 growing 100% of your food sucks. It might be worth it in the end, maybe, but it still sucks. I try to create videos about solutions. All you have to do if you want to hear about problems is turn on the news or get on the internet. There are plenty of people out there ready to tell you about problems. There are a lot of people ready to tell you what a terrible person you are for not caring about whatever it is their problem is. But that's not true. We do care. We're just exhausted both from carrying around the weight of all of these problems all the time, day-to-day bullshit with no real solutions in sight. It's only natural that we shut down. We smoke and drink. We binge Netflix and video games. We do retail therapy. Anything we can try to do just to make the world shut the fuck up for one hour so we can rest and recharge and try to deal with all of this stuff tomorrow. But we never fully recharge and the problems just keep getting bigger and bigger and we just hope that there's someone else out there that can solve all of these problems for us. But we can't count on anyone else to solve the problems and what that ultimately means is that the only solutions that matter are the ones that people are actually capable of. And that's what I tried to provide. By focusing on the solutions I do worry is that I make it look easy or I present some romanticized version of reality. Growing all of your food isn't easy. I am not a master teaching students. I am a student that's in a class that's way over my head and any lessons that I'm learning I'm learning the hard way and I'm just desperately scribbling notes so I can just help anyone get a passing grade. Over the past 14 months I have struggled with nutrient efficiency that I honestly didn't think was possible in America. All the problems we might have with processed food they're at least fortified with minerals and vitamins so that it's almost impossible for an American to be dangerously low on something. Dangerously high on something? Sure but it's hard to be dangerously low on something. One of the reoccurring problems that I've had in the past 14 months is sodium deficiency and other electrolytes but mainly sodium. Suffered dizziness, fatigue, muscle cramps. The interesting thing is just how easy it's become to tell what I'm deficient in. I got to the point where I could pour salt out in my hand and eat it and it would not taste salty. Over the winter I got better about salting my food which hadn't been a problem previously because there was enough processed food in my diet to get plenty of salt but then other problems occurred. I started to get low on vitamin C and iodine because I was not using iodized salt. I didn't have any fruit or greens in my diet. I started experiencing extreme lethargy and pretty wild mood swings and I could feel my thyroid starting to swell which is the first sign that goiter is coming and that's basically unheard of in the US. There's so much iodized salt in everything I've literally never heard of someone actually having a goiter in my lifetime. It took 16 pounds of oranges and starting to incorporate iodized salt in my diet before those symptoms started to go away. I am tired constantly and there is such a huge delay between when you do the work and when you see the results that it can be really hard to keep going at times. When I talk about the number of hours I'm working I can see the look of disbelief on people's faces because they hear those numbers and they look at the garden and they think to themselves there's no way and that really struck home for me when someone commented on how big my turnips were only a month after I planted them. That's just the thing I hadn't planted them a month earlier. I had planted them three months earlier and in those three months I'd spent a lot of time weeding and tending to those turnips to make sure they got to that size but to the uninitiated that's completely lost. That's not considering all the time it takes to sift compost and mix fertilizer and do bed prep and weed and start seeds and water seedlings and all of the other things that have to happen before things can even go in the ground. People don't see that they only see the end result. I am destroying my relationships because I don't have the luxury to choose between work and friends. If something has to be done it has to be done I don't get paid by the hour I get paid in what I produce if I produce and even though I'm an introvert that doesn't mean I can just go indefinitely without human interaction. We are a social species and isolation wears on you over time. It's helpful that I can be outside and that I have work to keep me busy and distracted but there are only so many weeks and weeks on end without human interaction before you just need to talk to someone. You need to hear your own voice you need to hear somebody else's voice and you just need to sort out all of the things you've been thinking about. I'm so exhausted that I've failed to be 100% present with people or I'm stressed about things that I haven't managed to get done and I'm not 100% present with people. These are people that I care about people who going out of their way to spend time with me or making other sacrifices to help me get through this and I don't take those sacrifices lightly but I'm afraid that it looks that way when I'm not there with them mentally when they're there with me physically. I worry about creating a situation where I lean on them more and more and if I don't give 110% and turn whatever this is into something then they're just going to end up going down with me and that's what they'll get for all of the sacrifices and support that they've shown me. Even though I'm trying to put myself in a position where I can give back more than I'm taking I often feel like I'm failing to take care of them in the present as well as in the future. I have to make really tough decisions about what I spend my time on and sometimes that means spending a week or two on a project before realizing that I can't get it done in time for it to matter. Sometimes I have to give up a foraging opportunity in order to get something planted and then inevitably that crop fails and I end up with neither. That's compounded by the fact that the property was clear-cut so some things are just too sparse to gather efficiently or sometimes the populations are too small to harvest sustainably. It really kills me sometimes when I have to leave a plant in the ground either because I need seeds or I otherwise need to get that population established so that I don't have to worry about how much I harvest next year and the year after but that means I go without this year. It's getting to the busy point in the season and that honestly scares me. Best case scenario I have 50% of my calories in the ground but really I'm only counting 20 to 30% because so many of the early season staples are things that I just don't have good data on and I don't have previous experience with so I don't know what the yields are gonna be like. That means in the next two months I have to get 50 to 75% 80% of my calories in the ground and I know how much work is taken just to get this much done. Two months is not enough and that means I have to start making really hard decisions about what isn't making the cut this year and what I can put in the ground that will actually get me through the year. What corners I can cut without just losing everything in the process. Videos are one thing that I know I have to cut back on. One of my previous videos took 19 hours from 8 in the morning until 3 the following morning and I cannot put in those kinds of hours right now. I want to be able to make shorter videos over the next couple of months but I can't guarantee that because food is a higher priority. If I end up doing shorter content over the next couple of months I hope it's still stuff that you guys find valuable. If I'm not able to do video at all then I hope you guys stick around. It very well may be the case that the next videos will be looking at yields for the experiments that I did this year. Whatever the case may be I hope you guys are there and we'll figure this out when we get there.