 Hey everybody, Rob Greenfield here, and today is day 333 of growing and foraging all of my food. No restaurants, no grocery stores, no pantries at a friend's house, no dumpster diving, no eating from another friend's garden, literally growing and foraging 100% of my food. It's been about four months since my last update, so I'm sure you're wondering what I've been up to, I've still been at it. I actually went away for a long trip up to Northern Wisconsin, up to my homeland, and that's why I haven't had an update, because I spent almost three months up there. Just got back to Orlando a little less than a week ago, and now here I am, and I spent a lot longer than I planned up there, and the reason is it was just amazing. I went up there to really reconnect with the land that I grew up on. I grew up there never paying attention to the plants, and I really just felt this strong calling to go up there and connect with the plants that surrounded me, and that I just walked by without ever thinking about my relationship with them. I was only going to spend one to two months up there, but ended up spending nearly three months and almost didn't even want to come back. The abundance was real, it was a truly, truly special experience. So I'm going to tell you all about that, but first I'm sure that you all are really interested, really excited to see how are my gardens looking after the long summer, and I'm sure you want to see how they've changed. So I'm going to take you to my two main gardens. First I'm going to take you to the garden that's right here in the front yard of my tiny house, so come on out. I was overjoyed to return to a jungle garden, just bountiful, full of food. After three months or so, this thing was just taken over. The Florida summer with the heat and the rain, plants just took over. So while I was gone I had four interns who took care of the garden, and the arrangement that I made was that prior to leaving I spent five weeks with them teaching them how to grow food, how to garden, and it was basically an exchange. They were all really excited to spend time in the garden and learn, and during that time I taught them, shared plants with them, and then while I was gone they did the basic needs of the garden, and they got to eat all the food they wanted. They got to enjoy the bounty all summer long. There wasn't a lot done. We mostly just let the garden take over and go wild for the summer. One of the big goals in the summer, really any time of year, is just not to have any exposed ground. So that was where the sweet potatoes came in, the seminal pumpkin, and the southern peas just kind of really took over the whole area. So you can see how much can happen in just a few months if you go back to my last video update on day 200. But also keep in mind, look at this jungle. This was just a front yard, a monoculture of grass, if you just go back about a year and a half ago. We have so much food growing in this garden, but a year and a half ago there was no food growing here whatsoever. It really truly shows the potential of what we can do if we decide to grow food and not lawns to turn our monocultures of grass into food. So food wise, what's growing here right now? Big one that I'm excited about is the sweet potatoes. Those are one of my staple crops. Since I've been back for the last week, that's been my staple food. I've actually had a sweet potato belly. I've been a little bit sleepy, honestly, the last five days, just carb loading. But it's just been delicious. We've got the seminal pumpkins, one of my favorite pumpkins, which I've talked about many times throughout my videos. And those covered the ground for the summer and acted as a nice cover crop. The other one is the southern peas. So we've got the dry ones and then we've got the green ones still and you can eat those as two different types of food. Dry is, you can put this in jars and save it. And then green, you eat these more as like a fresh bean. First one of the season, ooh, that is sweet and tasty. Another plant that's growing abundantly right now in the garden is green papaya. So this I'm going to use to make something like a sauerkraut, I'll ferment it. It also goes great in my green papaya curry, great sautéed, somewhat similar to a potato when sautéed. So green papaya is another really abundant one that I'm very excited about. There's also peanuts growing. That's been an experiment I'm hoping to have my own peanut butter with my honey and with coconut oil. With bananas, I feel like that could make a pretty amazing combination. Peanut butter, honey, coconut oil mixed together into delicious goodness, hoping that will be a reality this month. And then of course you have greens and herbs. There's tons of herbs growing for greens. The main ones that are bountiful right now are katuk, moringa. There is the chaya, there's some different perennial spinach. I haven't even seen what's all in this jungle to be honest. I've only been back for a week and haven't seen everything here. The sweet potato greens are also edible and very nutritious so there's tons of greens in here. Another thing I'm excited about is the community fruit trees. Oh my gosh, this mulberry tree behind me, it's amazing. I planted this tree a year ago, year and a half maybe. And that thing is 15 feet tall now. It's just bountiful, I can't wait till that produces. And then the loquat tree right in front of me has got a lot of flowers looking like a good fruiting season for that coming up which is still a ways off. So yes, the garden is bountiful and I will be eating well from it. I want to take you to my other front yard garden which is the first one that I built and that is about a mile away. So from one jungle to the next, join me over there. So here we are at my other front yard garden and right away I'm going to go ahead and address this insane noise. They are literally demolishing a house right across the street. And that's what I'm dealing with all the time. My garden is supposed to be a place of peace and I'm often driven out of here by leaf blowers and lawn mowers and chopping down trees or demolishing houses or airplanes. That is honestly why I am really excited to be leaving Orlando and being in a more peaceful place and that's one of the reasons that I kind of didn't want to come back from Wisconsin because it was so peaceful up there. But still in the meantime I truly love this garden, I'm excited to show it to you. This is the first front yard garden that I ever created. So big part of my heart is right here. You can see this one is definitely a jungle as well. We've got again the southern peas, the fresh ones and then the older ones for drying. This was one of the ground covers. Back here we've got all of the sweet potatoes, another ground cover. The sweet potato didn't produce as much potato as last year, I'm not sure exactly why but definitely enough to get me through the project. Right behind me we've got the papayas. You'll notice that I cut the papaya trees way down and that is to prevent them from getting blown over in extreme winds or hurricanes. So this is the design, this is called polluting that helps you to have lower trees, lower plants that can handle the big storms. We had a big hurricane five or category five hurricane that was actually looking like it could come through here but it missed us. I don't know what would have happened. This garden would have been a whole different situation but I managed to make it through this year without a hurricane which is you know I'm very grateful for. Right here we've got Roselle. This is an absolutely beautiful plant, one of the most eye-catching ones. People that walk by always ask what is that? So that's Roselle or Jamaican sorrel, I make a tea from it, you can also make jams. Really high in vitamin C I believe. So continuing on through here, this was my experiment with grains, millet I believe this is, I haven't thought about it for a while so I forgot but you can grow some grains in Florida but Florida is not a grain place because of our extreme heat and humidity as far as I know. Right behind me right here is Moringa, the vitamin tree or the tree of life. You can see it's a very tall tree right now, this has to get cut back. Walking through the ground cover of sweet potatoes right here over to the bananas. So bananas are not trees, I still call them trees, it's the world's largest herb and if we walk around here, there is a new rack coming out right up here. That one just came out within the last week but I was just delighted to come home to this, to this just beauty, just this huge rack. This won't be ripe for a little while but thankfully there was another one that was ripe when I got home and I've already foraged some. So I've been eating banana ice cream, frozen bananas, fresh bananas just every day since I'm being home. Another cool thing I want to show you, this is, took this out of my back pocket, this is Nepal cactus and it's a variety with no spines, this is a cactus, biting right into it, no spines. I planted the cactus that's back here in the garden from one pad that I foraged down in Sebastian, Florida and now it's this good size plant that can grow into something huge. So spiny Nepal cactus, another thing that's in this garden is my ghost peppers and my serrano peppers, producing a lot of peppers. I mean one ghost pepper alone is enough for like a whole pot of food so I have way more than I need. So this is, you know the first garden that I created, remember this was again just a lawn less than two years ago and now it's this bountiful place full of food, so speaking of food or I mean that's all we're speaking about but we're gonna head back to my tiny house I'm gonna take you inside and show you what I've got going on there. Come on back to the tiny house. When I was in Wisconsin I really just was fully present there, Florida sort of ceased to exist. This home was not my home, home was in Wisconsin but on the train ride back I had a 38 hour train ride from Chicago back to Orlando I started to think what's gonna be growing in Florida and what am I gonna be able to forage. I don't have too much fruit in my garden so my mind was on what the trees might be bearing and I was unsure but really happy to show you that the bounty in Florida was real right when I got back. So I mentioned I had some ripe bananas at one of my gardens and these are them and I want to show you these ones this maybe possibly the smallest banana that you've ever seen and I'm gonna eat this right here in the spot. Oh look at that, that's so cute. One bite banana, so sweet, so good. Now this is more of the normal size of that particular banana plant those were just some mini ones that didn't fully develop. Other things right now we've got starfruit and I love starfruit they're not super flavorful but they're one of the most bountiful trees that grow. I mean more food than most any family can eat from one good starfruit tree. There's avocados producing right now this time of year and these came from a these are fruit trees that were planted at the east end market as community fruit trees right there in the parking lot for anybody to harvest from. So that's been beautiful. Grapefruits these are coming from a public park about three miles from here that I bike to and pick these with my fruit tree picker. Beauty berries are ripe right now not super flavorful but I'm sure they've got some great nutrients in them because of the beautiful color and they're amazing, beauty berries. Let's see, turmeric. My turmeric is not super bountiful right now, they're not fully grown at all but I planted enough and I have enough that I'm harvesting them prematurely because this is one of my most important medicines. So speaking of medicine I've got some different medicines up here. I when I say growing and foraging a hundred percent of my food that's everything that goes into my body so no medicine no pharmaceuticals only what I can grow our forage. One of my main medicines is elderberry syrup so this is elderberries that I forage honey from my bees which I managed to harvest over four gallons of honey which is about 50 pounds of honey over the last year or so so honey's been bountiful. So this is honey elderberry syrup and then also fermented garlic in honey and then I pour that in here as well so this is one of my main medicines. I've also got firesider which is a mixture of ginger, garlic, hot pepper, apple cider vinegar and then a new addition was horseradish and that horseradish is foraged up in Wisconsin. I've got my vinegar this is a mango cider vinegar or a mango vinegar and then jun which is like kombucha except it's honey and green tea which I grow the green tea rather than sugar and green tea. Another really this is not a medicine but this is a fun food that I'm harvesting right now this is tindora cucumber it's a perennial cucumber that grows year-round here and it's a crunchy one and I'm going to make pickles from these and one other little bit of medicine here this is my ginger turmeric bug this is the culture that I've created to make ginger beer or turmeric beer and this is probably close to a year old I haven't tasted this I was gone for the last you know three months I'm going to give this a sip see what it's like that's strong that's some medicine right there that's honey ginger and turmeric it's kicking in a little hotter and that is fermented for probably close to a year and that's some good stuff take a sip of that every day for the rest of the month along with my elderberry syrup man that's got me so also can't forget to mention I have my other shelves over here there's the seminal pumpkins on the windowsill I have those sitting there because they're beautiful and I love them I have my herb shelf which is just loaded with different herbs cilantro coriander oregano dill basil and then my my tea mixes my morning tea mix my evening tea mix and then of course there's the shelf of honey and there's an overflow of green papayas and sweet potatoes and bananas that I foraged at a park and then there's of course the roselle so so much food in the house right now and very bountiful another thing you'll see here is these jars and you might be wondering what this is a lot of people have commented they think that I'm vegan because they see all of the plants but I am indeed not my way of doing things is eating in a way that I think is actually the most sustainable is in harmony with the earth and that doesn't work in a black and white way every situation is different so in some climates it makes sense to eat far more plant based and others not but this is a really extremely sustainable source of meat this is venison but this is actually venison this is deer that was hit by a car that I got off the side of the road so this is a deer that would have gone to waste that would have you know of course animals may have eaten it or a city truck would have put picked it up and it could have even actually gone to a landfill or something like that so this is deer that was you know hit by hit by a car and I harvested a handful of deer while I was in Wisconsin so this was one of my main sources of food in Wisconsin venison and it has been a true blessing before going to Wisconsin I was I was having trouble getting enough protein and enough fat and my mom told me when I got home that I was looking a little gaunt and yesterday I talked to some of my friends and they said yeah you were looking a little gaunt and you're definitely you know looking a little more full so these have been a true blessing this is canned so it's shelf stable and I had gotten so much in Wisconsin I was actually able to bring back enough to last me the rest of the project I also have canned fish and this is smoked catfish which has been great and while I was in Wisconsin I ate a lot of fish as well up in that northern region there is just an extreme bounty of fish in Lake Superior it was truly special when I got up there I caught lake trout and that was exactly what I needed for just the total I felt like I just had lost most of my fat by the time I left Wisconsin I did a body fat composition and my body fat was up to about 15 percent so safe to say that I have enough fat on me now and that 82 days that three months that I was in Wisconsin I got there feeling you know pretty low energy but by the time I left came back and was really truly revitalized it was a it was the right place for me to be for the summer another bountiful thing in Wisconsin was apples I have a few here that I brought back but these are small ones but I got you know pretty good sized ones too there's plenty of big apples I ate hundreds and maybe hundreds of apples applesauce was one of my main foods venison and applesauce was one of my main foods while I was up there and also pear sauce plum sauce and yeah apple pear plum sauce as well there was such an extreme bounty of fruit up there when I first got to Wisconsin it was actually a little bit rough I got up there in July and that's sort of the time of the year when it's not extremely bountiful so it was a bit of a tough start even fishing in the summer as those are considered the dog days so it was it was a tough start but transitioned later into summer and then into fall and then up there was just amazing I mean a lot of people talk about you can do this because you're in Florida in a year a lot year around warm climate but it's just different in a northern climate there you have a huge huge bounty of food during the summer and the fall and you have to store it up to make it through the winter that's the way it works here honestly it doesn't feel nearly as bountiful but we are able to harvest year around so I'm actually really excited to hopefully do this project in a temperate climate in the future it's something that a lot of people have commented and I'm really excited about it I'm not guaranteeing that I'm going to do it but I am really hoping that I'm going to do it in the in the future so a couple of other things up there that were really bountiful there's hickory nuts and I make hickory nut milk with this so I crash crush these up with the shell and the nut inside and then boil it and that makes a great hickory nut milk acorns up there we had way bigger acorns our acorns down here are really small like way smaller and honestly I haven't utilized these yet acorns are an amazing foraging food but I haven't and I've barely utilized them but I could and then black walnuts another thing that I actually haven't tried yet but super super bountiful up there and had to at least try some of them let's see I mentioned I was never able to produce enough coconut oil this is actually deer fat so I finally have some cooking fat some cooking oil which has been really nice for some meals so I absolutely foraged a lot when I was in Wisconsin and that was really one of my big goals up there was to connect with the plants that I was raised around that I as I said I walked past and never thought about never put much care or intention to into and I just felt this deep calling to go up there and to connect with the land more deeply and to understand the land so when I got there one of the first things I did is I went to the library and checked out some local foraging books and I ended up buying a couple of books these are two of them that I absolutely loved it but they're by Sam Thayer who's one of the most renowned foragers in the United States and probably around the world foragers harvest and nature's garden and the thing about these books is that they don't just give you plant identification they tell you how to harvest them what time of year how to process them they are just incredibly helpful books while I was in Wisconsin I foraged and ate over a hundred different species of of foods while I was up there and even then I didn't get to I there's so many that I walked away from Wisconsin actually having this little bit of a sunken feeling of not getting to do or try everything that I wanted to and for me the it's not just about eating the food that eating the food is a deep connection with the food by by harvesting something from the wild it means I need to understand that plant and and know it much better so it's not about going out there and conquering food by eating it it's about connecting to what gives me life and and appreciating the land and honoring the land and all the resources that that go into it and I definitely want to give my appreciation to all of the foragers out there who have created this information I wouldn't be able to do this without them I went out with foragers while I was in Wisconsin and the and the books there's the online resources there was the local groups and even more important I want to give my thanks to all of the people that existed before our modern foragers the native people of the land where all of this information ultimately has come from without them none of this would be possible so my absolute thanks to them I'm really happy to say that I left Wisconsin really feeling like I did truly connect with the land there and have a deeper connection to it than I did in the past now while I was there I didn't depend just on foraging that would have been extremely difficult I brought about a hundred thousand calories with me for the trip which two thousand calories a day that's 50 days so just to give you an idea I did have a lot of food with me there was a lot of flour that I made from my yam and yucca or cassava as well as coconut flour a lot of coconut flakes and then I had my southern peas and my pigeon peas that were dried I also had salt a lot of herbs and then I also had a lot of dried fruit mango and banana and then also for vitamins I had my moringa powder which I took every day so I had a large amount of food to bring up with me and the combination between foraging fresh food and then having this preserved food was a great combination I also brought up about 50 pounds of wild yam as well which which was just I don't know what I would have done without that so a huge amount of food that I brought up with me and then maybe half of my diet up there was from foraging and half was food that I brought and not having a garden while I was there of course was the big challenge could I travel and could I not have a garden and do this and that was that ended up being a big part of this trip and I you know came back healthier than I was before and there's one thing that I haven't taken a look at so I'm going to take you outside and we're going to take a look at some food that I have stored below the ground and I haven't looked at since I've been back might even give it a little taste let's let's go out there and let's take a look so this right here is my little underground food storage and this was designed to keep my food my fermented foods cool now I haven't opened this up since I've been been back so this is going to be a surprise to me I'm not even sure what this is going to look like I've got my sauerkraut in here and vinegars and I left them for the summer oh wow oh look at all those frogs so that's sauerkraut and the idea of this little cellar is to keep the food cold cooler it was never designed to keep the food for this long or for the entire summer but I'm going to go ahead there's my mango vinegar I think I'm going to go ahead and give one of these a taste they look okay to me it actually looks not bad maybe I'll give it a I'll give it a smell first first though I'll try the vinegar that's a pretty sure bet nah that one doesn't smell so good I think that vinegar's gotten old oh there's a this is firesider this is a medicine it's better than before I'll definitely be drinking more of that now the true test this is sauerkraut that's about six months old and it's one thing if you're in Germany or Wisconsin it's another to be in the hot state of Florida which is just not what this is designed for smells great I wish you could be here I genuinely wish you could be here to smell that so I'm going to scrape off the top layer and I'm gonna I'm gonna give this a bite this is six month old sauerkraut it's been in about 90 degree heat every day for the last half a year stored in this little makeshift box under the ground it's just it's truly fantastic exceeded my expectations I can't believe I can't believe this worked it's great that this worked but it's even better that I have sauerkraut good news good news everybody you can store ferments in the ground in Florida with a very makeshift little system gotta have another bite actually I'm gonna take this over to my sweet potatoes have a little lunch all right the sauerkraut needs some sweet potatoes so while I was in the garden just before I cut up some sweet potatoes in this pressure cooker and slow cooker it does both it's a dual thing and and so we're gonna open that up and there is the sweet potatoes with some rosemary and I'm not really I mean if you know me you'll know that I generally I avoid technology but I got this thing and it's been just it's saved me just countless hours and it was especially helpful on the trip because I could take this thing from house to house and have hot meals as I was traveling and even for the train ride for the 38 hour train ride back from Chicago to here to Orlando I was able to plug this thing on the train and have hot meals so I've got this so this thing's just been it's been so useful so I've got my sweet potatoes which was my fast food just popping it in and being done and then I've got my sauerkraut which was my slow food combine those together for a pretty great little meal and you can see the you know bounty of sweet potatoes there as well that's a good combo right now there are two main feelings coursing through my body that is excitement excitement that I have just one month left and also relief I've made it this far I've made it 11 months in here I am you know almost a year of growing and foraging 100 of my food I didn't lose weight I'm about the same weight that I started I feel really healthy really happy I still have a month to go but I am just very much in the home stretch and things are looking good what's to come for the next month my gardens are fairly abundant I have enough food it's looking like I'll still have to be going out and doing some foraging which I want to do because it's one of my main ways of connecting with nature but it really seems that I'm in the home stretch and the next month is going to be far more easy no really late nights preparing tons of food for you know months to come don't need to be storing and preserving a lot so the next month it's going to be a lot of eating fresh food straight from my garden and going out and foraging and eating fresh food straight from the woods and from the oceans and such so it's been an amazing journey more to come if you got inspiration from this or you learned something from this then I really encourage you to subscribe and also share this video with your friends hit that like button on there to help get it out there and stay tuned because there will be a lot more beyond this adventure a whole lot more to come so love you all very much and see you soon