 When I first moved to Florida about five years ago and I set out to grow and forage 100% of my food, I was told I had to come see this guy. This is Josh Jamison and he knows how to grow a ton of food here in central Florida, how you can actually live off your garden. So I followed what I learned from him. It was one of the big successes in growing and foraging all of my food. Are you into giving us a tour? Sure. All right, let's go. So when I started getting into this in 2010, you could read about all these plants, but you had to pack up and drive four hours away to get a lot of them or you couldn't get them at all. So what I'm seeing myself now as is this person that can bridge this gap, if I identify something that's interesting or other people identify something that's interesting, I go get it and I work on it and if it's good, then we start replicating them and getting them out So I have to say one thing, in case anyone's wondering, a lot of you probably think that I know a lot about plants. It's like this much compared to where Josh is at and so I just want to say I'm like really excited for you all to get to know what Josh is doing here because I kind of focused on the basics that I learned from Josh and a few other permaculturists and growers and that helped me to literally be able to grow and forage 100% of my food. So if you're trying to grow a lot of food in Florida, come in here, get in plants, visit, you do nursery tours some as well. Every other Saturday we do tours followed by nursery being open. Coming here and seeing these plants is one of the most powerful things you can do to really start to turn your dream into a reality as you see what is happening here. So this is one of our vegetable growing areas and something we focused a lot on is collecting some of these what are considered lesser known vegetables in the United States but are important vegetables in other countries. One example would be taro, which is one of the most important root crops in the world and through experimentation we've found a variety from Puerto Rico that performs very well. We can get up to seven pounds on each plant. Seven pounds of food per plant. Over here we have some tropical various tropical beans. These are yardlong beans and this type of yardlong bean can actually get to be over 40 inches. They're like this long. This is an experiment with tropical kale. I'd love to hear a little bit about this. This is a perennial kale right? It's a breeding project for selecting new perennial kales yeah. Okay so how long can this kale live here in central Florida would you say? Well I'm going to need some more time to tell you that. Okay, he needs more time. This for instance is a sweet pepper that was the result of our trials with sweet peppers and this I had these get this tall versus big nice crunchy sweet peppers and everything we're growing in here is grown under the same exact conditions that a one of you at home would have your garden. You can see there's no machinery. There's nothing special here other than some irrigation line, some logs and mulch, and this is all designed to replicate the way that a homeowner would grow and we're growing everything under those conditions to prove before we sell and promote them that they do well under these conditions. So this is Josh's new place and you've been here for two and a half years and I've traveled all over Florida. I've been to dozens maybe even over a hundred places and I've been here for the day and it is incredible. So I'd love you to tell us about like your vision here and what you're up to. So I worked at a different place called the Heart Village for quite a few years which was focused on doing sustainable agriculture, focused on the developing world and helping people in poverty and we made the transition to this property to a more local form of activism where we're trying to identify the types of crops and the types of strategies that can be grown here in the state of Florida to promote small farms, home growing and the whole kind of local agriculture movement and a critical ingredient for that is having the right, the properly adapted plants. I believe that every local bio region should have people that are trying to identify the best things for every specific environment. That could be even 50 miles apart. The environments are very different. So behind us we have kind of a living landscape of all kinds of crops such as this, this is banana, we host a collection of bananas and part of our thing is doing collections and trials of many varieties of certain crops. So for instance with banana we have 20 or so varieties and once we identify certain things are well adapted here, they perform well, we find that people like to eat them, they fit the whole palette as well as lesser known experimental unusual things, we begin then propagating and promoting those crops so we have an online shipping where we we ship live plants, cuttings, we do seeds, we do now tours every other Saturday, people can come here and get an hour tour and then the nursery is open and we also sell at our nursery and we do events. So finding the ingredients to have a local sustainable agriculture in Florida and then trying to make them available to the community. And really what I've seen is like like you mentioned you find the crops that already do relatively a lot of it's crops that you already know do well here but then you actually work with them selecting the variety to find the ones that are going to excel the most whether it's the weather conditions or producing the largest crops is that right? Right and a big emphasis of mine has been in myself and trying to communicate to others switching away from a European centric vision of gardening and looking out towards Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, Central America, India, places in the tropics where people already farm this way. Florida is this peninsula that's sticking out towards the tropics if you get on a boat and go down to Cuba you're in the tropics. So we need to be a looking to those those climates for new crops and we can dig into all kinds of interesting research and also learning from the people that live in those countries and the immigrants who come from those countries. So if you look behind us none of these crops are things you would find in an Ohio garden these are all things that grow well in the tropics and can be stretched up into the more northerly location of Florida. So he mentioned that he feels like he knows this much about plants and I feel like I have people in my life that make me feel like I know this much about plants and some of those people have been people that have gotten to meet traveling in the tropics and I wanted to take a moment to appreciate the small farmers of Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa that brought these tropical crops into fruition and have stewarded them in some cases for thousands of years and still in the form of immigrants in many gardens across the United States have you know brought them into cultivation here and a lot of these for instance these cassava varieties some of them have been cultivated by immigrants here and another cool thing to mention is there's the world of plants is so vast that the closer you look at one thing you feel like the less you know and there's so many things out there just right here this is a relative of guava that is from a southern part of Brazil where it gets very cold so this is a little guava that's actually really tasty and can tolerate 15 or 20 degrees Fahrenheit that I've never seen in a different garden other than than mine it's not known in Florida and there's so many things like that that we could be growing so you kind of have both these interesting things people have never seen if they come here but also like the basic staples right so to me you know longevity spinach one of the easiest things you can grow in Florida we grow these pots that fit right into a little box and we can ship these right to your house if you can't come out for a trip so you can actually get these in the mail if you go right now and click by this little go into the box yep I've actually never ordered a pat in the mail before so it's kind of new for me yeah we pack them up real careful and we also have seeds on there and it all goes in the box and if you do cuttings it all goes out and it'll get there in two or three days so Josh just fed me a little leaf that I have never had before pandanus and he said you can put it in a pot of rice and it'll make it taste like jasmine rice I you know I I know a thing or two about plants but today's been just for me a joyous day of learning and I'd love for you to learn from Josh so tell us how they can learn from you um so one thing is we do uh we offer the tours which I mentioned um we also have our website you can go on there and read about all the plants I've taken a lot of time and energy into writing these excessively long descriptions for the plants um we also have some youtube videos and in the last six months or so we also opened up a patreon which is a it's a paid subscription service for creators and basically you can sign up it's ten dollars a month which helps us keep this all functioning um and uh if you sign up for that we produce roughly three hours of video a month one lecture on uh farming specific crops uh very deep dives sometimes we just did an interview with a vegetable farmer those types of things and um a cooking class with Emily and then a q and a nice so well you've been here for just two and a half years right yep and it is genuinely magical and just you know so hopeful and exciting to see what's going on here so in the you know for now you'll get to learn from josh but I have to say I want to come back here and about maybe two years two and a half years and do another video and show people what it's looking like then how's that sound you come in June when there's lots of mangoes to eat oh all right all right thank you my friend