 I've been exploring food for about a decade since 2011 when I woke up to the globalized industrialized food system and realized it was basically causing destruction to everything that I love to people to the planet to other species and the thing was I realized it wasn't just the globalized industrialized food system but I was a part of that everything that I was eating was coming being shipped long distances across the world it was in packages and plastic that was leaving trash behind for future generations it was sprayed with pesticides it was animals raised in horrible conditions and I realized I was a part of all of that so that was back in 2011 and I decided I was going to change my life to eat in a way that didn't consume the planet but actually helped the planet and I had a big question very from the very beginning but it was a far-off question and that was would it be possible to actually step away from this globalized industrialized food system would it be possible to step away from Big Ag and actually produce all of my own food could I grow and forage 100% of my food so that's been a question for about eight years now and about two years ago I decided I was actually going to find the answer to that question and not just by looking on the internet which I did and I couldn't find anyone doing it I decided I was going to find the answer by by doing it and seeing if it was possible could I grow and forage everything that I eat for an entire year nothing packaged or processed nothing shipped long distances no pesticides literally knowing every ingredient that I put in my body including the medicine as well my food being my medicine and so that's why I ended up in Orlando Florida that's why I'm here today I'm standing here because I finished the year two days ago today's the second day after growing and foraging 100% of my food so proof that it is indeed possible however I'm the one standing up here tonight but I'm only proof that community can do this there's no way that I could have done this without the people in this room Orlando permaculture being a big part of it but hundreds of people it took hundreds of people to feed me not by bringing my food to me or farming it for me but through the knowledge the education the spending time with people getting plans from people the only reason I made I was able to do this is really because of the community so so why Orlando why did I choose to live in Orlando I was passing through here for the first time in 2016 I believe I was invited to speak at East End Market and I was immediately connected with Orlando permaculture and fleet farming and my partner at the time Cheryl and I we just felt welcomed here we've been traveling all over and we've we hadn't felt more welcomed than right here and we were telling people that we were kind of looking for a spot to possibly settle down and I had this project in mind and people said yeah come here so you know we felt very welcomed but also the thing that I liked about Orlando is there's actually a blossom there's there's a community but there's a blossoming community so I wanted to be in a place where I could affect positive change and but that didn't mean for me being in say Berkeley California where there's already a lot of change makers where I could make a difference but there was already a lot going on but not maybe like rural Alabama where people wouldn't really listen to me central Florida and Orlando is kind of this great middle ground right now where there's a lot of people as you can see in this room that really care about this but yet we all know where we are we're in Orlando one one extremely consumeristic city so that was one of the reasons I chose Orlando because I felt like it was the right place to make a difference and then the other part is the year-round growing season I thought if I have a chance to do this Orlando is a really good place to to give it my first shot and the reason why I wanted to do it in one of the easier places is because growing going into this I had next to no actual growing experience so when I moved to Orlando before this I had only had a couple of small raised beds in back in San Diego where I grew a little bit of greens some herbs and some tomatoes and I just look back at that and all the mistakes I was making were just crazy I mean there was a tomato horn worm and I just thought it was so cute and I loved it that I just let it eat my tomatoes my tomato plant and actually tonight I was going through my old photos to find photos to show you tonight this is the the small little greenhouse that I made when I first got here and I look back and I know how little I know I knew then because there's no sunlight hitting this greenhouse this is under a balcony there's no way those plants would grow so when I moved here I didn't know how much water to put on the the seeds I didn't know you know how much sunlight a garden needed I was just figuring out all of the most the most basic things and I was trying to do it quickly because I only had my plan was to have six months of getting here before I started my year of growing and foraging all of my food but I had another big problem and that was that I didn't own any land I arrived here not only not really knowing how to grow food much but also not owning any land and also not having a lot of experience in the state of Florida in general I had been coming here since I was 16 fishing and things like that but never had paid attention to the plants and certainly had never grown any food here so I was new to growing I was especially new to Florida and I arrived here with just a backpack literally everything I owned in a fit into a backpack and a few connections I had met Sarah right here at this church at a fleet farming dinner when I passed through and so when I got here she was one of the first people I talked to and I said hey Sarah what would you think about me staying in your guest bedroom and turning your yard into a garden in exchange and that's what I did this is Sarah's front yard two years ago this picture was taken as you can see Sarah's yard was grass but she had a dream and that dream was to turn it into an abundant garden so this picture was taken about a month ago and today I actually had a really beautiful experience I was standing right about where you see me now and I realized I was way higher up than the land around me so you can see where I am and you can see the sidewalk and you can see there's quite a bit of height there and so what I started do I'd started doing is I dug down to see what was below me now what it started with was sand most of you live around here you know that we're basically a former beach a former former ocean under the water and so starting with sand I had to turn that into a garden and two years later I started to dig down today and it was nothing from nothing but black loamy soil for about six to eight inches and the reason I was standing that high is because that's all that's all fertility that was created over the last two years so I'm going to show you how I managed to turn front yards into gardens as one of the things today now as far as preparation the idea was that I was going to give myself six months to to prepare before I was going to launch full into growing and foraging all of my food and the reason I was so quick about it is because I've been a traveling person for really the last well kind of forever I really at least since 2011 I've never stayed in a place where I could really solidly grow food and that was one of the reasons I didn't know the answer to that question could I grow and forage all my food because when I lived in San Diego I traveled six months of the year and before that I was consistently traveling so I didn't think I'd want to stay here for too long so that's why I gave myself six months to prepare and then a year here that'd be 18 months staying put which would be the longest that I've stayed put since I became unable to stay put I suppose so I gave myself six months and I started just trying to figure things out I connected with local resources one of the first places I came of course was here to Orlando permaculture and I started to buy local seeds I searched out local seed companies I searched out local nurseries I went to classes like foraging with Green Dean and Andy Kirk went to the local earth skills gathering and just any opportunity I had found local books found websites like eat the weeds and survival gardener and all of those and just tried to soak in as much knowledge as I could it was basically my full-time job to try to figure out how to grow and forage all my food this is just some of the beginning plants just getting some trays and starting to plant seeds and I just accumulated everything one little bit at a time some of the seeds were bought from companies and other parts of the United States like Bakers Creek seed company for example most of it was local some of it was Palmer's dumpster for example just down the street here from here that's where I got my sweet potato slips to start off with and the six months turned into a little bit longer it ended up being ten months before I actually decided to get started so or to before I felt like I could actually get started so grow food not lawns that's probably something that all a saying that all of you have heard before but that was really my my core to being able to do this here being in the city of Orlando poses big challenges compared to being on say a farm having that small space so what I did is I met people in the community and just like I did with Sarah I turned six I well not the whole yard but I put six plots throughout this neighborhood throughout the Audubon Park neighborhood where I grew my food so I had that basically spread out in different areas so this was the first garden and this is probably a month into the project I can see I was a little fatter when I you know just before this year started I lost a little bit of weight but the idea of growing food not lawns that I like to keep things pretty simple so I'm gonna share a little bit about how to turn your yard yard into a garden and for that there's six basic ingredients so cardboard mulch soil or compost water sun and then plants so the basics the basics to turning a yard into a garden first you lay down cardboard you can get cardboard for free from dumpsters grocery stores restaurants liquor stores if you go to a plant shops that sell things like refrigerators your job will be a lot easier because they have huge pieces of cardboard take all the tape off take the staples off and you lay that down the idea of that is to kill the grass every plant needs to photosynthesize and if it has no sun it can't create energy and it will die over time but that cardboard wouldn't stay put on its own it's just the first ingredient over that you lay mulch and you lay about a foot of mulch you can see the mulch here and one of the big focuses of this is how can we utilize resources that would otherwise be completely wasted and do things in a very inexpensive way so mulch is actually the waste product of tree trimming and tree cutting down companies and a lot of the times they actually take that to the landfill it's something they have to deal with so instead you can get them to dump it into your yard and you can do that through websites like get ship drop dot com and I'll have all the resources listed at the end as well or if you see one of those companies you can just walk up to them in your neighborhood and say hey do you want to dump that right on right on my front yard so cardboard mulch the reason that you have mulch many reasons one suppresses the grass to turn your yard into a garden mulch holds in moisture so your lawn if there's nothing there what happens when it rains most of it runs right off into the street and you lose that opportunity mulch holds that in the other thing mulch does is it breaks down over time into soil it also creates an environment where microorganisms and mycorrhizal fungi can be which are very important to plants it prevents erosion and holds in nutrients it has many many functions the third ingredient is mush is compost or soil if you're living in a place like Wisconsin where I'm from there's a lot of very rich soil and that might not be needed but if you have a sandy yard you need to bring in some nutrients so I got mushroom compost which is a resource that we're blessed to have in central Florida it's a waste product of the mushrooms that you buy or many of us buy at the grocery stores so mushroom compost was my growing medium and then Sun that's freely available to us not much we have to do there water also something that can be freely available to us from the sky we live in a place where we we get a good amount of water year around even our dry time of the year we still get about three inches of rain per year and if you're doing rainwater harvesting you can capture a whole lot of that and then the other ingredients would be plants so you can start from seeds cuttings and then buying potted plants already there's probably some other ways to do it I'm still kind of a rookie I should say that from the beginning so that's the basic ingredients and that's what I did to turn the front yards into gardens so what were the guidelines for this project of growing and foraging all my food so what that meant is obviously no grocery stores no restaurants that included my medicine so no pharmacy I had to grow or forage my own medicines as well a lot of people know me for having done a lot of dumpster diving to raise awareness about food waste and some people call that urban foraging but for this project that did not count as foraging so the idea was I had already learned in the past that I could live solely off food from grocery store dumpsters but I wanted to again step away from Big Ag and see if I could live independently of that which would not mean eating those foods from dumpsters so no dumpster diving no drinks at a bar no eating food from a friend's pantry no going to my friend's food forests because I mean let's face it if I if I ate at the food forest life would just have been too easy and I wouldn't have had to learn near as much because this is Orlando permaculture there's dozens of food forests that I could visit so no food forests literally had to grow or forage everything for the entire year so this picture is on day one that was November 11th 2018 and you would think when I finally began that I would have maybe eaten quite a few meals that I had completely grown and foraged but I had a lot going on and my first meal was the first meal that I had ever eaten a hundred percent grown or forage so when I started on day one I was definitely in on the deep end jumping into the deep end so where did I live during this time my goal was originally to live off the grid in the city and do all of this off the grid as well but over time I realized off the grid would have been a whole nother level of the challenge that I wasn't quite able to do so I wasn't off the grid but what I did is I built a tiny house homestead you can see it in the backyard yard here this is a drone shot and here's another picture of it from closer up and the idea was to try to live in a way where I was living as much as possible in harmony with the earth here in the city and in a way that caused as little harm on the on the earth I mean it might not seem like it in the city of Orlando but we are indeed in a natural environment of sorts even though there's concrete around everywhere is nature we are nature so even being in the city of Orlando my idea was to be as integrated as possible with the elements as I could and to actually use resources as effectively and wisely as I could and improve the quality of life around me so at this tiny house a couple of the key things for sustainable living there was a compost basic compost bin which meant anything like food waste yard waste paper cardboard all of that stuff could go right into the compost to build fertility for my gardens there was rainwater harvesting so my shower was a rainwater harvesting system and that water that I used to shower after it came off the roof from rain after it cleaned me it went on to bananas and then could grow bananas the water from my kitchen was also from rainwater harvesting and after I washed dishes and wash my hands and such that went behind the sink and that's called gray water and back there I planted taro and tumeric and so all of that was also used to grow food and the idea of this is really to keep the water on the land it's the opposite idea of a lot of today's society you look at how the gutters and the downspots are set up it's to send the water off of your property into the street and then into our stormwater runoff system my goal was to try to keep as much of that water as on as possible but still let it flow off like during hurricanes I'm not talking about holding every ounce but but that was the idea there and then as well as fertility keeping all that fertility on the land I also had a compost toilet as well so they could use that so over this year I grew and foraged 300 different foods so I grew a hundred different foods in my garden and 200 different foods that I foraged and so there's 365 days in a year so what that means is that I foraged a new food for almost every single day of the entire year so that's quite a bit of diversity so a lot of people you know imagine that I would be just missing all the different tastes and flavors but the realities was there between the 300 different foods that I foraged there was quite the diversity so I'm gonna walk you through that tonight you know a large part of tonight's focus is is how you can do this and not necessarily a hundred percent you know that's obviously really extreme and very challenging but how you can grow in forage or how you can produce as much as your food as you would like to so I'm gonna go into detail with with a lot of the the actual plants so one of the really important ones you know so many people dream of self-sufficiency it's the dream of really millions of people to grow a hundred percent of their food to live off the land to never have to take a trip to the grocery store but you know for most of us that's really just a dream because the globalized food system is far too easy far too far reaching far too convenient and alluring but even the people that are really largely living off the land one of the biggest challenges is calories actually growing all of your calories so here in Florida we're not we're not in a grain state you don't see big fields of wheat and corn and things like that here so grains were not gonna be the way that I was going to feed myself like billions of people around the world do tubers are actually what we have going for us in central Florida so my first calorie crop is sweet potato that's what I'm holding in my hand there and some of the sweet potatoes were like what you'd see at the store small ones but the biggest sweet potato was over five pounds so imagine if you buy a five pound bag of potatoes one sweet potato can be that big or or even larger so in a small area probably definitely smaller than this stage I grew about 500 pounds of sweet potato so it is truly one of those most powerful crops that we have available to us here in central Florida not only can you eat the tubers the potatoes themselves but the greens are also edible and what I was told is that sweet potatoes are the most useful land as far as any crop goes you get more out of that per acre than any other crop that's grown because of the calories from the potato and then the nutrients from the greens so it's really important to look at all of the elements in the plant because most people who bought sweet potatoes at the store have never eaten a sweet potato green but it's a really really useful resource so sweet potatoes were one of my main crops and then yuka is another one also called cassava now what you'll see tonight with a lot of the plants that I'm that I'm gonna show you is that these are plants that most people in Caribbean cuisines and a lot of central and South American cuisines are these are staple crops to them but if you go away from the south and to much of the United States these are foods that that most people have never heard of but these are largely many of these you'll see as staples and much of central Caribbean and South America yuka being one of those or or cassava now I'm just gonna say it's not yuka that's why you CCA yuka is why you see a and yuka is a desert plant that doesn't produce big tubers yuka is a plant that grows in semi tropics and tropics that produces big tubers so the nice thing about yuka is you can plant it along your fence line you all you have to do for yuka is get a cutting which is a stick so like what I'm holding in my hand there just a part of the stick or all around this this is the the parts that I broke off that grows above the ground any one of those sticks you just take that stick you put it in the ground and that's gonna turn into five pounds of yuka or sometimes even 15 pounds of yuka so this is what's called a survival crop one billion people around the world depend on yuka because and and the reason they depend on it is because it grows ridiculously easily takes very few nutrients and and doesn't need much water at all so that makes it a very much a survival crop the other great thing about it is you can leave it as your basic calorie bank in the ground it can sit there for it can sit there for years at peanut butter palace there's one that was there long before I got there and it's still there today and they can go down and dig that food out so it's a it's a survival crop it's not the most nutritious it doesn't have a lot of nutrients but it has calories it's twice as calorie dense as sweet potatoes so very important crop I got my cat I got my nutrients elsewhere and we'll go into that but calories came from tubers now another tuber is wild yam or deus goria alata I'm not sure if I pronounced that correctly but it's an idea I mostly use common names rather than the genus and species but wild yam winged yam this is actually formerly a domestic domesticated yam that got into the wild the largest one that I dug up this year was with James and it was 157 pounds I weigh 153 pounds so a yam as heavy as me and that's just one yam imagine how much you can food you can get out of that that's 35 pound bags of potatoes for one yam so I found will we found this wild yam in a in a reserve about 10 miles west of here but before I started as I was preparing I actually found a huge amount of it there may be as much as a thousand calories on the Katyway trail right over by the golf course right growing right along the golf course and that was actually on day one I think one of my first meals was the wild yams right there from from the golf course so an amazing plant you can also grow it there's a lot of people who grow it in central Florida as well so it's great for foraging for calories or growing your own calories so another really important crop for me this year has been papaya it's absolutely for central Florida one of the plants that I would recommend the most you can eat papaya green if you've ever had Thai papaya salad for example that's green papaya but there's so many ways you can prepare it you can cut it up like potatoes and saute it you can turn it into papaya kraut fermented which I'm gonna talk about a little bit later so it's it's not as dense in calories as the tubers but still has quite a few calories and as you can see from this one tree I mean I had probably five papaya trees and I never ate five percent of the papayas that I put out so papaya trees are a really really worthwhile thing to grow another thing is seminal pumpkin all of those pumpkins that you see right there came from the seeds of two pumpkins that I had for dinner before this project started I was down at Sustainable Kashi and Sebastian and we had a seminal pumpkin and I said can I take these seeds home just as excited as could be I had you know planted very few things in my life at that time that was before it got started and I took these seeds home and was just so excited to plant them so those seeds from two pumpkins turned into 169 pumpkins that I grew in two of the front yards and those them a beautiful thing about seminal pumpkins is they also store even living I lived basically outside no air conditioning in my tiny house it was if it was 90 degrees outside it was 90 degrees inside and they lasted through an entire summer on my shelves so they're truly amazing crop most of you don't have to worry about that because you have air conditioning I've heard of them lasting even two years inside so another amazing crop similar to butternut squash in a way it's got a bright flesh she bright orange on the inside but that for me was a big lesson in the power of the seed because just think about it if there's I don't know hundred hundred fifty people in this room there's about a hundred seeds in a pumpkin so if we just had two pumpkins between this room each one of us could take home one seed turn that into say ten pumpkins and then that would already be in the tens of thousands of seeds and you could create food sovereignty so quickly just with growing our own seeds it's truly amazing if you order a pound bag of kale seeds I looked at how many seeds are in there and there's about 1.5 million so one bag of kale seeds has enough seeds in it for the entire metro Orlando to have their own kale the seed is an extremely extremely powerful thing Ron Finley he's a he's a he calls himself a gangster gardener out in LA he's a friend of mine and one of the things that he said the most that I absolutely love is growing your food growing your own food is like printing your own money and it truly is it's you can literally create abundance out of almost nothing it's it's truly special another really important crop for this area is bananas when I first got here for some reason I didn't believe that bananas would really produce I looked around at all my friends banana plants and I just I never saw bananas and I thought that I see these people growing banana plants but I never actually see any bananas but now sure enough the the banana stand over at Sarah's has three racks on well I just harvest one of the racks and it already has and it has two others and we already harvested one and I'm eating fresh bananas over from Lisa's house and fresh bananas over from Jen's house so bananas really do grow extremely well here and you can also forage them Dickinson Azalea Park has been one of my sources for wild forage bananas I've harvested bananas there multiple times apparently nobody knows the stand is there because when I went away for the summer there were five racks of bananas and I thought surely someone's gonna harvest these while I'm gone I came back all five of them I could tell had rotted and not been harvested so if you want wild bananas Dickinson Azalea Park is a great place to search it out I'm not gonna tell you exactly where it is you'll just have to scout it out but I found wild bananas growing within five miles of here in at least three different locations public parks that you can go seek out so bananas are a great crop for growing and foraging you can wait till they're yellow and eat them as a delicious fruit you can when they're green you can fry them and have fried green bananas you can you can blend you can dry and blend the entire thing the peel and the banana inside and make the green banana flower so it is a it's a really great crop for here now coconuts were one of the most important foods for this year so I kind of shared some of my main ways of getting calories which are just you know calories are the energy of life without having enough calories we slowly would dwindle away so it's one of the most important foundations we can we can be nutrient deficient for quite a while but if we don't have enough calories then we're in more trouble so calories was kind of my big focus because I knew I could I knew I could make it through the year with you know not getting enough nutrients but if I didn't have enough calories I knew I wouldn't be able to make it so that was that's why I started with calories coconuts are an interesting crop because they are very high in calories they're also high in fat and they also have protein so the the water inside of it is high in electrolytes and it's often called nature's Gatorade the meat itself is high in oil and fat you can either dry it and and shred it and use it as coconut shreds you can dry it and just make chunks and have that as a snack you can dry it and blend it and make your own coconut butter or you can dry it and then press it and make your own coconut oil you can also make your own coconut milk just by blending it up and straining it and then you have delicious high fat coconut milk so I've probably eaten 200 coconuts over the last year and if I didn't have the coconuts I don't know if I had made it through this year you can't grow coconuts in Orlando they are more tropical but you can forage coconuts all over South Florida and all of these coconuts that are brown are mostly from picking up on the ground around coconut trees they're growing in public parks they're also growing in places like nurseries people's backyards all over the place so coconuts were one of my my absolute most important crops of the year for protein that was you know that was one of the biggest challenges of the project where would I get my protein and probably one of the most commonly asked questions online so I grew some of my own protein these I'm standing with are called pigeon peas or gandules and they were one of the most important crops of this year also very much a survival crop needs minimal nutrients minimal water and it's a very nutrient dense calorie dense protein dense plant so behind me is the pigeon pea tree and you can see the flowers there and then those are dried pigeon peas just you'd use them just like you would lentils or black-eyed peas or any dried bean basically so I grew some of my own protein I tried growing sunflower seeds for protein and didn't have much success with that because of the squirrels I grew some some peanuts but also didn't have a lot of success with that the other crop that I grew was southern peas so that was another crop it's a ground cover that's really helpful in the garden and also a nitrogen fixer so that was another important protein source so other protein sources fish was always my main plan I actually if there's one thing I was experienced in and before this project it was fishing I started fishing when I was about eight and it's actually been one of my biggest passions of my life I truly love it's one of my my most important ways of really connecting with the land I got away from it for a while because I was vegan for a while and and it didn't it just didn't sit right with me for a period of time but for most of my life I have been fishing and I started fishing again about maybe three or four years ago so my plan my main my main plan was fish for fish was mullet probably most of the people in this room have not eaten mullet it's not generally a really highly regarded fish I would say one of the most important lessons as far as a food lesson that you could walk away with is that most everything that is not highly regarded by American culture is an amazing food other cultures it's it's the food of life if Americans don't like it generally so it's in with fish you know mullet is an amazing fish it's very high in fat the beneficial fats and it's it's very abundant still in Florida the reason I wanted to focus on mullet is because it's very low on the food chain it only eats plants so it doesn't bio accumulate bio accumulation what that you all probably heard about how eagles were affected by DDT in the past and then their eggshells crumble and that made eagles almost almost extinct in the United States what that is is because there was DDT which built up in the fish and eagles eat so many fish that it builds up in the cycle and then once it gets up to the predator so much of it is in them that it can affect them greatly so what what happens now is there's a lot of bio accumulants if you're eating game fish like tuna for example there's a lot of accumulation of mercury in that but the reason I chose wanted to mostly mullet is because it only eats plants so it doesn't accumulate by eating fish that eat smaller that eat bigger fish and the bigger fish and bigger fish and so on so mullet was one of my plans this is a red fish here I didn't I didn't I didn't actually catch enough mullet to have a really good picture or never got around to taking a good one mullet were harder than I expected and interestingly enough fishing was weirdly the most challenging thing I could just never catch enough fish I ate squirrel but not because I couldn't have enough fish but because squirrels were eating my sunflowers and a lot of you are new to permaculture in this room tonight but there's one common saying in permaculture and that is the problem is the solution how can you turn the problem into the solution well here I was trying to grow a plant-based protein they were eating my plant-based protein so I ate them instead definitely caused a little controversy some people like it I guess I may as well answer the question how does it taste it's just you know it tastes like meat it tastes similar to chicken you know not too different so but I only ate about nine squirrels so it was by no means my we'll do questions at the end it was but it was by no means you know a main source of food now the other things I thought about hunting wild boar they're invasive and this is not something that I did so I can't speak of their experience but there I think are a couple million wild boar in Florida and it is one of the most sustainable ways to get protein to get meat in Florida and other parts of southern United States so they're highly invasive and they destroy a lot of land and they are an amazing resource that we can utilize I didn't end up doing that and the reason I didn't is because most people who hunt it who offered to take me out they bait it and my rule was I could only use food that I grew to catch other food so I didn't have bait for the pigs and that's why I never got around to actually doing that and then the reason I didn't raise animals you know there's a lot I'm not gonna get into raising animals today because I didn't do that but chickens quails rabbits you can also do aquaponics for fish tilapia is a common one there's a lot of ways to raise animals but the reason I didn't do that is again I would have to raise all of the food for them so on a small plot I didn't have the ability to grow all of the food for the chickens or to have any you know grass fed animals or anything like that so that's why raising animals was out now the other solution was number three and that is car killed animals I haven't really hunted much so my solution was to find animals that had already died so David and I David Warfell there he is him and I went up to Gainesville about New Year's ish searching for some deer and Joe Pierce helped us he was gonna help us out we went up to up to his place in near Gainesville we found two but they were too old and so you know wasn't able to harvest those and then it got a little hot and as you can imagine when it's 90 degrees by nine in the morning in Florida that's not the best time to be trying to harvest deer so I didn't actually harvest any deer in Florida but this summer I took a trip to Wisconsin I wanted to connect with my homeland I felt a strong connection a strong desire to learn the plants where I was from and so I decided to take a trip up there and I'll mention they'll talk a little bit more about that at the end but one of my goals while I was there was to get a deer now when I got to Wisconsin I was really I was really deficient in fat and protein and I was like this was something that I was really trying for and it actually took me a whole month before I actually was able to get one but by towards the end I harvested five deer in Wisconsin and that ended up being really one of my main sources of you could say one of my main sources of food the entire year it probably made up ten percent plus of my food for the entire year okay one of my other main sources of a really a main source of food was honey so sugar is really important I actually you know one of the big challenges I thought of this year was gonna be chocolate that's actually one of my favorite foods in the whole world dark chocolate my former partner share used to call me a chocolate vampire because if it was around me I did bad things like I would just eat everyone share a chocolate and not be able to resist like I loved it so that was one of the big things could I get by without chocolate and so the solution was honey and this year I think I harvested five gallons of honeys honey from my bees so that is you know a lot of honey that is about let's see a gallon is about ten pounds so that'd be no that's not right anyway five gallons it's a huge amount honey it's one of those big blue jugs so honey was a really important source of calories of enjoyment add a lot of value to different meals I fermented with it now sugarcane is another source of sugar that you can do here and that's something that that actually is pretty easy but it takes time and it's just not one of the things that I ever did I plant I actually got a whole bunch of sugarcane cuttings but they all rotted and I never got around to it it's an important lesson when you're trying to grow and forage a hundred percent of your food it's not that necessarily any one thing is challenging it's that trying to do everything is challenging and that's like you know people would often say well why don't you just do that well because I'm already working 70 hours a week on my food so I just didn't have time to do that so that's one of the big differences between shooting for a hundred percent and say 80 percent it's actually that last 20 10 to 20 percent making your own oils and the calories and all that that is one of the most difficult parts whoops so salt when I before I started this project I was actually on a train in Germany and I was just thinking how the heck am I gonna get salt and you know I never had seen anyone eating salt that they harvested and I had very little experience with whatsoever the only really there was a couple stories I had in mind one was Gandhi's salt March where he walked to the ocean and he picked up salt from the ocean and that was his protest against the British and I knew that they literally just picked up salt so I thought okay I know what could be done and I knew there was the salt flats in Bolivia the salt flats of Oyuni so I knew there was places but I didn't think that was in Florida I was pretty sure of that so I didn't know how the heck I was gonna do salt I was I was very you know lost and so I did the research and basically all you have to do is go to the ocean scoop up some salt water put it in a pot turn on your stove all the water will boil off and then you're left with salt it's just as simple as that so there's salt water is about three and a half percent salt by volume so a gallon of salt water gives you about a half cup of salt so you know that's a fair bit of salt so if you do if you go get five gallons that could be all the salt that you need for an entire year so we can be producing all of our own salt really really quite easily and the most sustainable way to do it is actually not to put it on your stove you can just let that evaporate use the sun let it evaporate over time and that's also I would prefer to do that but I always just boiled it usually I boiled it on on wood waste wood from the neighborhood like heat treated pallets that didn't have chemicals in them or wood from the trees in my neighborhood mushrooms were another really important source of food for me this is Pete Canaris and I this is two different species or three different species species of shantral mushrooms so when I started this I don't I had maybe forage mushrooms one or two times and I would say probably when people think about foraging that's probably one of the things that scares them the most is mushrooms and there's one way to never die or never get sick foraging and that's only eat something if you're 100% sure what it is you will never have problem foraging if you only eat things that you're 100% sure what they are that's the number one rule of foraging one way to do that is triple confirmation so you don't take one person's word you don't take from me tonight that shantral's are edible you first have three different good sources you can decide whether I'm a good source or not and decide whether that's your your first source but three different good resources before you eat something from the wild so triple confirmation so I probably foraged about 20 species of mushrooms between Wisconsin between here and then my trip to Wisconsin in Florida shantral's are probably one of the the more abundant and easier it's one of the most beginner easy mushrooms to start with so as I you know I said I was growing and foraging a hundred percent of my own food and that included my own medicine so for the last year nature was my garden it was my pantry and it was my pharmacy so if I got sick this year I could not take any medicine to get better so that meant first and foremost I had to take care of my health preventative health care today with our modern health insurance it's something like 75% of all of our doctor visits come down to what we eat exercise move basic movement and then our level of stress and anxiety so 75% of our doctor visits can be taken care of through preventative health care just basic eating healthy moving and then and then living a life that's not so stressful and anxious so for me food was my medicine and medicine was my food there's really no clear difference between the two they are all working together every green that I ate every every vegetable every fruit the meat that I ate the fish it all was my medicine it's just like we need to take care of our plants to have healthy plants and it's the exact same with with us if we're healthy we're less likely to get sick so a couple of my most important medicines were elderberry syrup and that came from foraging elderberries which are an amazingly abundant resource in central Florida and then combining that with bees with honey from my bees to make elderberry syrup I would often put turmeric and ginger and sometimes fermented garlic in there so I took elderberry syrup a tablespoon of elderberry syrup most every day of this entire year it prevents cold and flu or if you get cold or flu you can use it to reduce it or take care of it fire cider was another one of my important medicines so I made vinegar from fruit apples is an apple cider vinegar but you can make it from almost any fruit and then garlic onion horseradish and red peppers serrano peppers I put in there and maybe another ingredient or two and fermented over a period of a couple of months probably and that was something that I took most days as well so fire cider turmeric I grew my own turmeric that's one of the easiest crops that you can grow in central Florida it's like 10 to 25 dollars a pound for organic stuff at the grocery store and it grows amazingly easily as well just go to the grocery store buy some organic turmeric put it in the ground and then you can never have to buy it again simple as that ideally you can source it locally but if not you can literally just get organic stuff from the grocery store and start growing your own garlic I consider that a medicine as well reishi mushrooms or something that I foraged another medicine herbal teas plantago or broadleaf plantain that to me as a medicine that very much calls to me if I get stung my by my bees not my bees I don't own them but the bees that I steward if they sting me and I don't do anything I swell up big I should have put a picture on there but a lot of you have probably seen my face after getting stung I swell up but if I take some honey and some dried plantago and I put it on there within about two minutes I generally don't swell at all it's a it's a it's a pretty amazing medicine and it grows probably in most states of the United States you can forage it or you can grow it in the garden here in Florida so basically food is food was my medicine and medicine was my food here I am with Jeff that was early on collecting elderberries this is out by Blanchard Park over towards peanut butter Palace and again just an amazing resource that grows all over and you can grow it in your garden so another one of those kind of borderline food or medicine is wild fermentation it's one of the most important ways for me to stay healthy to increase the nutrients in my diet and to have a well-functioning digestive system so I did a lot of wild fermentation now what is wild fermentation that is taking the yeast and the bacteria from the air and using that for fermentation what wouldn't be wild fermentation would be a controlled sterile environment where you buy a specific yeast like baker's yeast and you use that to make things bubble or raise that's is that even fermentation is that fermentation yeah so that's fermentation but not wild fermentation that's a way that most of the beers you buy for example are done so wild fermentation is literally just the yeast of the bacteria that are in every breath we take using that to ferment your food and all you have to do to attract them is put food that they want there that they will eat so bacteria and yeast love sugar and again it's it's on every tiny part of our skin it's an every breath we take every breath we take we consume yeast and bacteria so wild fermentation some of the things that I have here for example this is a papaya kraut so you know sauerkraut but you can use the green papaya to make a delicious ferment this is Jun Jun is not Jin it's like kombucha except it uses honey and green tea and I grew you can grow green tea here as well or ya upon Holly and I'll tell you that in a bit tell you about that in a bit so fruit scrap vinegar most fruits especially fruits that are high in sugar you can make vinegar from the rinds of pineapples have enough juices left on them still and you can make vinegar just from the leftover pineapple scraps honey wine and another one is ginger beer or turmeric beer that's not an alcohol even though it's called beer but that's another than one that I made so this is some of my sauerkraut here and the amazing thing what I did is I didn't have a fridge and I didn't have air conditioning so I needed to keep them cold so what I did is I just built this little underground storage and it was an experiment I didn't know if it would work I knew it would at least be a little bit better probably and the idea was to keep the things cooler because fermenting is done best in somewhere like the mid 70s not 90 degrees there's some fermenting that can be done at that but sauerkraut and things like that are around 70 degrees so hard to do in the summer unless you're in air conditioning then it doesn't matter but so I had to figure out a way to keep things a little bit cooler so I built this little underground well actually my friend Harley built this little underground storage container and the idea was at least maybe I'd get an extra month of life out of out of the sauerkraut because it's not like I could go to the store and buy cabbage and I couldn't grow cabbage in the summer I had to figure out a way to make it last and that's how you make it last through sauerkraut and I went away like I said to Wisconsin for three months and when I came back I opened that thing up and I still had about three or four jars of sauerkraut in there and I made them three months before I left so this was six month old sauerkraut sitting in the ground in Florida about 90 degrees every day for those six months and when I opened that thing I did not know is this stuff still gonna be good I opened it up it looked good I took the cap off it smelled good just pulled the little top layer off that's called the sacrificial leaf that you put on top I bit it and it was some of the most delicious sauerkraut that I've ever made so it was a really awesome little experience a little experiment to see that you can do that here even in the heat of Florida if you want to get into wild fermentation my favorite book is wild fermentation by Sandor Katz also called Sandor Kraut he's also named the Johnny Appleseed of fermentation by Michael Pollan amazing book highly recommend that you learn what you need about need to know about wild fermentation so a little bit about fruit foraging now I didn't have the time to establish fruit trees most fruit trees take a bit of time to produce a couple of years avocados for example can take five plus years so I wasn't able to grow most of my fruit so foraging was my was my key for for most of my fruit I mentioned I grew papayas and bananas but for the most part my fruit came from foraging so some of the easiest to forage and easiest to grow fruits are loquat mulberry, cernum cherry, banana, avocado, citrus which would be grapefruit lemon oranges passion fruit which is not a tree of divine and I think I missed star fruit so those are all fruits that I well the ones that I foraged a lot are loquat mulberry, star fruit, cernum cherry, banana, some avocado, citrus but not passion fruit I grew that so those are those are and those are also all fairly easy to grow well except citrus because of citrus greening but there's still a ton of citrus in existence so there's a lot of it out there even with that disease some more abundant foraging that I experienced were mango prickly pear cactus and white sapote were other great foraging that I had and then a few mentions as far as fruit trees persimmon cocoa plum java plum pond apple sea grapes are all are all fruits that I had pretty good success with now there's hundreds probably there's hundreds of fruits that grow in Florida and there's different fruits that grow in northern Florida central Florida and south Florida we actually have a pretty diverse state but those are just some of the fruits that I experienced now I went to south Florida for my mangoes and this is about a day of foraging down there for mangoes and there's so many mangoes that people it's a problem what I would do for foraging for fruit is I would just ride my bike around or be in a car depending on the situation and if I saw a huge mango tree and there was just fruit falling to the ground in the road I would just knock on the door and ask if I could harvest that fruit and generally the answer was yes sometimes it was absolutely please this stuff's rotting on the ground and causing me a trouble or falling onto my car a lot of times people wanted it to be taken so generally that was you know that was the response so that was a form of urban foraging and that was kind of one of the gray areas a lot of it was abandoned lots there's there's fruit trees growing in abandoned lots in the forests in public parks which is all clear foraging the stuff that was growing over the street you know on someone's lawn that was like kind of one of my gray areas as to whether I completely considered that foraging but but basically that's it is what I considered foraging because a lot of those fruit trees I basically tried to stick to all fruit trees that had pretty much naturalized where nobody was taking care of them and they were just largely in existence that kind of gray area of humanity and ultimately that was one of the big things for me is that this project was about stepping away from big ag but it wasn't about stepping away from humanity and it wasn't about stepping away from other people and I realized that almost everything that I ate was affected by humans in one way or another most of the weeds that I was eating a lot of them came from Europe 400 years ago from humans so that was one of the interesting lessons is that wild and domesticated is you know it's a gray area so an important tool for fruit foraging is a fruit picker I bought this up for $40 at a hardware store and that allows you to reach way more fruit fruit that often would go to waste because most people don't have a fruit picker and they just pick the lower stuff so another thing that I would generally do is I would often pick the higher up stuff that other people definitely wouldn't have gotten so my my meals were definitely not bland occasionally bland but for the most part not bland grew lots of herbs and spices so the ones I'm gonna list here are ones that I recommend for central Florida that do grow well so African blue basil Cuban oregano holy basil garlic chives green onion mint rosemary lemongrass Italian basil Thai basil popolo which popped up in my garden and I had no clue what it was and it was this mystery I don't know where it came from but it's a great herb some people consider it close to cilantro cilantro dill fennel thyme oregano curry leaf tree garlic sage dill seeds coriander the dill seeds are dill you let dill go to seed and you get dill seeds and coriander is cilantro that goes to seed and then you get coriander so those are just those are just some of the herbs and spices that I grew this year and those are I'm just featuring those ones as the highlights I grew a lot of annual greens so collards is my top recommendation as far as annual greens so some of the ones I grew collards kale arugula Swiss chard mustard greens chicory lettuce cabbage brassicas that's the whole family of broccoli and kale and collards and such Asian greens like pok choy and tots soy do really well in this area nasturtium and amaranth would be a bunch of the annual greens that I grew I really prefer perennial greens though the thing about annuals and for those of you don't know what an annual is that's a plant that generally produces about once and then dies a good example of that is a carrot you can't leave a carrot in the ground for more carrots to come you got to pull that carrot up after about 90 days and eat that carrot otherwise you get no food but perennials they can be some of them are three four five years rhubarb in the north generally lasts for 25 years oak trees can be hundreds of years old and those put out acorns which are edible so so perennials can produce for years decades or even over a century and they're much more resource efficient they're more time efficient they consume a lot they consume consume far fewer resources and generally they add nutrition back to the soil when you take out a plant from the soil you're taking out nutrients so perennials by staying there it's less disruption of the soil that would be generally something that goes hand-in-hand with no-till gardening for example so the number one plant that I recommend in central Florida if everybody in this room just had one plant it would be Moringa it's also called the vitamin tree or the tree of life and it's one of the most nutrient dense plants on earth another survival plant needs almost no water or irrigation needs almost no nutrients it's native to India from dry parts of India and it's one of the most nutrient dense on dense plants on earth it's truly a miracle food and if everybody had one of those plants that could change the entire state of Florida very easy to grow you can get it from a cutting stick that cutting in the ground or from seeds so Moringa is my number one recommendation other ones are katuk that's what you see right here that I'm cutting Chaya is also considered a superfood that's been grown for thousands of years that dates back to I think the Aztecs the Mayans in Central and South America sweet potato greens as I mentioned before yucca greens or cassava not only does it create a tuber but you can also eat the greens just like Chaya they are high in cyanide so they have to be cooked but don't be scared the fact that they have a poison in them a lot of our foods are poisonous if not prepared correctly or toxic might be a better word so they just have to be boiled for depending on you talk to three to 20 minutes so you can you know go 20 minutes whatever you want but so yucca greens other ones cranberry hibiscus purslane is one of my favorite foods on earth and it's a very nutrient dense it's actually one of the few plants that are high in omegas garden sorrel again plantago oak and then perennial spinach is we can grow a lot of different perennial spinach is here so to name a few of them Okinawa longevity Suriname Malabar Brazilian those are just five of the perennial spinach is that we can grow here so foraging greens this is right here on Bumbie and this is a plant that most people know Biden's Alba or Spanish needle it's despised by many front lawn growers and gardeners as a weed but it's actually nutritious and medicinal it's one of the most highly regarded medicinal plants by a lot of the local holistic health practitioners if you go to the Florida School of Alistic Living they're always talking about Biden's Alba it's important medicinal but it's also just a great edible and very nutritious so this is it right here it has these these flowers with the yellow in the center and the white around it you can eat the flowers they make a nice salad garnish or you can eat the greens so it's a it's a beautiful food and everywhere you go in the United States most most everywhere you go in the United States there's gonna be weeds that are edible nutritious and often medicinal greens so to name some other great ones in the area dollar weed is in most of your yards probably go to cola which is considered a brain food a very important one Bacopa oxalis purslane and then there's sea greens like sea purslane and sea blight and then plantago which that might be the third time I brought that plant up I obviously like it quite a bit one of the the foods that I made was green juice that was a good staple this year as far as water when I went into this year my hopes was to actually get all of my water foraged as well which meant harvesting rainwater but that was something that I quickly realized I wasn't gonna do because I didn't want to carry around gallons of water everywhere I went so at my tiny house I harvested rainwater put it through a filter this is called a Berkey filter and that purified it and then that was my drinking water so a majority of my water this year was foraged water it was drinking water but wherever I went if I had to I drank tap water as well so some mentions of other plants and this is getting close to the end of the plant section so other things carrots I grew over 60 pounds of carrots this year so that was an important food source beets tindora cucumber which is a perennial cucumber that can grow year around peppers grow really well in central Florida that's probably one of the easiest foods to start with I grew serrano peppers and ghost peppers everglades tomatoes it's hard to grow big tomatoes in central Florida but everglades tomatoes grow really well daikon radish is an amazing one you can make ferments from that green tea this is a really great one that you can grow here but there's something that I prefer that I'll get to in a minute roselle or Jamaican sorrel amaranth grains as far as grains that was the one that I experimented with and I did get two pounds of grains full of rock so it never was tasty it was actually probably worse eating it than not eating it but amaranth grains is a is a good potential green beans yard long beans are a rate really great potential I mean that's a really great food to grow here cucumbers I did well with annual cucumbers but that one's not always easy kohlrabi celery eggplant and also just standard small potatoes can do well as well some other important mentions for foraging there's acorns for much of humanity many people that existed 50% of their calories came from acorns we only exist today as humanity possibly because of the acorn we might not exist without the acorn it's one of the most important food sources on earth oak is present I think on every continent except Antarctica so an extremely important food source and can still be used today here in central Florida you could get most of your calories from acorn if you wanted to take the time and energy to do that hickory nuts are another they're a great nut you can make nut milk Sam Thayer is one of the great foragers he's got two books that I reckon three books nature's garden is one of is one of them I can't think of the name of the other one that I read at the moment but hickory nuts what he taught me to do is you smash the hickory hickory nuts in the shell because they're like walnuts but there's way more shell and not a lot of nuts so it's very tedious to pull out and if you are trying to grow and forage 100% of your food you have to learn to use your time effectively how you use your time effectively with hickory nuts is you smash them up you throw them in a pot you boil them and then that makes hickory nut milk and then you just strain it out and it takes just minutes to make your own nut milk that's great high in fats and delicious I put honey in it to make it a really nice drink beauty berry is a native plant to Florida that grows all over great little snack Smilax also called nature's asparagus or wild asparagus I think it's delicious grows all over the place cat tail we could talk about cat tail for hours you can do cat tail pollen you can eat the roots the rhizomes the shoots when the tops are young you can eat that like corn on the cob you can eat most parts of that plant at different times of the year amazing plant bitter melon those are those weeds you see those little orange melons that grow as weeds in the area according to Green Dean four of those little melons a day will give you all the lycopene you need which I don't know everything about Lycopene but apparently it's an important thing you don't eat the seed you just suck the fruit off of it because it's because the seed is toxic so you just suck the fruit right off of it so that's an amazing weed that's great grows right right around us Brazilian pepper is an invasive but it makes a red peppercorn that you can use as a pepper substitute I don't like it I use it occasionally but a lot of people like it American nightshade is a really great forageable and then one of the big foraging ones for me this year that really deserves a whole section but I put it in the honorable mentions and that's Yapon Holly it's North America's only native caffeinated plant and it is in a plant with amazing potential it has the same abilities basically as green tea the antioxidants in it but it grows natively to Florida needs no water and can be harvested wild or grown on your property it's often used as a nice landscaping plant so you can forage it all over the city and it's it's got the same amount of caffeine as coffee and it's related to year but my day so it's basically the year but my day of North America and then a couple of failures that I tried I mentioned sunflowers which turned into squirrels magically peanuts and my big goal was to grow my own peanut butter grow my own coconut oil or make my own coconut oil and my honey and just make and spread that all over a banana and that was like my dream of this year that never came true I did grow enough peanuts but it was it but I harvested them within the last couple weeks and I was just too too busy coasting into the finish line to try to make the peanut butter so and I didn't get around to it so peanuts were a minor failure and then sugarcane for sugar is a great resource that I have not succeeded at and then my big failure one of my big failures of the year was coconut oil I thought that about six coconuts made a pint of coconut oil and I thought at the beginning I was gonna make a gallon of coconut oil and just be coasting through the year with coconut oil all I wanted but I got four ounces of coconut oil so I didn't have oil this whole year which is definitely one of the big challenges it was it's you know definitely one of those you you know you don't realize until you're literally trying to grow and forage everything all the things that you eat that you don't realize how much resources it takes and such so coconut oil was my holy grail that I ultimately failed at what I learned is that it's more like 15 coconut oils to a pint is what I'm told so instead I just made my coconut milk my coconut butter my coconut curries so I used a lot of coconuts just didn't succeed with the coconut oil show you some of my meals this is my little outdoor kitchen where I cooked these are a few meals here I did eat very well very delicious foods up here is seminal pumpkin soup with a beet and cabbage sauerkraut as a garnish this is pigeon peas with nasturtium leaves as a garnish and greens this is seminal pumpkin roasted with inside of a collard wrap so those were some of my really nice meals and a little bit of coconut oil I did have went on to these collard wraps with the seminal pumpkin and that was like one of the best foods of the whole year so good here's another this was a very common meal I probably ate six seven hundred pounds of sweet potatoes this year quite a bit of sweet potatoes and I did different things but the most common thing was just to mash them up and make mashed sweet potatoes this is a bowl of mashed sweet potatoes with greens and pigeon peas you can see behind me behind the other me seminal pumpkins on the shelf so that's how I stored them just sitting there right on that shelf this is another common meal yucca and I just boiled the yucca that that was basically how I did it I didn't actually have an oven to bake so that limited me I would when I went over to friends houses I would often use their oven and it was really nice but this is yucca with fish on there that's mullet the whites on top those are the little everglades tomatoes and then that is a sauerkraut garnish on top so that's just an example of a few meals I probably really subsisted on a couple dozen different meals but my food did vary drastically throughout the year so as I mentioned I did take a trip to Wisconsin I when I got I didn't make any videos while I was gone and people commented on YouTube like oh we went to Wisconsin and ate pizza for the summer but I it was harder to be traveling imagine I had no garden I went away for 82 days is what it ended up being so I had no garden up there so this was a whole new challenge of kind of taking it to the road so before I left I worked long hours often till 2 in the morning preparing foods I was I was making flowers from yucca and yam that Maribu Thomas taught me how to make I was drying coconuts and making coconut shreds I was making tons of Moringa powder I was rehydrating herbs I was foraging I dehydrated bananas and mangoes and I left with a hundred thousand calories with me at least which is at 2,000 calories a day that's 50 days so I was carrying a lot of food I was carrying about a couple hundred pounds of food with me so I had a lot of food but I really was dependent on foraging I did a lot of fishing while I was up there I mentioned the deer while I was in Wisconsin I learned and foraged a hundred new plants and a lot of people up north say you can only do this because you're in central Florida so you are the beneficiaries of that comment we are in a great place central Florida is one of the greatest growing climates in the United States I would say we have this beautiful thing where we can grow many plants of the north but we can grow many plants of the tropics we're in a sort of subtropical area and we're on this border we're in zone what 10a 9b 9 I'm still kind of a rookie so it's 9 9b okay so 9b is basically like on this edge where we can grow many things of the north and we grow many things of the south so it's this beautiful area where there's an incredible amount of diversity and abundance with that being said I never felt abundance like I felt it up in Wisconsin it was the most abundant place I've ever been on earth I almost didn't come back actually a lot of people thought I was never coming back but I had things to take care of so anyway my trip to Wisconsin was great I foraged a hundred different foods while I was up there apples were one of the most important I made apple sauce I made so much apple sauce in my hometown off the top my head right now I could I could name 50 public apple trees just in that area so if you ever go to Ashland, Wisconsin that's my hometown go and gorge on apples so got to mention the toilet paper I grew my own toilet paper haven't bought toilet paper for over five years and this is this plant is called Plecranthus Barbados that's the genus and species also called blue spur flower it grows in zones 8 to 10 so right where we are so this won't grow in the colder climates maybe it will as an annual but this will grow year-round I put two sticks in the ground and I have never used more than 1% of my toilet paper stock there's just two two little sticks turned into you know infinite toilet paper for life it's basically it's the it's the perennial toilet paper plant and the I'm rubbing it on my face because it's actually softer than anything you'd buy at the store it's in the mint family so some people call me captain minty bottom on YouTube now because of that it doesn't leave a minty well I got I wouldn't know I guess I have never I can't speak to that but I don't think it does it produces beautiful flowers sometimes hummingbirds were hanging out with my toilet paper and bees and it actually makes a tea you can eat this toilet paper as well in Brazil I know that it's used I believe for upset stomach and maybe some other things I've made tea with it very bitter bitter is medicine we have in this society bread bitterness out of the plants what we do when we breed breed bitterness out we breed the nutrients out lettuce is the one of the least nutrient rich plants that you can possibly eat because it has almost no flavor no flavor means very few nutrients so keep that in mind so highly bitter means generally medicinal and here's the toilet paper next to the compost toilet this plant is truly miraculous this this toilet paper you can actually harvest from the plant and it stays soft I've done it for up to a week sitting on this little sitting right next to the toilet for a week it's still soft it's very strong doesn't break and on a dewy morning it actually holds the moisture and turns into a wet wipe so it's truly it's truly a miraculous plant and for people that live up north the good news is toilet paper grows everywhere there's lambs here up there and imagine wiping butt with a lambs ear I don't know if any of us have done that but it probably would feel good they're nice and soft they make wool which could be scratchier anyway so everywhere you go there's a perennial toilet paper growing but this is the best that I've seen on earth okay so one of the most common questions is pests you know what about pests I am very very proud to say that I in this two years here never applied a single pesticide not even or an organic one like BT or neem now how how did I deal with pests it's not that I never had pests this is my seminal pumpkin and I know there's probably some beginner gardeners in the room but you all probably know that's not what plants are supposed to look like towards the back you can see leaves all of this was leaves but all of that was eaten by I think they're called cucumber worms so there's different names for them but they eat squashes cucumbers and and plants like that and so they came in and just decimated this and I wasn't paying attention and they got so bad that they actually started to eat many of my pumpkins and actually infest the pumpkins so I definitely dealt with pests this year a lot of people say you can't grow food in central Florida there's this idea that a lot of people have that this is a horrible horrible place to grow food but that's just not remotely the truth at all what they're doing is they're trying to grow the wrong food in the wrong way so when I got to when I got here what I didn't do was go to the grocery store and walk down the aisles and say what do I want to eat I didn't say I like strawberries I'm gonna go grow strawberries and said I talked to all the locals and I said what grows so ridiculously well and has so few pests that a fool could not possibly kill it I said what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grow what grows the easiest has the fewest pests and is also very very nutrient-dense or has a lot of calories so that's what it was about what what's been proven time and time and time again by the locals I didn't come here and I didn't reinvent anything the only reason I'm standing here today after having grown and forged a hundred percent of my food is because this is all the knowledge that's in this room already and in other people in this community all I did was take that knowledge put it all together into one little package to have me standing here at the end of this year so as far as pests goes a few things there was one garden that I constant that I worked with and there was the person in the garden and they I had 50 60 70 different species growing in this garden and she would always tell me about the one or two plants that had pests on them and it was a constant oh the pests are getting these plants and so what I said is oh well we have 68 other plants that don't have pests so let's just eat those ones so that's one of the most important elements of pests diversity if you have a hundred species and the pests are getting 10 you still have 90 species to eat so diversity is key monoculture is gonna bring in pests polycultures are gonna reduce pests imagine if you have a line of tomatoes and you get worms here they just walk from tomato plant to tomato plant to tomato plant and they just eat themselves away but if you have a tomato plant here and on the other side of the garden and in between that you've got basil and onions and such the pests amazingly don't get to all of them so diversity spreading things out intercropping or polyculture one really important thing is that plants basically have immune systems healthy plants can defend themselves from pests so you need healthy soil you need the right amount of sun if a plant doesn't have enough sun and it's in too much shade that often was what will bring in the pests like aphids for example if you see aphids it's not how do I get rid of these aphids it's what do I have to change foundationally to make healthy plants so that the aphids aren't there so that means planting the right things planting at the right time of year planting in the right places using local knowledge doing what's done been done for decades and there's many ways to get local knowledge which is something that I'm going to go into so a little bit about my health this is me about eight months in and I was feeling at that point I was not catching enough fish and I was feeling pretty deficient I didn't have enough fat and I didn't have enough protein and I'm pulling my cheeks there because I started to feel my body and I was like man I feel like my skin is really loose on my body I was like what happened I feel like my fats gone and my brain wasn't functioning as well and I was like we worried that I wasn't getting enough fats and and so there was a rough patch this summer there were there were a good number of times where I definitely thought about giving up there's I definitely want to say this was extremely difficult like it's a dream because it's very very difficult not something that's easy to attain and there were definitely many times where I wanted to give up this was one of those times I was I was just feeling very gaunt and like I wasn't getting what I needed and I was pretty confident it was fat and it was protein and how I got to Wisconsin was I caught a ride with with Jen one of the gardens for single mom's recipient she happened to be going to Chicago two days before I was trying to go to Chicago so I drove up there with her I stayed in my aunt's 23rd story apartment in Chicago and didn't have and then that it only got worse because I was sitting in a car sitting in an apartment and mostly eating carbs and didn't have the fat so anyway that was like that was a really hard time I had my ups and downs but that's when I caught fish I had one of my lowest days I caught a 20 pound lake trout and that would have fed me for a week you're sorry three weeks at a pound a day and it's one of the fattiest fish there was basically it was exactly what I needed and I put it back in the water because it was too big at that point lake trout are all female and they're they're the producers for the for that population they produce so much and so here I had exactly what I needed when I was craving but I just couldn't eat it I you know I put it back I put it back in the water and that hurt me for days but I did rebound I caught enough fish I got the venison and then at the at the end of my time in Wisconsin I actually spoke at UW La Crosse where I went to college and they happened to have they had a dunk tank where I could get my body fat composition and I got it and it was 15% so I had built my fat back up and I and I and I gained it back so 15% is healthy fat more than you know I would expect on myself and I maintained my weight I started at 153.4 pounds and yestered the night before I finished on day 365 I weighed 155 pounds and the morning of my first day finishing I weighed 152.8 so 0.8 pounds less it's amazing I've weighed myself a lot and you start to realize how much your weight can fluctuate it fluctuates by about seven pounds a day you can pee out a gallon of water per day and that's 8.8 pounds so you're shedding a lot of weight just in one day through fluids and food so basically I I stayed my my weight stayed about as steady as I could possibly imagine and I didn't get sick once so I think it's safe to say that I did it and I mean I've been doing it for a while now so I don't I mean I'm a little nonchalant about it because it kind of just feels like yeah I did it but it but it doesn't lose I don't lose that you know it's something that I was set out to do forever so okay so I want to end by sharing a whole bunch of resources and then we'll have time for questions so I'm gonna go through a bunch of resources now I have all of this information online at robgreenfield.tv slash grow everything most of the things many of the things I talked about tonight but certainly all of these resources are listed on that page so you don't have to cram it all down and this talk is being recorded have these cameras been gone this whole time all right so this talk is being recorded and will be on my YouTube channel which is just youtube.com slash robgreenfield so you can watch this and I'll have all the links in the description there so all this information I designed this so that it will live so that you can continue getting from it you don't have to suck all this in in one night so I'm gonna go through these resources first events classes groups the most important thing is community as I said the only reason I'm standing here today period is because of community I could not have done this alone not even remotely it's all through community and the idea of this isn't that any of us have to grow and forge of our own food we have an amazing community right here where we can share we can trade we can ask each other what we need and that doesn't have to stop with just food if you look at this room we have doctors we have lawyers we have teachers we have permaculturists and growers we have most things in here and we can exchange those things and improve our communities without having to ship our money to these corporations and far off places so starting with community that's where I'm going to start so Orlando permaculture where we're standing right now definitely my favorite community in central Florida that's why I came to Orlando because of Orlando permaculture foraging Green Dean one of the greatest foragers in the United States he's got the most watched foraging YouTube channel and he does classes in Orlando at least once a month and all over the state of Florida we have an amazing resource with Green Dean Andy Ferk another amazing forager definitely I have to say my favorite human being that I met in the state of Florida if you get a chance to hang out with Andy Ferk and do one of his classes it's social activism and plants all in one it's it's amazing and then John Martin is now expert monk mushroom guy fun guy John where's John I know he's here there's John over there so yeah we'll give him a round of applause so when I got here John wasn't teaching classes yet and this is something you started doing within the last year he's one of the mushroom experts of the area he teaches classes so fun guy John other resources uf ifa ifas extension that is an amazing resource I got so much through them they have a master gardening program which is a great resource Central Florida Fruit Society that's where I learned so much of what I needed to know about what fruit trees to plant for my community fruit trees program they have monthly meetups so some some bigger events there's the permaculture convergences there's local ones and then there's the statewide ones and those are amazing place to meet local permaculturists earth skills gatherings are truly amazing I went to the that both both years I was here highly recommended the Florida School of holistic living is all about holistic medicine and holistic health highly recommend getting involved with that they have the Florida herbal conference once per year and then sustainable cost she's a place where I've done a lot of my learning they have free permaculture classes on Wednesdays and there's lots of events John just hosted a mushroom foraging class there a couple weeks back for example so lots of opportunities there so and I haven't named all of them but that is some of the amazing resources that we have locally some online resources one of my favorite is Pete Canaris I was lucky enough to get to spend a lot of my time he is one of the reasons I'm still standing he took me out fishing and he was a great he was just an amazing friend and amazing resource his YouTube channel is green dreams Florida so much knowledge on there again uf ifus extension is a great online resource green Dean eat the weeds calm David the good the survival gardener so much education came from him Andy FERC I mentioned him again my website is robgreenfield.tv slash grow Florida or just slash grow and that is just an accumulation of all of this it put into one place for you and then another one is Terry mere his is Terry mere comm slash resources and that is just a really great resource guide that puts together a lot of the events in the groups and such so it's some nurseries my favorite probably is heart Josh Jameson he is one of the amazing you know solid foundations of this community definitely go take a tour there and their plants are one of the most affordable because their mission isn't to make money their mission is to spread plants and plant knowledge so heart village nursery echo global farm that's down in south Florida I actually never made it there but it is an amazing resource a natural farm and education center that's an amazing resource for fruit trees that's where I got a majority of my fruit trees for this year south seminal farms and nursery greens nursery green dreams peeking areas also has a nursery over by Tampa but you don't have to buy plants the amazing thing about plants is they reproduce on their own so are their plants back there right now are those flowers so we do have a plant raffle tonight so every month every month there's a plant raffle right so every month that you come here you can take plants home with you so there's plant swaps there's plant raffles but it's just about connecting I have this you have that so you don't have to buy plants I have enough yucca cuttings for everyone in this room unfortunately I don't have them with me but that all came from a few cuttings in the first place so simple Iving Institute has had plants they do plants Orlando permaculture Lou gardens has a plant sale and then just meeting permaculture is talk to people ask if you can go over to the garden and share knowledge now the key to a permaculturist heart is helping them doing work that's the key to any gardeners heart doing some work and helping them whatever that is weeding shoveling putting down compost it's usually the labor that's needed because gardening takes work so earn some plants by putting in time at a garden in or at a permaculturist food forest another nursery that I visited is so exotic and that that was a really great nursery about an hour south of here local seeds when I got here I asked around even Orlando permaculture and I said where can I get local seeds and they all said there is no local seed company and I said no way there's got to be a local seed company so I searched it out and there I found three local seed companies there's crispy farms in a popka they only have about 30 varieties of seeds but they're all great varieties that grow really well here crispy farms is is an incredible little place to get seeds witwam organics is over in Tampa and then southern heritage seed collective Melissa de sa is the seed genius of central Florida I would say and they are a nonprofit and they're spreading seeds they probably have 50 a hundred different varieties and they grow all of them in Gainesville for the most part so a couple local seeds not local seeds southern exposure seed exchange Johnny selected seeds seed savers exchange Baker Creek heirloom seeds high mowing seeds and seeds of change are all some great places that you can buy online a couple of local books my favorites listed here Robert Bowden's Florida fruit and vegetable gardening that's more annual base but reading that really gives you the basic knowledge you need of understanding central Florida that was you know my holy grail of a book starting but if it's not really perennials it's more annuals perennials David the good was a great Reese is a great resources with his books very small books that have the information you need like how to create your own Florida food forrest and totally crazy easy Florida gardening the plants that grow ridiculously well that you can't kill Peggy Lance Florida's edible wild plants is a foraging book that I really recommend Maribu Thomas has a more like a cookbook home garden cuisine toolkit for the subtropics really highly recommend that book it's it's a it's a beautiful one James Stevens vegetable gardening in Florida twice I have that one listed and this is Maribu right here he's not here tonight because he's a genius who's at home always toiling away I was lucky to get to go over to his house a couple times and he came over to mine and he taught me about yam flour and yucca flour and he's a genius if you can tap into that knowledge and one way to do that is through his book this is him making we're making tortillas without oil from flour that we made from my garden and that's something he's been perfecting that I don't know a whole lot of people who do so that is an amazing book his Instagram page is a really nice resource to some not local books there's so many books but I'm just naming a few perennial vegetables and then also paradise lot by Eric Tones Meyer guy as garden a guide to homescale permaculture are two great permaculture books there's so many out there but it's just to name a couple I love Michael pollen his books are some of the foundations to me questioning the globalized food system so if you want to understand even big organic Michael pollen's books are fantastic and then sand or cats wild fermentation it's not just a revolution of our food it's really a revolution of our mind he is an incredible author in person some garden resources I mentioned mulch you got your local tree companies and then get chip drop calm this is where you get the mulch compost you get that from Monterey mushroom or you can get it from the city our yard waste gets turned into compost oh and we got the new compost program started by Charlie so you can do that as well cardboard I meant again grocery liquor appliance stores oh if you want to do rainwater harvesting just type rainwater harvesting into Craigslist and you'll be able to find barrels and totes and materials for that and then drip irrigation you can just get at hardware stores and online so those are kind of my main ingredients besides the plants that I mentioned and then as far as this project other resources my YouTube channel is where I produced a lot of videos about this year so if you want to learn more you want to take tours of my garden spend time virtually in the garden with me because you won't be able to in real life because I'm leaving in a few days but YouTube comm slash Rob Greenfield has these videos I'm putting out a video soon that is how to turn your garden your your lawn into a garden and then a lot of the resources for this project if you go to Rob Greenfield TV slash food freedom foods lists the 300 foods that I've foraged this year and grown with links to a lot of them slash food freedom meals that lists every meal for the last 365 days and every snack slash food freedom photos is photos of many of my meals and my foods where you can learn more slash food freedom rules is all the guidelines behind this year slash food freedom why is why I did this and more about that and then lastly the book I do have a book and one or not out yet it'll come out December of 2020 with new society publishers and a hundred percent of the proceeds of that book are going to be our donated to nonprofits that are working on the food solutions working to create more sustainable and just food more sustainable and just food system so I'm not out to make money from food at all really I think food is a basic human right I want to empower others to grow their own food and I this book is I'm writing it right now and I think it will be maybe the the most powerful thing that I've ever put out so highly recommend it and I'll be on a book tour here when that book comes out end of December or end of 2020 slash beginning of 2021 and I'll be doing a talk with that book as well so as far as the media behind this I want to thank Sierra Ford photographer Sierra my friend Sierra Ford she took a lot of these photos as well as the Danielle Werner at Live Wonderful photography and then as far as my videos that you've seen over the year John van Wut Moushius brand and Kerry and Paul O'Neill so I want to thank them for that but most importantly I want to thank the Orlando permaculture community I've said it a hundred times but all of this is a matter of community and it's been incredible to be here for the last two years you made Orlando a more than tolerable place a beautiful place to spend the last two years and I couldn't have done any of this without you so thank you to Orlando permaculture thank you to Sarah Robinson for always hosting me in her house in her church wherever I want to say thank you to Lisa Ray who hosted me in her backyard and all of the fun stuff we went through to you know especially the team at Orlando permaculture Jeff and David and Caitlin and thank you all for that and the whole Orlando permaculture and to Daniel for all the good times we had together and for the great kombucha and the list could absolutely go on but just thank you everyone so much for being a part of this journey so how long was that how long was I talking almost two hours oh my gosh there was a lot of information to go through what time is it nine o'clock that's the longest talk of all time at Orlando permaculture I guess we don't really have time for questions then right okay well I'll be around and hugs like I love hugs so come give me a hug and I love you all very much and next up Jeff Trapani I want to thank you so much and you've been such a great inspiration motivation for us and and just helping us to get more publicity as well and get more people here and learning about things so I want to thank you a lot and gonna miss you definitely I'm just gonna be thinking about you when I drive by the house and the property and everything and just that's a great thing I'm having you here