Is It Possible to Grow and Forage 100% of My Food? Full Talk in Orlando

For one year, I grew and foraged 100 percent of my food. Every. Single. Bite.
No grocery stores, no restaurants, not even a drink at a bar.
Nature was my garden, my pantry and my pharmacy.

This is my presentation of the year, given at Orlando Permaculture in Orlando, Florida on 11/12/19. This presentation shares the story of my experience, but more importantly was designed to lay the framework for anyone in central Florida who wants to step away from industrial agriculture and live within a fully localized food system. For a detailed resource guide to accompany this presentation, visit this page see Robin Greenfield’s Guide to Gardening for Beginners in Florida.

I lived in the city of Orlando, Florida, in a 100 square foot tiny house. With no land of my own, I turned front yards into gardens and shared the bounty of food with the homeowners. Over the year, I grew over 100 different foods in my gardens, foraged over 200 foods from nature and I even grew and foraged my own medicine and vitamins, too.

This project wasn’t just about growing and foraging all of my food though. It was about empowering others to take back power from Big Ag. I built gardens: 15 Gardens for the People; planted over 200 Community Fruit Trees, sent out over 5,000 seed packs to help people grow their own organic, healthy food and I taught free gardening classes to the people in my community.

I’ve been exploring food for nearly a decade and I believe the globalized, industrialized food system is broken. This was a personal quest to see whether I could step away from Big Ag and grow and forage every bite of my own food.

Here I am, one year later. I did it and I feel healthier and happier today than when I started.
I’m here to share solutions for a more sustainable and just food system with you.

The Food Freedom book is out and it is a gift to you! Order here.

Transcript: The following is a transcription of Robin Greenfield: Is It Possible to Grow and Forage 100% of My Food? I Decided to Find Out.

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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 loved: 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 from — being shipped long distances across the world. It was in packages, in 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. And 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 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 percent of my food? So that’s been a question for about eight years now. And about two years ago, I decided I was actually gonna 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 doing it, by 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. 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 percent of that 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 plants from people. The only reason I was able to do this is really because of the community.

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. My partner at the time, Cheryl, and I, just felt welcomed here. We’ve been traveling all over, and 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 we felt very welcomed. But also, the thing that I liked about Orlando is there’s actually a blossom. There’s a community, but there’s a blossoming community. So I wanted to be in a place where I could affect positive change. 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 extremely consumeristic city. So that was one of the reasons that 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 give it my first shot.

The reason why I wanted to do it in one of the easier places is because, going into this, I had next to no actual growing experience. So when I moved to Orlando before this, I only had had a couple of small raised beds back in San Diego, where I grew a little bit of greens, some herbs, and some tomatoes. I just look back at that and all the mistakes I was making were just crazy. I mean, there was a tomato hornworm, 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, when I was going through my old photos to find photos to show you tonight, this is the small little greenhouse that I made when I first got here. I look back and I know how little 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 seeds. I didn’t know how much sunlight a garden needed. I was just figuring out all of 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 my own 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 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. So when I got here, she was one of the first people that I talked to. I said, “Hey Sarah, what do 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 could see there’s quite a bit of height there. So, what I 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 ocean, under the water. 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 but black, loamy soil for about six to eight inches. And the reason I was standing that high is because 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 prepare before I was going to launch fully into growing and foraging all my own 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 my own 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 would be 18 months staying put, which would be the longest that I’d 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 Deane and Andy Firk. I 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 of my food. This is just some of the beginning plants, just getting some trays and starting to plant seeds. 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 Baker Creek Seed Company, for example. Most of it was local. Some of it was from Palmer’s dumpster, for example, just down the street 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, or two 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 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, 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’s, I lost a little bit of weight. But the idea of growing food not lawns, I like to keep things pretty simple. So I’m going to share a little bit about how to turn your yard into a garden. And for that, there’s six basic ingredients: cardboard, mulch, soil or compost, water, sun, and then plants. So 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 appliance 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. 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. A lot of 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. You can do that through websites like GetChipDrop.com. I’ll have all the resources listed at 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 my front yard?” So cardboard, mulch. The reason that you have mulch — many reasons: one, it 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. Mulch 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 mushroom 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 — 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 get a good amount of water year-round. 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 those are the basic ingredients, and that’s what I did to turn the front yards into gardens.

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 mean not 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 friends’ food forests. Because I mean, let’s face it, if I ate the food from their food forests, it would just have been too easy, and I wouldn’t have learned near as much. Because this is our land, Orlando Permaculture, there’s dozens of food forests that I could visit. So no food forests. I literally had to grow or forage everything for the entire year. So this picture is on Day One. That was November 11, 2018. 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 100 percent grown or foraged. So when I started on Day One, I was definitely in the deep end, jumping into the deep end.

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 back, in the yard here. This is a drone shot. And here’s another picture of it from closer up. 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 to 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, it 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 basic compost bin, and 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. My shower was a rainwater harvesting system, and that water that I used in the 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 washed my hands and such, that went behind the sink, and that’s called greywater. And back there I planted taro and turmeric, 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 downspouts 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 on as possible, but still let it flow off, like during hurricanes. I’m not talking about holding every ounce, 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 that I could use that.

Over this year, I grew and foraged 300 different foods. I grew 100 different foods in my garden and had 200 different foods that I foraged. 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.That’s quite a bit of diversity. A lot of people imagine that I would be just missing all the different tastes and flavors, but the reality is, there were — between the 300 different foods that I foraged — there was quite the diversity. I’m going to walk you through that tonight. A large part of tonight’s focus is how you can do this, and not necessarily 100 percent, that’s obviously really extreme and very challenging, but how you can grow and forage, or how you can produce as much of your food as you would like. So I’m going to go into detail with a lot of the actual plants.

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 100 percent of their food, to live off the land, to never have to take a trip to the grocery store. But 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 who are really largely living off the land — one of the biggest challenges is calories, actually growing all of your calories. Here in Florida, 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 going to 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 even larger. In a small area, probably definitely smaller than this stage, I grew about 500 pounds of sweet potatoes. 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. What I was told is that sweet potatoes are the most useful plant 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. It’s really important to look at all of the elements in the plant, because most people who buy 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.

Yuca is another one, also called cassava. Now what you’ll see tonight with a lot of the plants that I’m going to show you is that these are plants that most people in Caribbean cuisines and a lot of Central and South American cuisines — 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 most people have never heard of. But these are largely — many of these you’ll see as staples in much of the Caribbean, and Central and South America, yuca being one of those, or cassava. Now I’m just going to say it’s not yucca. That’s why you see, yuca is Y-U-C-A, and yucca is a desert plant that doesn’t produce big tubers. Yuca is a plant that grows in semi-tropics and tropics that produces big tubers. So the nice thing about yuca is you can plant it along your fence line. All you have to do for yuca is get a cutting, which is a stick, so like what I’m holding in my hand. They’re just a part of the stick, or all around this, this is the part 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 going to turn into five pounds of yuca, or sometimes even 15 pounds of yuca. So this is what’s called a survival crop. One billion people around the world depend on yuca. The reason they depend on it is because it grows ridiculously easily, takes very few nutrients, and doesn’t need much water at all. So that makes it 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 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 food out. So it’s a survival crop. It is 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 a very important crop. I got my nutrients elsewhere, and we’ll go into that, but calories came from tubers.

Now another tuber is wild yam or Dioscorea alata. Not sure if I pronounced that correctly, but it’s an idea. I mostly used common names rather than the genus and species. But wild yam, winged yam. This is actually formerly a 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 one yam as heavy as me. And that’s just one yam. Imagine how much food you can get out of that. That’s 30 five-pound bags of potatoes from one yam. So I found — we found this wild yam in a reserve about ten miles west of here. But before I started, as I was preparing, I actually found a huge amount of it there, maybe as much as 1,000 calories on the Cady Way Trail, right over by the golf course. 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 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. It’s great for foraging for calories or growing your own calories.

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 going to talk about a little bit later. It’s not as dense in calories as the tubers, but still has quite a few calories. 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 Seminole 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 in Sebastian, and we had a Seminole 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 the beautiful thing about Seminole pumpkins is they also store. Even living, I lived basically outside, no air conditioning in my tiny house. If it was 90 degrees outside, it was 90 degrees inside, and they lasted through an entire summer on my shelves. So they’re a 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 that’s another amazing crop, similar to butternut squash in a way. It’s got a bright, fleshy, 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, 100, 150 people in this room, there’s about a hundred seeds in a pumpkin. So if we just had two pumpkins in this room, each one of us could take home one seed, turn that into, say, ten pumpkins, and 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 calls himself a ‘gangster gardener’ out in LA — he’s a friend of mine, and one of the things that he said that I absolutely love is, “Growing your own food is like printing your own money.” And it truly is. You can literally create abundance out of almost nothing. 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 never saw bananas. And I thought, “I see these people growing banana plants, but I never actually see any bananas.” But now, sure enough, the banana stand over at Sarah’s has three racks on it. Well, I just harvested one of the racks, and it already has two others, and we already harvested one. And I’m eating fresh bananas from Lisa’s house and fresh bananas from Jen’s house. So bananas really do grow extremely well here. You can also forage them. Dickson 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 going to 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, Dickson Azalea Park is a great place to search it out. I’m not going to 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 until they’re yellow and eat them as a delicious fruit. When they’re green, you can fry them and have fried green bananas. You can blend — you can dry and blend the entire thing, the peel and the banana inside, and make green banana flour. So it is 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 be nutrient deficient for quite awhile, 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 make it through the year with not getting enough nutrients, but if I didn’t have enough calories, I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it. That was 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. 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 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. If I didn’t have the coconuts, I don’t know if I would have 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. These coconuts that are brown are mostly from being picked up from 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 absolute most important crops of the year.

For protein, 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. 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. Those are dried pigeon peas, but 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 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.

Other protein sources: fish was always my main plan. I actually — if there’s one thing I was experienced in before this project, it was fishing. I started fishing when I was about eight, and it’s actually been one of the biggest passions of my life. I truly love it. It’s one of 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 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. I started fishing again about maybe three or four years ago. So my main plan was fish, for 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 the food of life. If Americans don’t like it, generally, so it’s in. With fish — mullet is an amazing fish. It’s very high in fat and the beneficial fats, and 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 bioaccumulate. Bioaccumulation, what that …. You all probably heard about how eagles were affected by DDT in the past and then their eggshells crumbled, and that made eagles 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 happens now is, there’s a lot of bioaccumulates. If you’re eating game fish like tuna, for example, there’s a large accumulation of mercury in that. But the reason I chose to mostly eat mullet is because it only eats plants, so it doesn’t accumulate by eating fish that eat smaller fish and the bigger fish and the bigger fish and so on. So mullet was one of my plans. This is a redfish here. 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. They say similar to chicken, not too different. But I only ate about nine squirrels, so it was by no means — we’ll do questions at the end — but it was by no means 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 an experience. But I think there 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, 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 — there’s a lot, I’m not going to get into raising animals today because I didn’t do that. But chickens, quail, rabbits …. You can also do aquaponics for fish. Tilapia is a common one. There are 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 grass-fed animals or anything like that. 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 Warfel is there — and when I went up to Gainesville about New Year’s-ish, searching for some deer, and Joe Pierce helped us. He was going to help us out. We went up to his place near Gainesville. We found two, but they were too old. So I wasn’t able to harvest those. Then it got a little hot. And as you can imagine, when it’s 90 degrees by 9:00 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. So I decided to take a trip up there. And I’ll mention — I’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 deficient in fat and protein, and I was like, this was something that I was really trying for. It actually took me a whole month before I actually was able to get one. But, by toward the end, I harvested five deer in Wisconsin. That ended up being really one of my main sources of food the entire year. It probably made up 10 percent plus of my food for the entire year.

Okay, one of my other main sources, or a really main source of food, was honey. Sugar is really important. I actually — one of the big challenges I thought of this year was going to be chocolate. That’s actually one of my favorite foods in the whole world — dark chocolate. My former partner Cheryl used to call me a chocolate vampire because if it was around me, I did bad things. Like I would just eat everyone’s share of chocolate and not be able to resist. I loved it. So that was one of the big things: could I get by without chocolate? So the solution was honey. This year, I think I harvested five gallons of honey from my bees. That is a lot of honey. That is about, let’s see, a gallon is about 12 pounds, so that would be 60 pounds. Five gallons is a huge amount of honey. It’s one of those big blue jugs. Honey was a really important source of calories, of enjoyment. It added a lot of value to different meals. I fermented with it.

Now sugar cane is another source of sugar that you can do here, and that’s something that actually is pretty easy. But it takes time, and it’s just not one of the things that I ever did. I planted — 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 100 percent of your food, it’s not that necessarily any one thing is challenging, it’s that trying to do 100 percent is challenging. And that’s like — 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. I just didn’t have time to do that. So that’s one of the big differences between shooting for 100 percent and, say, 80 percent. It’s actually that last 10 to 20 percent, making your own oils and the calories and all that, that is one of the most difficult parts.

So, salt. Before I started this project, I was actually on a train in Germany, and I was thinking, “How the heck am I going to get salt?” I never had seen anyone eating salt that they harvested, and I had very little experience with it whatsoever. The only really …. There were 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 it can be done.” And I knew there were the salt flats in Bolivia, the Salar de Uyuni. So I knew there were 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 going to do salt. I was very lost. So I did the research. Basically, all you have to do is go to the ocean, scoop up some salt water, put it in a pot and 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 salt water is about 3 1/2 percent salt by volume. So a gallon of salt water gives you about a half-cup of salt. So, that’s a fair bit of salt. If you go get five gallons, that could be all the salt that you need for an entire year. So we can produce 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. That’s also — I would prefer to do that, but I always just boiled it. Usually I boiled it on 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. These are chanterelles, two different species or three different species of chanterelle mushrooms. When I started this, I had maybe foraged mushrooms one or two times. I would say when people think about foraging, one of the things that scares them the most is mushrooms. And there’s one way to never die or never get sick from foraging, and that’s only eat something if you’re 100 percent sure what it is. You will never have a problem foraging if you only eat things that you’re 100 percent sure what they are. That’s the number one rule of foraging. One way to do that is through triple confirmation. You don’t take just one person’s word. You don’t take from me tonight that chanterelles 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 first source. But three different good resources before you eat something from the wild: triple confirmation. I probably foraged about 20 species of mushrooms between here and my trip to Wisconsin and back to Florida. Chanterelles are probably one of the more abundant, one of the easiest mushrooms for beginners to start with.

So, as I said, I was growing and foraging 100 percent of my own food, and that included my own medicine. So, for the last year, nature was my garden, my pantry, and my pharmacy. If I got sick this year, I could not take any medicine to get better. That meant, first and foremost, I had to take care of my health through preventative health care. Today, with our modern health insurance, it’s something like 75 percent of all our doctor visits come down to what we eat, how we exercise, move, basic movement, and our level of stress and anxiety. So 75 percent of our doctor visits can be taken care of through preventative health care; just basically eating healthy, moving, and 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 vegetable, every fruit, the meat, the fish — it was all 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 us. If we’re healthy, we’re less likely to get sick.

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. Combining that 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 a tablespoon of elderberry syrup most every day of this entire year. It prevents colds and flu. Or if you get a cold or flu, you can use it to reduce it or take care of it. Fire cider was another one of my important medicines. I made vinegar from apples, so apple cider vinegar, but you can make vinegar from almost any fruit. Then garlic, onion, horseradish and red peppers — serrano peppers, I put in there, and maybe another ingredient or two, and it 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 grow turmeric. That’s one of the easiest crops that you can grow in central Florida. It’s like $10 – $25 a pound for organic turmeric 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 never have to buy it again. Simple as that. Ideally, you can source that 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 are something that I foraged, another medicine. Herbal teas. Plantago or broadleaf plantain. That, to me, is a medicine that very much calls to me. If I get stung 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 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 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 as it grows all over. And you can grow it in your garden.

Another one of those kinds of borderline foods or medicines 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. 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 used that to make things bubble or rise. That’s … is that even fermentation? That’s 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 and the bacteria that are in every breath we take, using that to ferment your food. 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 on every tiny part of our skin. It’s in every breath we take. With every breath we take, we consume yeast and bacteria. So, wild fermentation. Some of the things that I have here, for example, this is 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 yaupon holly. I’ll 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. Another one is ginger beer or turmeric beer. That’s not an alcohol even though it’s called beer, but that’s another one that I made. So these are some of my sauerkrauts. The amazing thing is …. I didn’t have a fridge and I didn’t have air conditioning, so I needed to keep them cool. So what I did is, I just built this little underground storage. 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 temperature, but sauerkraut and things like that need around 70 degrees. That’s hard to do in the summer unless you’re in air conditioning, then it doesn’t matter. 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. The idea was at least maybe I’d get an extra month of life 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 then 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 had 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 if this stuff was going to 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. An amazing book, I highly recommend it to learn what you 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. Foraging was my key for most of my fruit. I mentioned I grew papayas and bananas, but for the most part, my fruit came from foraging. Some of the easiest to forage and easiest to grow fruits are loquat, mulberry, Surinam cherry, banana, avocado and citrus, which would be grapefruit, lemon, oranges, passion fruit — which is not a tree, but a vine — and star fruit. So those are all fruits that I …. Well, the ones that I foraged a lot are loquat, mulberry, star fruit, Surinam cherry, banana, some avocado and citrus. But not passion fruit. I grew that. So 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. There’s a lot of it out there even with that disease. Some other abundant fruits that I foraged were mango, prickly pear cactus, and white sapote. And then a few mentions as far as fruit trees: persimmon, coco plum, Java plum, pond apples and sea grapes. All are fruits that I had pretty good success with. Now there’s probably 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 harvested.

Now I went to south Florida for my mangos. And this is about a day’s worth of foraging down there for mangos. And there’s so many mangos 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 trouble, or falling onto my car.” A lot of times people wanted it to be taken. So generally, 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 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, on someone’s lawn, that was kind of one of my gray areas as to whether I completely considered that foraging. But basically, that’s it. I considered it 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 in that kind of gray area of humanity. And ultimately, that was one of the big things for me: 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 or domesticated? It’s a gray area.

An important tool for fruit foraging is a fruit picker. I bought this for $40 at a hardware store. It 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 check often, pick the higher up stuff that other people definitely wouldn’t have gotten.

My meals were definitely not bland. Well, occasionally bland, but for the most part, not bland. I grew lots of herbs and spices. The ones I’m listing here are ones that I recommend for central Florida that do grow well. These are: African blue basil, Cuban oregano, holy basil, garlic chives, green onion, mint, rosemary, lemongrass, Italian basil, Thai basil; and popolo, which popped up in my garden and I had no clue what it was. It was a mystery. I don’t know where it came from. But it’s a great herb. Some people consider it close to cilantro. Also, cilantro, dill, fennel, thyme, oregano, curry leaf tree, garlic, sage, dill seeds and 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 some of the herbs and spices that I grew this year. Those I’m just featuring as the highlights.

I grew a lot of annual greens. Collards is my top recommendation as far as annual greens. 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 bok choy and tatsoi do really well in this area; mizuna and amaranth would be a few of the annual greens that I grew. I really prefer perennial greens though. The thing about annuals … and for those of you who don’t know what an annual is, it’s a plant that generally produces 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’ve 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, or five years. Rhubarb in the north generally lasts for 25 years. Oak trees can be hundreds of years old, and they put out acorns which are edible. 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’ve consumed 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 disruptive to 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, 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, it needs almost no water or irrigation. It needs almost no nutrients. It’s native to India, from dry parts of India. It’s truly a miracle food. If everybody had one of those plants, it could change the entire state of Florida. It’s very easy to grow. You can get it from a cutting. Stick that cutting in the ground, or grow from seeds. So moringa is my number one recommendation.

Other ones: chaya, that’s what you see right here. I took that as a 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. Yuca 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 who you talk to, three to 20 minutes. You can go with 20 minutes — whatever you want. So yuca greens. Others: cranberry hibiscus and purslane, one of my favorite foods on Earth. And it’s very nutrient-dense. It’s actually one of the few plants that are high in omegas. Garden sorrel. Again, plantago. Okra. And then perennial spinach. We can grow a lot of different perennial spinach here. To name a few of them: Okinawa, longevity, Suriname, Malabar, Brazilian. Those are just five of the perennial spinach that we can grow here.

So, foraging greens. This is a plant that most people know: Bidens 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 Holistic Living, they’re always talking about Bidens alba. So it’s important medicinally. But it’s also just a great edible and very nutritious. So this is it right here. It has 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 beautiful food. And most everywhere you go in the United States, there are going to be weeds that are edible, nutritious, and often medicinal greens. To name some other great ones in the area: dollar weed is in most of your yards, probably. Gotu kola, which is considered a brain food, a very important one. But, coppa, oxalis, purslane. And then there’s sea greens like sea purslane and sea blight. And plantago. This might be the third time I brought that plant up. I obviously like it quite a bit.

One of 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 hope 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 going to do because I didn’t want to have to carry around gallons of water everywhere I went. So, at my tiny house, I harvested rainwater and put it through a filter. This is called a Berkey filter, and that purified it. 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: I grew over 60 pounds of carrots this year. That was an important food source. Beets. Tindora, a cucumber which is a perennial cucumber that can grow year-round. 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, but it was …. It never was tasty. It was actually probably worse eating it than not eating it. But amaranth grains have good potential. Green beans, yard-long beans have 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 who existed — 50 percent 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 it can still be used today here in central Florida. You could get most of your calories from acorns 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 recommend. That is one of his, 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 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 percent 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 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. Cattail, we could talk about cattail for hours. You can do cattail 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, those little orange melons that grow as weeds in the area. According to Green Deane, 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 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 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 foraged edible. 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 yaupon holly. It’s North America’s only native caffeinated plant. And it is a plant with amazing potential. It has the same abilities basically as green tea, the antioxidants in it. But it’s native to Florida, needs no water, and can be harvested wild or grown on your property. It’s often used as a nice landscaping plant. You can forage it all over the city. And it’s got the same amount of caffeine as coffee. It’s related to yerba mate. It’s basically the yerba mate of North America.

And then, a couple of failures that I had. I mentioned sunflowers, which turned into squirrels, magically. Peanuts. My big goal was to grow my own peanut butter, grow my own coconut oil, or make my own coconut and my honey, and just make and spread that all over a banana. And that was my dream of this year that never came true. I did grow enough peanuts, but I harvested them within the last couple weeks, and I was just too busy coasting to the finish line to try to make the peanut butter. So I didn’t get around to it. So peanuts were a minor failure. And then sugar cane for sugar is a great resource that I have not succeeded at. 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 going to 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, you know, definitely one of those, 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 coconuts to a pint, is what I’m told. So instead, I just made my coconut milk, my coconut butter, my coconut curries. I used a lot of coconuts, but I just didn’t succeed with the coconut oil.

I’ll 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 Seminole pumpkin soup with a beet and cabbage sauerkraut as a garnish. This is pigeon peas with mizuna leaves as a garnish and greens. This is Seminole pumpkin roasted inside of a collard wrap. So those were some of my really nice meals. A little bit of coconut oil that I did have went on these collard wraps with the Seminole pumpkin, and that was one of the best foods of the whole year. So good. Here’s another. This was a very common meal. I probably ate 600, 700 pounds of sweet potatoes this year. Quite a bit of sweet potatoes. And I did different things with them, but the most common thing was just 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 are Seminole pumpkins on the shelf. That’s how I stored them, just sitting there right on that shelf. This is another common meal: yuca. I just boiled the yuca. That was basically how I did it. I didn’t actually have an oven to bake, so that limited me. When I went over to a friend’s house, I would often use their oven, and it was really nice. But this is yuca with fish on there. That’s mullet. The white on top 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.

As I mentioned, I took a trip to Wisconsin. I didn’t make any videos while I was gone, and people commented on YouTube, “Oh, we went to Wisconsin and ate pizza for the summer.” But it was harder to be traveling. Imagine I had no garden. I was away for 82 days, is what it ended up being. So I had no garden up there. This was a whole new challenge of kind of taking it on the road. So before I left, I worked long hours, often until 2:00 in the morning, preparing foods. I was making flour from yuca and yam that Marabou Thomas taught me how to make. I was drying coconuts and making coconut shreds. I was making tons of moringa powder. I was dehydrating herbs. I was foraging. I dehydrated bananas and mangos. And I left with a hundred thousand calories with me at least, which at 2,000 calories a day, that’s 50 days. I was carrying a lot of food with me, about a couple hundred pounds of food. So I had a lot of food. But I really was dependent on foraging. I did a lot of foraging 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 here 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 up 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? I’m still kind of a rookie, so it’s 9b. Okay, so 9b is basically like on this edge where we can grow many things of the north and 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 applesauce. I made so much applesauce. In my hometown, off the top of my head right now, 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.

I have to mention the toilet paper. I grew my own toilet paper. I haven’t bought toilet paper for over five years. This plant is called Plectranthus barbatus, that’s the genus and species. It’s also called blue spur flower. It grows in zones 8 to 10, so right where we are. It 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 one percent of my toilet paper stock. There’s just two little sticks turned into infinite toilet paper for life. It’s basically the perennial toilet paper plant. 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 smell. Like, 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, 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, bred bitterness out of the plants. When we breed bitterness out, we breed the nutrients out. Lettuce is 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. Highly bitter means generally medicinal. Here’s the toilet paper next to the compost toilet. This plant is truly miraculous. This toilet paper … you can actually harvest from the plant and it stays soft. I’ve done it for up to a week, 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 a miraculous plant. And for people that live up north, the good news is toilet paper grows everywhere. There’s lamb’s ear up there. And imagine wiping your butt with a lamb’s 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 scratchy. So anyway, 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 about pests. What about pests? I am very, very proud to say that I, in this two years here, never applied a single pesticide, not even an organic one like BT or neem. Now, how did I deal with pests? It’s not that I never had pests. This is my Seminole 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. There are different names for them, but they eat squashes, cucumbers, 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 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 going to grow strawberries.” Instead, 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 going to do is 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. It’s what’s been proven time and time and time again by the locals. I didn’t come here and reinvent anything. The only reason I’m standing here today after having grown and foraged 100 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 go, a few things. There was one garden that I constantly worked with, and the woman who owned the garden had 50, 60, 70 different species growing in this garden. She would always tell me about the one or two plants that had pests on them. It was a constant, “Oh, the pests are getting these plants.” So, what I said was, “Oh well, we have 68 other plants that don’t have pests, so let’s just eat those.” So, that’s one of the most important elements regarding pests: diversity. If you have a hundred species and the pests are getting ten, you still have 90 species to eat. Diversity is key. Monoculture is going to bring in pests. Polycultures are going to reduce pests. Imagine if you have a line of tomatoes and you get worms. Here, they just move 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, 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, if it’s in too much shade, that often is 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 grow healthy plants so that the aphids aren’t here?” That means planting the right things, planting at the right time of year, planting in the right places, using local knowledge, doing what’s been done for decades. And there are many ways to get local knowledge, which is something that I’m going to go into.

A little bit about my health. This is me about eight months in. 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 fat’s gone.” And my brain wasn’t functioning as well. We had worried that I wasn’t getting enough fats. So, there was a rough patch this summer. There were a good number of times where I definitely thought about giving up. 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 just feeling very gaunt and like I wasn’t getting what I needed. I was pretty confident it was lack of fat and protein.

How I got to Wisconsin was I caught a ride with Jen, one of the Gardens for Single Moms recipients. 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. But that only made it 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 a really hard time. I had my ups and downs. But, that’s when I caught fish. On one of my lowest days, I caught a 20-pound lake trout. That would have fed me for a week. I’m sorry, three weeks, at a pound a day. It’s one of the fattiest fish there is. Basically, it was exactly what I needed. But, I put it back in the water because it was too big. At that point, lake trout are all female, and they’re the producers for that population. They produced so much. So here I had exactly what I needed and what I was craving, but I just couldn’t eat it. I put it back in the water. That hurt me for days. But I did rebound. I caught enough fish. I got the venison. And then at the end of my time in Wisconsin, I actually spoke at UW LaCrosse, where I went to college. And they happened to have a dunk tank where I could measure my body fat composition. And I got it, and it was 15%. So, I had built my fat back up. I had gained it back. Fifteen percent is healthy fat. More than I would expect of myself. And I maintained my weight. I started out at 153.4 pounds. And yesterday, 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. Basically, 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, “Did it.” But it doesn’t, I don’t lose, it’s something that I set out to do forever. So, okay.

I want to end by sharing a whole bunch of resources, and then we’ll have time for questions. So I’m going to go through a bunch of resources now. I have all of this information online at robingreenfield.org/grow. Many of the things that 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 going this whole time? Alright, so this talk is being recorded and will be on my YouTube channel, which is just youtube.com/robingreenfield. So, you can watch this, and I’ll have all the links in the description there. All this information is designed 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.

I’m going to 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 is because of community, period. I could not have done this alone, not even remotely. It’s all through community. The idea of this isn’t that any of us have to grow and forage all 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. 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. Orlando Permaculture, where we’re standing right now, is definitely my favorite community in central Florida. That’s why I came to Orlando … because of Orlando Permaculture. Foraging: Green Deane. One of the greatest foragers in the United States. He’s got the most watched YouTube channel on foraging. He gives classes in Orlando at least once a month and all over the state of Florida. We have an amazing resource with Green Deane. Andy Firk is 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 Firk and do one of his classes, it’s social activism and plants all in one. It’s amazing. Also, John Martin is an expert, the Hmong mushroom guy. ‘Fungi 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 he started doing within the last year. He’s one of the mushroom experts of the area. Eat his classes. So, ‘Fungi John.’

Some other resources: UF/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 bigger events: there’s the permaculture convergences, there are local ones, and then there are the statewide ones. And those are amazing places to meet local permaculturists. Earth Skills Gatherings are truly amazing. I went to both, both years I was here. I highly recommend it. The Florida School of Holistic Living is all about holistic medicine and holistic health. I highly recommend getting involved with that. They have the Florida Herbal Conference once a year. And Sustainable Kashi is a place where I’ve done a lot of my learning. They have free permaculture classes on Wednesdays. They have lots of events. John just hosted a mushroom foraging class there a couple weeks back, for example. So, lots of opportunities there. I haven’t named all of them, but these are some of the amazing resources that we have locally.

For online resources: one of my favorites is Pete Kanaris. I was lucky enough to get to spend a lot of my time with him. He is one of the reasons I’m still standing. He took me out fishing, and he was a great … he’s just an amazing friend, an amazing resource. His YouTube channel is GreenDreamsTV. There’s so much knowledge on there. Again, UF/IFAS Extension is a great online resource. Green Deane, EatTheWeeds.com. David the Good, The Survival Gardener, so much education came from him. Andy Firk, I mentioned him again. My website is robingreenfield.org/grow, or just /grow, and that is just an accumulation of all of this put into one place for you. Another one is Terry Meer, terrymeer.com/resources, and that is just a really great resource guide that puts together a lot of the events and the groups and such.

So, some nurseries. My favorite probably is Heart, Josh Jamison. He is one of the amazing, solid foundations of this community. Definitely go take a tour there. Their plants are some 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, an 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 Seminole Farms and Nursery. Green’s Nursery. Green Dreams, Pete Kanaris 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. Every month there’s a plant raffle, right? So every month that you come here, you can take plants home with you. There are plant swaps, there are plant raffles. But it’s about connecting. I have this, you have that. So, you don’t have to buy plants. I have enough yuca 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. Simple Living Institute has had plants. They do plants. Orlando Permaculture. Leu Gardens has a plant sale. And then just meeting permaculturists. Talk to people. Ask if you can go over to their garden and share knowledge. Now, the key to a permaculturist’s heart is helping them, doing work. That’s the key to any gardener’s 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 gardening or at a permaculturist’s food forest. Another nursery that I visited is SoExotic, and 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 Apopka. They only have about 30 varieties of seeds, but they’re all great varieties that grow really well here. Crispy Farms is an incredible little place to get seeds. Whitwam Organics is over in Tampa. And then Southern Heritage Seed Collective, Melissa DeSa is the seed genius of central Florida, I would say. They are a non-profit, and they’re spreading seeds. They probably have 50 to 100 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’s 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 & Vegetable Gardening. That’s more annual-based. But reading that really gives you the basic knowledge you need of understanding central Florida. That was my holy grail of a book starting out. But if it’s not really perennials, it’s more annual. Perennials: David the Good was a great resource with his books. Very small books that have the information you need, like How to Create Your Own Florida Food Forest and Totally Crazy Easy Florida Gardening, the plants that grow ridiculously well that you can’t kill. Peggy Lantz’s Florida’s Edible Wild Plants is a foraging book that I really recommend. Marabou Thomas has a … more like a cookbook, Home Garden Cuisine Toolkit for the Subtropics. I really highly recommend that book. It’s a beautiful one. James Stevens’ Vegetable Gardening in Florida … I read it twice. I have that one listed. And this is Marabou 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 yuca flour. 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. And 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 also Paradise Lot by Eric Toensmeier. Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture are two great permaculture books. There’s so many out there, but it’s just to name a couple. I love Michael Pollan. His books are some of the foundations to me questioning the globalized food system. So, if you want to understand even big organic, Michael Pollan’s books are fantastic. And then Sandor Katz’s Wild Fermentation. That’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’ve got your local tree companies, and then GetChipDrop.com. 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. And we have the new compost program started by Charlie, so you can do that as well. Cardboard, I mean again: grocery, liquor and appliance stores. 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. Then for drip irrigation, you can just get materials at hardware stores and online. Those are kind of my main ingredients besides the plants that I mentioned.

And then as far as this project goes, some other resources. My YouTube channel is where I produced a lot of videos about this year. So, if you want to learn more, if 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.com/robingreenfield has these videos. I’m putting out a video soon that is how to turn your lawn into a garden. And then a lot of the resources for this project. If you go to robingreenfield.org/foodfreedom, food lists: the 300 foods that I foraged this year and grew, with links to a lot of them. /foodfreedom meals: that lists every meal for the last 365 days and every snack. /foodfreedom photos: photos of many of my meals and my foods, where you can learn more. /foodfreedom rules: there are all the guidelines behind this year. /foodfreedom why: is why I did this and more about that. And then lastly, the book. I do have a book that’s not out yet. It’ll come out in December of 2020 from New Society Publishers. And 100 percent of the proceeds of that book are going to be donated to nonprofits that are working on food solutions … working to create a 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 that I’m writing right now, I think may be the most powerful thing that I’ve ever put out. So I highly recommend it. I’ll be on a book tour here when that book comes out, end of December or end of 2020, beginning of 2021. And I’ll be doing a talk on that book as well.

So, as far as the media behind this, I want to thank Sierra … food photographer Sierra, for my friend, Sierra Ford. She took a lot of these photos, as well as Danielle Werner’s Live Wonderful Photography. And then, as far as my videos that you’ve seen over the year, John Van Mutius, Brandon Carrey, and Paul O’Neill. So I want to thank them all 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 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? 9:00. 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, I like 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. You’ve been such a great inspiration and motivation for us. 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 I’m going to miss you, definitely. I’m just going to be thinking about you when I drive by the house and the property and everything. And just, it’s a great thing having you here.