30+ Survival Foods to Grow to Live on Your Garden (in Florida)

Through my year of growing and foraging 100 percent of my food and five plus years of visiting and meeting with dozens of gardeners and permaculturalists across the state of Florida, I have created a grouping of 30 of the easiest and most abundant foods to grow in Florida.

This grouping of plants is ideal for laying the foundation for a food forest or creating The Survival Garden. We’re talking about growing a lot of food, with the least work, so you can truly break free from the grocery store!

Our mission is to assist people in attaining ‘food freedom’ — breaking free from the global, industrial food system and growing their own food!

We share with you our extensive resource good for 30 of the easiest to grow, most productive foods in Florida.

Transcript: The following is a transcription of 30+ Survival Foods to Grow to Live on Your Garden (in Florida).

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Today, I am going to introduce you to 30 of the easiest-to-grow, most abundant foods here in Florida. We’re talking about the survival garden, we’re talking about starting your own food forest so you can break free from the grocery store, break free from the global industrial food system, and never have to go grocery shopping again.

Cassava

This is yuca or cassava. If you want to really eat from your garden and break free from the grocery store, then this is the plant to grow. It produces tubers like potatoes, but they’re twice as calorically dense as potatoes and they are delicious. Like, I crave this. You can boil them. You can mash them. Anything you would do with potatoes. You can also dehydrate them and make a flour for making things like tortillas or flatbreads. This is a staple food for one billion people around the world. People have grown it for thousands of years. It’s an incredibly important plant. And another thing that a lot of people don’t know is the leaves are actually edible as well if you cook them, if you boil them, like chaya. They have cyanide in them. There’s cyanide in the roots, and so they have to be cooked. You have to know how it would work with the plant. What’s incredible about yuca is you can just take a piece of the branch or a cutting and just stick that in the ground, and then you can get a dozen pounds of yuca out of that. So you just need to start with a few cuttings and, over a little while, you can make a yuca forest and you can break free from the grocery store with this plant.

Katuk

Here we are with katuk. A lot of people assume that all greens taste the same. That is not the case. A lot of greens taste wildly different from one another. Katuk has its own unique flavor. It also has its own unique nutrient profile, so this is a wonderful one to have in the garden. I like to eat it raw in salads. I also will throw it in with my sauteed greens into my soups. I don’t eat this one in endless quantities, but I eat a good amount of this. Another really wonderful thing about katuk is that it grows really well in the shade. So this is a great one to put into understory. It’s a great one that can be under the shade of large trees, and it actually thrives in shade. You can see this katuk is beautiful. It’s loving it. You can grow hedges of this, or you can grow small sections. And you can easily have … well, actually katuk is a little bit of a tender one sometimes, but once you’ve got it established and you find the right place, endless katuk.

Mulberry

I’m going to talk about two varieties of mulberry, and I love both of them. They have their own benefits. This is the dwarf everbearing mulberry. What I love about this is it puts out berries for a pretty good amount of time, like often a couple to a few months, and it can put out sometimes at multiple times of the year. And the berries are delicious. They are very nutritious. So I love these for community gardens, frontyard gardens. If you want to engage the community and you want to introduce people to picking food, picking fruit straight from the trees, and you want smallish trees, dwarf everbearing mulberries are one of my favorites.

Now we are at another variety of mulberry, and this is a Florida variety. There are a lot of different varieties out there. These are going to have much larger berries. They tend to be, from my experience, a lot sweeter. I love these mulberries, and this tree that I’m standing at has only been in the ground for two years. So the mulberries are very quick to produce, great for being early establishing trees in a food forest. The other thing to mention about the Florida varieties versus the dwarf everbearing, the dwarf everbearing has nematode issues. These, if you find these, these are generally nematode resistant, and so these often thrive a lot better than the dwarf everbearing varieties.

Sweet Potato

Here we have sweet potato, and I could never ever get sick of sweet potato. I have eaten hundreds of pounds of sweet potato from Florida gardens, and I love it. Of course, you know that the sweet potato itself is edible, high in calories, more nutritious than regular potatoes, people say. For me, just a little bit more delicious, but what a lot of people don’t know is you can also eat the greens. And when you combine the greens and the potato, you have a whole lot of food, a whole lot of nutrients, a whole lot of sustenance coming out of this crop. Variety is key. Some varieties produce a lot, and some varieties do not produce so much when it comes to the tuber. But if you have a variety that doesn’t produce a lot of tuber, you can still be eating greens. Last thing I want to say, from a 4′ x 8′ bed, like a typical garden bed, it’s possible to get about 40 pounds of sweet potatoes. So, you can grow a lot of sweet potatoes.

Perennial Spinach

What I’m surrounded by might look just like a patch of weeds or a blanket of green, but this is actually a perennial spinach, a spinach that can produce spinach year round and is basically eternal. This just covers the ground, and from one or a few cuttings, this is over 10′ x 10′ of spinach growing all over. Longevity spinach. It’s great for filling salad bowls, it’s great for sautéing. If you want to have a lot of greens, the perennial spinaches go a long way.

Okinawa Spinach

I’m here with Okinawa spinach, and this was actually the first plant that really introduced me to the idea of permaculture. I was in Hawaii, and someone said, “This is a bed of spinach that produces year round, and when you pick it, it actually produces more rather than taking away from it.” And that was a pretty wild concept to me about ten years ago. So, I’m elated to share this plant with you. It’s prolific. Both of the longevity and Okinawa spinaches can have diseases, they can die back, they can be cold sensitive, but they often come back, or you can just always have some cuttings to get them to come back. I love the purple, the vibrant purple on the Okinawa spinach. And these are some of the easier greens to grow in Florida.

Rosemary

Rosemary. It’s a medicine when you eat it, and it’s a medicine when you smell it. This is a plant that’s known around the United States and even much of the world. It is a wonderful herb. You can use it fresh, you can dry it, and it’s incredibly resilient. This grows into whole hedges, and once you start to grow your Rosemary, you’ll never ever have to buy Rosemary from the store again. In fact, in some areas, I almost think it’s a crime to buy Rosemary at the store when you have hedges and bushes full of this absolutely wonderful herb.

Southern Pea

I’m here with my friend, the southern pea or the cow pea. And a lot of plants have many benefits. It’s not just food and medicine, it’s also plants that work with the Earth that help us be stewards of the Earth. So, southern pea or cow pea is a ground cover that covers the ground, which helps to prevent the soil from getting baked out by the sun, helps with water retention, and is a nitrogen fixer. So, it helps to add nitrogen to your soil, which is one of the key things that plants need. At the same time, you can eat the peas both as a full fresh pea pod or as just the green peas themselves. You can also leave it on the vine to dry and have a pea that you can store for long term, for years.

Now, as you get introduced to a lot of these new foods that you’ve never heard of before, you’re also going to get introduced to a lot of new flavors. And that might mean rewilding your palate a little bit. Some things might not taste as you’d expect or as you desire at first, but the more you eat them, the more these unique flavors become just normal for your palette that you love and enjoy.

Cuban Oregano

So, I am here with Cuban oregano and this has a flavor like your Greek oregano, that’s why it has this name. But oregano that’s not as strong, in my opinion, but a good one for garnishing food, for cooking, for juicing, for throwing into smoothies. There’s some real medicine in this herb.

African Blue Basil

Here we are with African blue basil and this plant brings so much joy to the garden. It’s often full of honeybees and native bees and other pollinators, so it brings in the pollinators. The flowers are on it for many months of the year and it’s just a joy to have in the garden. Of course, it’s also basil, so you can enjoy the flavor of it. If you’re looking for that typical Italian basil, you’re not going to get exactly what you’re looking for, but if you appreciate it for what it is, you will find something you love in the African blue basil.

Seminole Pumpkin

Seminole pumpkin is a heat-tolerant pumpkin. Here in Florida, the winter squashes that you get up in the north are pretty hard to grow because of the heat. This is one that has been growing here for hundreds of years that produces beautiful pumpkins. They can range from one to two pounds to a handful of pounds. They’re similar to a butternut squash in their flavor and the color inside is a bright orange. I love them. I can eat so many of them. I once got about 70 pumpkins from just two plants, so they can produce a lot. These can thrive and they can also struggle. The pumpkins can be eaten also young as a zucchini, but I like to let them mature to get that beautiful pumpkin. What’s amazing about these is they can be stored for a year, even outside of an air-conditioned house. I’ve had them stored for an entire year in my tiny house where it was 90 degrees for over six months.

Pigeon Pea

Here we are with pigeon pea or gandules, and again, if you want to produce some serious food in your garden, this is one of them. If you want to grow some protein, this is one of them. If you want to grow something that you can easily store for years, this is absolutely one of them. Pigeon peas dry right on the plant, you can hear them rattling, and that is the peas dried right on here that you can harvest and store. You can also eat the peas like you would a pea pod when they’re young and tender, and I also just love to enjoy the flowers on here. Gandules are a staple food for many people in Puerto Rico and across the Caribbean. One of the reasons they’re a staple is because they grow really, really well. You can grow them as a hedge and keep them smaller and pruned back, or you can grow them as bushes. I’ve had them grow over six feet wide and produce hundreds of pods on each tree.

Galangal Ginger

Here we have galangal ginger, and this is one that is used in Thai curries. It’s very strong, so you don’t need a lot of it to add to your curries. It’s also very hearty. You can have this lasting for years in your garden. It’s definitely one of the hardiest of all of the gingers. So, as far as a survival garden goes, one that can just last even if there’s periods of neglect, galangal ginger is an excellent one for that.

Nopal Cactus

This is nopal cactus, specifically a spineless variety of nopal cactus. So there’s no spines, there’s no little glochids that get stuck on your tongue. So, you can eat this raw or you can cook it. This is another survival food. You can plant one of these little pads and, within a couple years, you can have a tree that is producing an incredible amount of food. It’s been eaten for a long time. It’s very much a part of Mexican cooking, Mexican cuisine, because it’s a wonderful food to eat. And some people eat a whole lot of it.

Chaya

This is chaya, also often called tree spinach. The reason it’s called spinach, I think, is because when you cook it down, it’s got a similar consistency and flavor to cooked spinach. However, this plant has cyanide in it, just like yuca and yuca leaves. So, you do need to cook this one properly. As with any food, you want to get to know it and you want to learn how to properly cook it. This one just takes some extra care. This is another one where you can just take a stick of it, pop it in the ground, and you could have a little chaya tree. They can turn into … I’ve seen them 15 feet tall, but you really want to maintain them at a low level so that you can easily access the branches and access your fresh daily greens.

Papaya

Papaya is an incredible one to start off your food forest. It’s also great for a survival garden. It does need care — it needs water, it needs fertility, and the reason why is it puts out an incredible amount of fruit if it gets the water and the fertility that it needs. There are a couple ways to eat the papaya. You can eat it as a fruit once it’s ripened and turned orange, but if you want to eat a ton of papaya, you want to embrace the green papaya. And I just remove the skin, chop that up, and I cook it up just like potatoes. You can make a papaya kraut if you want endless kraut without having to grow cabbage, which could be difficult. You could do that with the papaya kraut. And there’s also green papaya salad. There are a lot of ways this food is eaten in many cultures around the world. The reason that it grows — the reason that many cultures have it as a part of their diet — is because it grows abundantly. And that’s what you want, plants that grow abundantly and thrive. Papaya is definitely one of those.

Turmeric

When I spent a year growing and foraging 100 percent of my food, there was only one thing I felt like I did that was a mistake that I would have gone back and changed. And that would have been to plant more turmeric, because the turmeric I planted thrived and produced a lot of turmeric. So it’s possible to be turmeric self-sufficient here in Florida and even much further north. It can be grown very successfully. Super wonderful medicine. I like to eat turmeric every single day. I like to have it in my soups and my smoothies, in my sauteed vegetables. You can dry it and then turn it into a powder or you can eat it fresh. The leaves I actually throw into my soups to add some flavor as well. And it’s a wonderfully productive plant. It’s one that brings me an incredible amount of joy. And, of course, not only do we want to break free from the grocery store, but we want to break free from the pharmacy, too. Turmeric is definitely one of our friends to help us break free from having to buy any medicines ever again.

Everglades Tomato

This is Everglades tomato, not your typical tomato. It is a very small tomato, but it’s very prolific. And what’s incredible about this … there’s a lot of incredible things, but for one, it’s a volunteer tomato. Once you grow this, it’ll drop tomatoes on the ground, and these tomatoes tend to come back year after year. They are quite flavorful, so what they lack in size, they definitely make up for in flavor. And the plants can sprawl, they can climb up trees, they can sprawl out. I’ve seen patches that were just volunteers out of compost that were probably 20 or 30 feet wide, just full of tomatoes. This plant right here was a volunteer, and it’s probably got an 8 – 10 foot spread. And these are the tomatoes you want if you want tomatoes that just keep coming back year after year.

Tethonia

This is tethonia, and this one’s not actually one you eat, but it’s an incredible companion in the food forest or in the survival garden. This is great for numerous things. One, you can build walls with it, so if you want privacy from your neighbors, it builds a wonderful living wall. It’s fast growing, so it’s one of the fastest ways to grow walls, but these walls have other purposes as well. You can chop them back and use that as a way to build up the carbon in your soil in your garden, so you don’t need to bring in all of the resources. You can bring in plants that actually create the sources, suck the carbon right out of the air, create that mass for you to add to your garden to build up your fertility and build up your soil. So, of course, how could I not mention it’s got sunflowers for months of the year? Like, months of the year you have beautiful sunflowers. It’s a great way to invite in your neighbors and your community as well.

Lemongrass

The number one most irrigated crop in what we call the United States is not a food, it’s grass for lawns. If you want a grass that’s actually going to do something real for you, then lemongrass is the way to go. You can grow this and you can have a wonderful herb to make lemongrass tea, and then you can also use it in soups and curries. It proliferates, it grows, and then you just take cuttings like this, give them to your friends, and you can spread lemongrass all across your community. Sometimes we consider things bad, like weeds, grasses. It’s all a matter of learning how to work with them, and when we learn how to work with them, they’re no longer problems, they’re actually a part of the solution.

Sorrel

Now, not all plants are in season at the same time, so it can be hard to find all 30 of these plants at once. Sorrel or Florida cranberry or hibiscus is a plant that is going to be grown throughout the summer in Florida, and it’s only early May here, but here is a volunteer one that just popped up. This is wonderful. You’ve probably seen the bright red tea. It’s sometimes called Jamaican sorrel, but people drink it all across the Caribbean, in Florida, and in other parts of the Western Hemisphere that I know of. So it makes a wonderful tea. You can also just eat these calyxes. You can also eat the leaves. Both are wonderful, but tea is really where it’s at, and you can dehydrate these and have this tea year round.

Loofahs

Loofahs are both edible, but I don’t use them so much for the food. I use them because you can grow your own loofah sponges and not have to buy sponges at the store either and be able to compost your sponges to turn it right back into soil. Now, the edibility of it is dependent upon the variety. Some of them are bitter and not edible or desirable. So again, my favorite part is to grow the sponges, and how that works is, you leave it on the plant until it dries out, and you have your own loofah sponge, a sponge that nature provides without having to take a trip to the grocery store, and this sponge is great for dishes. It’s also great for scrubbing down the body.

Biden’s Alba

Biden’s alba, also called Spanish needle, is growing in yards all over Florida, and a lot of people consider it to be the bane of their existence because it puts out these little seeds that stick to our clothes that a lot of people feel really annoyed by. But the truth is, this plant is actually incredibly nutritious and medicinal. You can eat the leaves, you can eat these flowers, and I do like to cook it. Raw is not my favorite for the leaves, but I do love to nibble on the flowers raw when it’s young and tender. That’s when it’s going to be best for your salad bowl. You can make medicine from it year round, and these flowers are really incredible for the pollinators. They tend to be out almost all year, so they are a little bit of a food source for the pollinators year round. So let this grow wildly in your yard. It’s a wonderful plant to have for food and medicine and friendship.

Elderberry

I am elated to share with you elderberry. I have wild foraged elderberry all the way from Florida up to Wisconsin. It grows along roadsides and it likes moist wet areas, so you find it along lakes and creeks and ditches, and it grows wonderfully in the garden as well. I love to make elderberry syrup. I take the berries, boil them with water, and then strain that and mix it half-and-half with honey, and you have incredibly delicious medicine that helps with preventing or reducing a cold or flu. Elderberry is great for building fence lines. It’s very fast growing and it grows up into a fairly thick hedge, so you can also make an edible medicinal hedge in between your neighbor’s places. Also, the flowers can be used to make champagne or you can batter the flowers and dip them in jam, and that makes for an incredible partly garden-made snack.

Moringa

This is moringa, or the vitamin tree, or the tree of life. I planted this tree about five years ago, and it has given me a lot of life and others a lot of life. The reason it’s called the vitamin tree is because it’s loaded with vitamins. It’s actually one of the most nutrient-dense foods on Earth. You can eat these leaves fresh right off the tree, put them in a smoothie, or soups. What I like to do is dry the leaves, put them in a blender after they’re dehydrated, and that makes moringa powder. I travel with that, and it’s my homemade multivitamin. No need to buy multivitamins at the store because this is basically the multivitamin tree. You also have beautiful pods coming off of it, and these pods produce seeds, and with these seeds, you can give them to others and they can start their own moringa trees. This tree was a seed about five years ago, and now it’s producing an incredible amount of vitamins and nutrients. This is the tree of life, and it is giving life.

Ethiopian Kale

Ethiopian kale is a green that you can get going in your garden that, once it’s producing seeds, it scatters those seeds around and it just keeps coming back. It’s got a really quite mild flavor that often even stays mild through the summer when other things die or get bitter. And it’s got a nice flavor to it, though you’ll have to taste it for yourself. But it’s wonderful in salads, it’s wonderful cooked, and it is one that once you get it seeding, it spreads those seeds and it keeps coming back, and it can be in the Florida garden for months and months of the year.

Egyptian Spinach

Molokia, or Egyptian spinach: this is one where people from East Africa often recognize it in gardens here in Florida, and they’re so elated to see it because it’s been a part of cultures for 6,000 years or more. As with many of these plants, these are plants that come from Africa that have been stewarded by the people for thousands of years. Many of these have been stewarded by Indigenous people of this land, Turtle Island or the United States, for thousands of years. And I really encourage you to connect with these plants and get to know the cultures that have stewarded them, and I give an incredible amount of gratitude and thanks because everything I shared with you today, none of it would be here. We didn’t create this here in the United States. This is not new stuff. These are foods that there’s been deep cultural connections with, living in reciprocity with for thousands of years.

Hopi Red Dye Amaranth

Hopi red dye amaranth in my central Florida gardens. I scattered these amaranth seeds into my mulch, and they popped up into these beautiful red purplish amaranths that put out these big seed heads that made a beautiful sight for everybody walking by in the neighborhood. They got over my head tall, and they self-seeded, and they just kept coming back in my gardens. The leaves are edible, they’re not the prime edible amaranth, there’s actually callaloo varieties that are specifically for eating the greens. They also do produce the seed, the amaranth seed, an ancient grain, and I have saved that and actually eaten meals of amaranth grain from this amaranth. I love the Hopi red dye because it just adds so much beauty, but all the amaranths add value and nutrition and beauty to the garden.

Daikon Radish

Daikon radish. This is useful for both eating and for establishing your garden. As far as eating goes, they’re not your little dinky radishes — these can be over a foot long. They’re crispy, they’re great for adding directly to salads. You can bake them, and they’re wonderful baked along with other root veggies. And of course, Daikon radish kraut, you don’t have to grow cabbage here in Florida, that can be a challenging one, and with Daikon radish, you can have endless kraut just by grating it up with a cheese grater and adding salt, and you’ll have a wonderful kraut. Daikon radish is really great for establishing the garden, because it helps to basically aerate the soil by putting its roots way deep down, 12-18 inches into the ground. And then, if you leave them there, they rot and add organic matter to the soil and help to break down that mulch, break down that soil, and start building your soil.

The Toilet Paper Plant

This right here is the toilet paper plant, and it is the ‘Charmin of the garden.’ The leaves are soft as can be, and the leaves are about the same size as a toilet paper square, yet durable. Your fingers will not break through. The toilet paper plant is also called Blue spur flower, or its scientific name is Plectranthus bjarbatus. It’s in the mint family, which means it has a nice minty smell.

Surinam Cherry

This is Surinam cherry, and it’s one of my favorite springtime fruits in Florida. It produces these wonderful little fruits that they call cherries. They look kind of like little pumpkins. I love the flavor. It ranges a lot from plant to plant. Some you’ll love, some you might not love, but it is productive and it is abundant.

This one is not in the Food Forest Starter bundle, and there’s a handful of other ones that I want to share just a little bit of information on, just a recognition to that aren’t in the bundle as well. First, that would be banana. They produce a lot of food and a lot of nourishment and a lot of joy and are easy to grow. Jamaican cherry, one of the fastest growing trees for a food forest. Sugar cane — never have to buy sugar again. Tarot, a really great sustenance crop. Puts out some really calorie- dense food. Yaupon holly, if you want a caffeinated beverage, you’ll never have to buy coffee again. You can grow your own caffeine. It’s related to yerba mate and it’s got similar health benefits. And Surinam spinach, another wonderful perennial spinach. This one is more tender and really great to fill your salad bowls.

So there you have it: 30 of the easiest to grow, most abundant foods here in Florida. This is how you can start your survival garden or your very own food forest. I really, really want to help you get started. I spent a year growing and foraging 100 percent of my food, and I want you to be able to break free from the grocery store. So, I’ve actually created the Food Forest Starter bundle, which has every single one of these plants in it, either from cuttings or seeds. You can make a donation and we’ll send you this in the mail to start your food forest, to start your survival garden. And your donations fund our food sovereignty initiatives to help others, community gardens and schools creating food sovereignty in their communities. So, you get your plants, you help our food sovereignty initiatives, and you can break free from the grocery store at the same time.