pretty excited about these and then back here is katuk and this is another really great perennial greens I highly recommend the perennial greens and this is one that does extremely well so I've definitely had my successes and my failures my beats for example total failure this year my carrots on the other hand I got about 50 pounds that I put in the freezer and have have stored away so I've had challenges with lack of fertility not enough sunshine in the winter the heat and too much sunshine in the summer but overall I've had a huge abundance of food and really the you know one of the great examples of that is yucca or cassava I have just a bank of calories in the ground throughout the neighborhood I have yucca behind me I have planted that in six different spots so I've just barely tapped into the yucca that I've planted and that's basically my little neighborhood grocery store my little calorie bank or my large calorie bank that keeps me going so those calories are obviously extremely important in maintaining my weight you might be wondering have I lost weight in the first couple of months I lost about three pounds since then I've maintained my weight I'm about 150 pounds and started off at about 153 so doing good there health-wise I definitely feel really good so overall everything is going really great in that regard and that's this garden before saying goodbye let's head back to my place for a quick stop so spring was beautiful but it was also rough it was a very busy time in the average week I was spending 40 to 60 hours on food maybe more and it was tiring there were many nights where I was up till 1 a.m. preserving food whether it was in the dehydrator or freezing processing I mean it was time consuming that and there was a huge amount of media that was happening so I was doing all this plus so much media national group National Geographic came down which was awesome and now moved away from spring I've got so much food stored and summertime is definitely gonna be the slow time things have really slowed down already in the last couple weeks also taking a break from from all that media will probably do that again in the fall but things have slowed down and I've really been able to be much more present with the plants taking the time with the plants and it's just been it's really been truly a world away from that busy spring I'm really excited for summer rainy season is coming that's gonna mean mushrooms are gonna be popping out mango season is coming as well and this is the first time I'm talking about this but I'm also really excited to say I'm actually gonna take a trip this summer probably for between a month and two months I'm gonna go up north so how's that gonna go we'll see I won't have a garden for that whole four to eight weeks so I'm gonna have to carry a lot of food with me and I'm gonna have to do a lot of foraging I'm gonna be up in the Northwoods up in Wisconsin which is my homeland and I I just can't tell you how can drawn I feel to my homeland to connecting with the land there to learning the foods that I can forage there and I just feel this strong urge and strong desire to go up there so again today's day 200 I'm just past the halfway mark and I have to be honest that this has been extremely difficult it's not been easy but it's also just been so rewarding I have learned so much one of the reasons that it's been so difficult is because I'm learning I went into this you know having never grown food in the state of Florida having very little growing and foraging experience all together and you know 10 months from zero to growing and foraging a hundred percent in Florida that's one of the reasons that this has been so hard so the good news for you is if you're enjoying this adventure and you're learning a lot I still have another 165 days so if you are inspired and you are gaining a lot of education education from this then I recommend subscribing and also helping get this message out there hit that like button leave a comment ask questions and I'll try to get to most of them and share this with friends so love you all very much it's been great spending the day with you and I'll see you all again very soon bye