 Hey, I'm Rob Greenfield and today is day 111 of my year-long project of growing and foraging 100% of my food. I'm about a third of the way into the year, so I wanted to update you and show you what I'm doing. We'll start right here in Audubon Park in the first garden that I created, which is just a few miles from downtown Orlando. I arrived in Orlando in December of 2017 with the intentions of launching into this project with just six months of preparation. So I had to get started right away. Where I'm standing right now was just a plain old front yard, just grass, and after just a few months I transformed it into this abundant garden. Because I live a life of simplicity and non-ownership, I don't have any land of my own. Instead, I grow food in the front yards of people that I meet in the community and they get to eat all the food they want. I have six small plots in the neighborhood. All of my gardens are within about two miles of each other, so I can access all of them by bicycle. And I have a trailer that holds up to 300 pounds of weight, so I can do most of my gardening needs with it. While I was getting started, I also launched three community initiatives. Gardens for Single Moms, Community Fruit Trees, and the Free Seed Project. My goal isn't just to grow and forage all of my food. My goal is to inspire and help thousands of other people to grow some of their food as well. With my team, we planted 110 community fruit trees, built five gardens for single parent families, and sent out 2,000 free seed packs to people all across the United States. Plus, I teach free gardening for beginner classes right here for people in the community in my garden. This all took a whole lot of time and energy, so I didn't make my mark of six months. Instead, it ended up being about 10. But still, going from nothing but a backpack and some new friendships to being able to grow and forage 100% of my food in under a year still amazes me. And when I say 100%, I really mean it. No grocery stores, no restaurants, not even going over to a friend's house and having a nibble from their pantry or even their garden. So I'm sure you're wondering, what am I growing? What am I eating? Well, let me show you around this garden a little bit. So again, this was the first garden that I created and not that long ago. This was just a blank lawn. But now there's an abundance of food. To my right down here, we have cabbage, which I'll be making sauerkraut with. To my left, this is called Malabar spinach. Over here, we've got lots of different greens like arugula, mustard, lettuce, bok choy. To my right, one of my favorite things, papaya, they're super abundant and I can eat these both green and as a ripe orange. One of my favorite trees right here, this is called Moringa. It's called the tree of life or the vitamin tree. And this one plant here, if I could just recommend one plant to people that live in a similar climate, that would be Moringa. If we keep on walking some. We've got beets and carrots, which I'm very excited about. Okinawa spinach and longevity spinach. Over here, I'm experimenting with garlic. Behind me, we have bananas. This is a really great one. You know, I consider it a green, but it's actually more of a purple or red. It's cranberry hibiscus. Adds a lot of variety to salads, taste-wise and color-wise. Another great one over here is katuk. And this is another bushy green that produces year-round, another perennial green. Very different flavor, almost a little, I don't know, nutty or something like that. So, this is one of my gardens. I have about 50 or so different foods growing here and so far I've eaten about 110 different foods, whether that I've grown or that I've foraged. A really important one I have to mention is my calorie crops. So I grow yucca, sweet potato and yam. So I can put those in different plots throughout the neighborhood. So that's this garden. I have about six throughout the neighborhood. Another one of my favorites is the one that is in the front yard of where I have my tiny little homestead set up and that is where I'm going to take you next. Welcome to the front yard at my tiny house homestead. So again, this about a year ago was just a front yard with no food growing at all. And this is where I do a work exchange to set up my tiny house in the backyard. One of the things that I'm really excited about is community fruit trees. To my right here I have a mulberry tree and to my left I have a loquat tree. These are community fruit trees that anybody can pick from just walking down the street and enjoy the fruit. Right here where I'm standing right now, this is young but this is all going to be native flowers that are beneficial for local pollinators, butterflies, bees and so on. Something I'm really excited about is pigeon peas. Pigeon peas are super productive and they're a great source of plant based protein. I've grown probably about 200 pounds of sweet potatoes over here in this little section, that one little plot next to the driveway. This little section here is annual greens so I have drip irrigation set up so this is really easy to take care of and really designed for the homeowner, especially for when I leave to have a very easy to manage place to grow a lot of greens and vegetables. It's pretty productive what you can do with a pretty small amount of space. Behind me is the little herb garden. So that's just a little taste of this front yard and now I want to show you my tiny house homestead back here. So welcome to my little homestead. This place pretty much exists for the purpose of my food and the house itself at 100 square feet pretty much exists for the purpose of my food as well. This is where I store a lot of food as well as lay my head down at night and relax during the day. I'll start here. This is one of the most prominent things people always see. I get comments all the time, show us your gourds, what's the deal with the pumpkins and these are not gourds. They're called seminal pumpkins and the most beautiful thing about these is these can preserve for over a year, up to two years. Here in the heat of the summer I don't have air conditioning. This is the last summer and they're still solid, still strong. This is my little fermentation station. This adds just a lot of joy, flavor, nutrition to my life. A centerpiece of that is Sandor Cat's Wild Fermentation, an incredible book that I recommend so much. It's got many of the recipes for what I have here. I've got Honeywine, Jun fermented radish and turnip fermented green papaya. I've got different vinegars, also fire cider. One of the most frequent questions I get is what am I doing for oil and that would be coconut oil. One of my favorite foods outside of this year and one of my favorite foods inside of this year. Coconuts are a true blessing and I forage these from the coastal parts of Florida and press it down into my own coconut oil. Another really important thing is salt and that's also from the ocean as well. I am almost out of salt. I have some being boiled right now on the fire and this is just as simple as boiling the salt water, evaporating the water and you're left with the sea salt. So here I've got pigeon peas that I showed you out in the front yard. I have these in a couple places throughout the neighborhood. Great source of protein. They can be dried or they can be eaten fresh. Next is southern peas. There's still some some shell in there but these have been really great, really adding some variety to the diet. Some of this is grown in the garden some of it is foraged. This is foraged, these are reishi mushrooms. One of the most important medicines that I have because I'm growing and foraging 100% of my food that includes the medicine. So I have to grow my own medicine or forage it. The medicine here is elderberry and I use this and my honey and I make elderberry syrup which is one of the greatest natural medicines for fighting off colds and flus. Caffeine. A lot of people wonder what do I do about the fact that I can't have coffee. Well the good news for me is I've never been a coffee drinker but I have something called Yapon Holly which is the North American version of Yorba Mate. About the same level of caffeine as coffee or Yorba Mate. This is the section where I store lots of fruits, papayas. This is a yam. I collect these from the wild and I also grow them. Good old sweet potatoes. I've eaten probably maybe a couple hundred pounds of sweet potatoes already. These are oranges. You've got wild oranges here. I've probably had these for a month or a month and a half, two months. Some passion fruit here as well. Grapefruit. From a tree in a public park about a few miles away. So that's just a bit of a view into the fruit that I am growing and foraging. I'll take you to my favorite spot of the house probably. And that's the honey section. This is really what keeps me going. A lot of people ask about what about chocolate. You know, no chocolate for this year. It doesn't grow in Florida. So, honey is one of my great secrets to happiness I would say. These come from my bees. I have four bee hives and all of them are rescues. So I go with my friend Dennis the bee guy. He's a professional live bee removal expert. So far I've got 75 pounds of honey. And then also, I have some honey that is from the rescues themselves. So sometimes, whoa! This is... Okay, that's good news. I thought it was loaded with ants on the... Nope, this is loaded with ants on the inside. I haven't picked this up for a while. Just loaded with ants. I have no problem eating some ants. Or I could filter them out, one or the other. But this is actually from... This is what you would call wild honey. This is from rescuing bee hives. Up here is dried coconut. So this is what can be used to make coconut oil. But it also just makes a wonderful snack. Preserving food is one of the big challenges in the heat and the humidity of Central Florida. So I decided to take it kind of easy on myself and get a deep chest freezer. In here, I'm able to store about 200 pounds for the food at a time. And this actually only uses about $3 a month in electricity. So it's actually an extremely energy efficient way to store food. I also ferment food, as I showed you before. But the problem with fermenting foods is it really doesn't like temperatures above maybe the mid- or upper 70s Fahrenheit. So with temperatures in the 90s this just isn't the ideal place for fermenting foods in the summer. Especially living in a house with no air conditioning that gets up above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Another way to preserve food is by drying it. And I have something drying right now that I'm going to show you. So these are pigeon peas. I let these dry on the tree harvest to them, harvest them. And then once they're dry I can store them in jars and then I can cook with them. So speaking of cooking next up, the kitchen. I happen to have a few things drying right now. Things that I processed today. I've got holy basil mint lemongrass and green onions. So all of these will go into the dehydrator. This is going to be great for traveling so that I can actually bring some dry foods with me when traveling. Tea and herbs to give you a little peek into what I'm eating. Looks maybe a little bit crazy for the first time but it's just mashed sweet potatoes seminal pumpkin and a whole bunch of greens blended in. So a pretty great meal and I love it. I mean I just love sweet potatoes. And of course wouldn't be complete without talking about what water I'm drinking. Almost all of the water that I drink I harvest from my roof right here. Growing and foraging 100% of my food for the year doesn't mean that I can't drink from faucets. So I still am drinking from faucets but most of the water comes from my roof right through this purifier this burky and then comes out as fresh clean delicious drinking water. So I spend a lot of time here in this kitchen in this yard in the house whether it's cooking three meals a day processing food, doing time intensive things like making coconut oil. So I spend a lot of time here. One of the things that really gets me out of this place is foraging. Whether it's right now there's a huge abundance of loquats which I'm just loving. A couple times a month I tend to go to the ocean to go fishing and harvest saltwater as well. The world is an extremely abundant place if we just have the knowledge to see what is growing and edible all around us. 111 days into the year and I feel exceptionally well but of course I'm not going to lie. There are many days where I am down and just tired out. This is a very challenging project and it takes a lot of time but extremely worth it and it's just incredibly rewarding. So if you got a lot out of this video and you're enjoying this adventure then I recommend you hit the like hit the subscribe because I still have about 254 more days to be here with you. Where's my spoon? Can't eat without my spoon. 254 more days.