The Year of Foraging – Florida Chapter

For one year nature is my pantry, my garden and my pharmacy. I am foraging for every bit of my food and medicine, down to the salt, oil and spices. In this video, I share an update from my 2 months in Florida, months 3 and 4 of the year-long endeavor. (January 3rd – February 25th, 2026 – Days 87 through 140)

Transcript: The following is a transcription of The Year of Foraging Florida Chapter.

Hello dear friends. Today I am going to share with you my chapter in Florida of the year of foraging all of my food and medicine.

This is the months of January and February through the winter. And this is months four and five. I’m going to share about what I foraged during this chapter and how the entire experience of living closely connected with the earth through this experiment has gone up to this point. When I was planning for this chapter, I realized that I would be gone for 3 months, which was as long as the experiment had gone so far. So, this would be a long time on the road, leaving behind the security of my home where I had everything that I needed and hitting the road for a big tour ahead with the idea being that this is a teaching tour, a speaking tour, foraging walks, and hosting foraging schools. When planning to leave Ashland, I had a lot of work to do with food processing and preservation. What I was bringing with me was mostly dehydrated and canned foods. My plan was to bring a lot of food with me because I would be on a fairly busy schedule while I was on tour, but also to really tap into the abundance of the landscapes that I would be on in Florida and in the southern United States. So, I brought a pretty substantial amount of my food, but was planning to forage, I would say, over half of the food that I would need while I was traveling.

One of the most common things that people ask is, “Well, how do you get around?” And how that worked is in a talk that I was giving in Minneapolis, I put out the word that I was looking for somebody that was already heading down to Florida. And I got a ride with a guy named Isaiah. He picked me up and we loaded his vehicle full of my food, my stuff, and all the books that we distribute. And it was a 3-day journey down to Florida.

It took about a half day of driving south of Minneapolis before we got past all of the snow. And I started to see that there was food and medicine growing still through the winter. At every single stop that we took pretty much I was finding food and medicine.

A lot of people wonder how do I eat on the road and I filmed a video of eating at a rest stop in Georgia and this video will fill you in on that. So I’m in Alabama right now on my way to Florida and I’m going to show you what I’m making. First wild parsnips. These were harvested in Madison from the fields. Then salmon. This came from Lake Superior that I harvested this fall. This morning I harvested oyster mushrooms fresh from a log. I was not expecting to find this abundance. And actually Isaiah, who I’m driving to Florida with, you want to say hello?
[Isaiah:] Hey!
Isaiah’s the one who actually spotted these while I was filling up my spring water, which I used the app findaspring.org to find springs to fill up. And oh, of course, the onion grass. Last night, I actually stayed at a place using the website Hipcamp. And when I arrived, the woman’s named Jennifer, whose place was called Tiny Dreamer, actually has been watching my videos, and she was joyful to have me foraging in her yard. And so, onion grass and I also harvested black walnuts there as well. I carry my pantry of foods here and then all of this is being cooked in this Instant Pot. So, I can put these ingredients in, plug it in right here at the rest stop, have a hot meal, and then as I’m traveling, I can just plug it back in to heat it back up and eat those leftovers meal after meal. So all the way to Florida, I was able to continue eating my 100% foraged food and able to eat really truly nourishing meals just plugging in my pot, whether it was at rest stops or gas stations or at the home of anybody that I was staying with. When I arrived in Florida, I found there was so much food and medicine right away. fresh greens like dollarweed, Bidens alba and peppergrass, fruits like beautyberry, roadside wild mustard. Right away I was able to be starting to harvest the wonderful foods and medicines. And I arrived at a place called Wander, which would be my base for the beginning portion of my time in Florida. They have a wild citrus grove of hundreds of citrus trees that have all self-seeded being spread around through the animals eating citrus making an understory of citrus growing under the live oak trees. So I was welcomed by a fruit that I hadn’t had for many months.

After just one day at Wander, my first big chapter was to go into the Everglades and have some real solitude. It was time to be alone and to be really alone for quite some time. I gave myself two weeks, two weeks of silence without speaking, two weeks of seeing very as few human beings as possible to paddle the Everglades from Flamingo to Everglades City. It was about a 70mile paddle, my longest solo nature immersion. To do that, I had to prepare some of these foods, gather them together. All right. What I brought with me was wild rice, deer fat, mushroom powder, herbs, some herbal teas, as well as some of the freshly harvest citrus. I calculated that I had about 16,000 calories plus the oranges and grapefruit and that I would need probably about 52,000 calories while I was down there. So, this meant that about 1/3 of the food that I would need I had. And that as I was paddling these 70 miles through the Everglades, I would be harvesting my foods. About 70% about 2/3 of my food I would be harvesting as I was deeply immersed in the Everglades. Here’s a video from my arrival back sharing a little bit about my time in the Florida Everglades in the 10,000 islands wilderness. “14 days of solitude and silence. My longest time alone in nature. I am well nourished. I probably lost maybe a pound of fat out there in 14 days of living off the land and the water here. So, I want to show you what food I ate, but more importantly, what food I came back with. So, here I have sea purslane. I ate sea purslane at many meals. I cooked this up. What a wonderful food this is. It’s more of a hearty vegetable than a green. and cooked. Oh my gosh, very tasty. I’ve come home with three coconuts. I harvested 20 coconuts out there on the Cape. I was amazed that there’s wild coconuts out there. I had no idea. So, I ate about 17 coconuts out there. And these are a small medium size coconut, but that’s about a coconut a day on average. For water, I brought 15 gallons of water in these two jugs and this bucket. This is the water that I have left, a half gallon. I had to ration a little bit there at the end. And I used salt water for a lot of my cooking. So when I cooked rice, I would cook it partially in salt water. So what I’m bringing back with me is 10 gallons of ocean water. This is some pretty pure ocean water out here. So I’ll be able to use that for cooking and for salt. I brought 35 servings of rice, about 7 lbs. I’ve come back with 2 lbs about 10 servings. I think that’s about 8,000 calories or something 9,000 calories of rice. So, this was my staple food, wild rice, of course. And I managed to come back with quite a bit of it. And then also deer fat. This was full and there’s about 8 o left. So, I used about eight of 28 o so of my deer fat. So, those are my staples and I managed to not exhaust them. I didn’t really use my greens, but I drank herbal teas. I used a little bit of my mushroom powder. I finished up my herbs. And then, of course, I ate all those oranges and grapefruits. I finished those by day six. Now, what I was really eating out there was fish. I caught 28lb. Probably ate a good 24lb. And a few of those pounds are not eaten because of bones and you know the intestines and such. I never expected to come back with fish. But this is what I’m coming back with. 11 mullet a mackerel. One lady fish. I caught these mullet yesterday. I’ve been keeping them on just continuously switching out the water. So I’d say they’re still good. And then the mackerel was a gift this morning from the more open waters that I was paddling through. I ate sea trout, red fish, jacks, ladyfish, mullet, and maybe one other type of fish. I cooked up some sea trout. This is what I was eating last night and what I’m eating today. Okay. I also came across multiple nopal cactuses, the fruit and the pads as well as Brazilian pepper as well. So, there was a lot of food out there. I would say out there about 75% of my diet was food that I foraged, food that I fished. The other 25% was food that I foraged and brought with me. Of course, a 100% foraged diet. And that’s by calories is what I’m talking about. So, that’s pretty substantial. And I found that if I had put in more of an intention, I could have brought no food and lived just off of the food out there. And then lastly, just to show my fishing gear, what I caught the fish on. Amazingly, I caught most of these fish on this $30 fishing pole that I bought at a hardware store in California on my way to Glacier National Park. And this is still the line that came on it. kind of amazed that how effective this $30 pole is. I use this lure as well as a few others and then of course the mullet the cast net and I just have a little 6ft cast net. So it was challenging. I had to get close to them. So that’s the Everglades adventure and there is much more much more coming. The next chapter awaits.”

There you go. While I was all alone camping on a little island, I experienced day 100 of foraging all my food and medicine. And I reflected in that moment and realized that I could not remember what it was like to eat from a grocery store or restaurant. This was now my new norm. I was truly settling in. I was really feeling very nourished that the earth could provide me with everything that I needed. Then my body was feeling solid, my mind, my spirit feeling very solid. It was a very healing, nourishing, rejuvenating and refreshing time. A real deep experience of connection, of being at home here on Earth. I write in depth about my experience in the everglades at robingreenfield.org/evergladesolitude if you want to hear about more of that experience.

One thing I’d like to touch a little bit on is that in a lot of national parks and in many places there are laws against foraging. There’s codes against foraging. In the Everglades in particular, there’s a code against harvesting any plants. Fishing completely legal and in code, but harvesting plants not allowed. So, I want to touch just a little bit on that. Some people would be concerned about that. Some people might even be kind kind of feeling frustrated or disappointed or angry hearing me talk about foraging in this space. But what’s really important to realize is that when I’m foraging, I am thinking about this environment in which I am in. And I am thinking about how I can be in this environment in a way that is not only neutral as some would say leave no trace but not destructive but can actually be beneficial. This requires critical thinking. The idea of these codes of course is to protect these ecosystems for the earth for the plants and animals and for the benefit of every human being who visits there and who doesn’t visit there. So, there is a way to do that and one example of that is eating plants that are introduced to this ecosystem that are considered invasive. An easy example of that was the Brazilian pepper that I harvested while I was down there. No harm whatsoever to the ecosystem to harvest the Brazilian pepper. There’s actually substantial efforts to remove the Brazilian pepper. So, by harvesting plants that are considered invasive, it’s actually an ecosystem service. The coconuts, coconuts are not native. they wouldn’t be considered invasive, but those are just coconuts that likely washed up from the Caribbean onto the Cape in the Everglades. Harvesting those coconuts does no harm to the ecosystem and is not competing with any of the animals there. They’re not dependent upon the coconuts. Then you have sea purslane for example and sea purslane is really important for helping with preventing erosion on these islands. And if every single human being came in there and wantonly harvested the sea purslane, that would do damage. But the key for me is that I can see when there are, you know, sea purslane patches that are 30 yards, 50 yards long, we are talking about huge patches and then going in and just thinning it, pruning the new growth tips. And the reality is that when harvesting sea purslane and pruning these new growth tips, it actually helps the colony of them to spread and to grow. So what I do is I practice earth code. Rather than just reading the laws that are on paper, I instead critically think. I know the ecosystem in which I am in and I know how I can work with these plants and animals in a way that is not bad for this space, but neutral at the least. and often actually beneficial for the ecosystem.

From the Everglades, I now had a week a week of serious harvesting. The idea being that I wanted to harvest about a 2 month supply of food in a 1 week period so that for the next 2 months I would be able to really focus on the talks that I would be giving, the plant walks, as well as the foraging schools that I would be hosting. So, I settled in at a place called Wander with friends Wendell and Nancy, fellow Earth stewards, and I had a couple of people who had uh volunteered to support me to work together in harvesting and processing food. And now was time to really get down to business and do some harvesting. I left behind my large supply of wild rice in Wisconsin because I would be replacing my wild rice with the wild yam. Dioscorea alata. I had a relationship with this plant already from my year of growing and foraging all my food and medicine. And I knew where the wild yam was growing in some of the preserves, how to harvest it, and how to work with it. That was one of my absolute main priorities was to harvest my staple calorie and thus preserving the bounty of wild rice that I had. The wild yam is a plant that is considered invasive as well.

It was introduced from another ecosystem and actually in the forests of Florida, it does real harm because the vines crawl up, choke out the trees and compete with the native plants. I go to a place called Oakland Nature Preserve where I have a relationship with the group there and they are happy for me to come and dig up these wild yams, take them out of there and help to reduce the amount that they’re spreading. The largest wild yam I’ve ever harvested was 157 lbs. Over this week, I harvested about 100 pounds of wild yams with my friend Eric Joseph Lotus. And in under 2 hours, we had harvested 100 lbs of wild yam. So, we’re talking about an incredible food source. We’re talking about being able to harvest many, many calorie days in a fraction of one day. How wild yam works is it’s basically like potato, giant potato, except slimier. I liberally cut off all the outside peel and then when it’s tender and young, it’s a nice white color. And then when it’s older, it’s a more yellowish color. With that wild yam, I eat it fresh by baking it, by frying it, by boiling it in soups, and then I also dehydrated a lot of it into chunks. And I made a lot of wild yam flour that I could then make tortillas and not quite bread, but flatbread like biscuits. For the rest of my time in Florida, I carried wild yams with me because they store very well. And in fact, you can actually just chop a chunk right off of them and they will heal and then you can chop a chunk off of them later. So, I ate fresh yams throughout the tour and then also with my dehydrated flour was able to make foods with that as well.

One of my big objectives during this week was to harvest a wild pig. I know that some people out there are thinking, harvesting a pig, why would you do that? Why would you kill an animal uh when there are plenty of plants out there? Wild pigs were introduced from another ecosystem. There’s over a half mill million of them in Florida. And they do an incredible amount of destruction. They root and they dig up the native ecosystem, destroying small trees, causing an incredible amount of erosion. Harvesting wild pigs is actually one of the most sustainable foods in Florida as well as parts of California and Texas. I had a friend Django who took me out to hunt for a wild pig and we went out on the land of someone who lived a few miles away who was happy for us to hunt on their land. I went out four times for just a couple hours at dawn and dusk. The first time I saw a wild pig, but I didn’t have an opportunity. And it was either the second time or the third time that I had a perfect shot and didn’t take it. Missed the opportunity. My heart was really pounding and afterwards I was pretty deflated. I was really depending on that. I didn’t bring most of my venison and was really counting on having that wild pig. Another objective during this week was to go fishing. Fortunately, my time turned out to be quite limited. I didn’t have as much time as I wanted and I was able to really rely on that abundance of fish that I had harvested while I was in the Everglades and managed to take home and be able to cook that for multiple weeks ahead. And the fish were able to replace the pig during that time. My ideal scenario was to have both, but having the fish was enough to meet my needs as far as the fat and the calories.

My other staple, coconuts. Coconuts are a wonderful food in Florida, and I would venture to say probably 95% of all coconuts that are being grown in Florida are not eaten. Many of them are actually thrown into the garbage cans, if you can believe that. What I do when I’m in Florida is I watch for coconut trees. Many of them are in public parks, also in uh abandoned lots, a lot of places where houses have been lost due to hurricanes. There’s many coconuts, and then as well as just in front yards. What I’ll do is I will simply knock on the door, ask, “Do you eat your coconuts or are they going to waste?” More often than not, people don’t eat their coconuts and they’re very happy to share them. The vast majority of my coconut harvesting though has been in public parks throughout Fort Meyers and Fort Lauderdale. Southern Florida is the premier place for coconuts. During this time, I drank an abundance of coconut water, a wonderful hydration, and just a really joyful food. And I broke a lot of these coconuts open and processed them. What I was going for primarily was not the green coconuts which have wonderful water and some jelly sometimes. I was going for the brown coconuts which were mature and had the white meat, the thick white meat. And then what I could do with that is blend that up to make coconut milk or use it in uh soups as uh like a coconut milk base. And what I did more so though was to dehydrate that. I broke it up into chunks and dehydrated those chunks which I could store long term or shredded it into flakes that I could use. Even more so, my objective was to make coconut butter. My first times around with coconut butter were not successful. The reason why is I didn’t get enough of the moisture out. You have to get all of the moisture out. Maybe not quite all of it, but almost all of it out through dehydrating. And then I put that into a Vitamix blender. And I have a wonderful coconut butter like you can have peanut butter or pecan butter or almond butter and so on. I was able to make very enjoyable fatty rich coconut butter. The other food that I made from coconuts was coconut flour. So when I make coconut milk and I strain that, you have your wonderful coconut milk, but what you’ve strained out that fiber that’s coconut flour. And I could mix that coconut flour with my yam flour in my different uh biscuits that I was making. What I carried with me for this was just a simple spike. And this is a spike that I buy at a hardware store. With that spike, I can open up half about 30 coconuts in casually about 45 minutes to an hour. It definitely takes some work, some using of the leverage and of the strength, but it’s a very simple tool that I travel with for coconuts.

During my time in Florida, I was very grateful to find a banana rack growing wildly in a public park. Throughout Florida, there are many bananas that are growing in public parks and in areas that are old farm stands and such. What I do with the green bananas is I harvest the whole rack while it’s still green. Chop that up, dehydrate it, and then blend that into a flour. The entire green peel and the unripe fruit blends together into a flour. So, bananas aren’t really so much of a fruit for me generally when it comes to my wild harvesting of bananas. And my primary fruit came from citrus. There is so much citrus growing around Florida. Much of it is in understories of live oaks. That’s a wonderful place to find them growing as well as city parks and uh empty lots. I find them growing in some of the state parks in the woods. Many of these are spread through animals and then some of them are just ones that have been grown in public places often going to waste. I enjoyed a lot of citrus during this time of preparation and was able to harvest enough citrus to bring me through the Florida tour along with the citrus that I continued harvesting around Florida.

When I arrived into Florida, I still had an abundance of salt that I had harvested in the beginning of my time in Portland, Maine, but it was time to make more salt as well. I brought back 10 gallons of ocean water from the Everglades. And at foraging school, I boiled that down to make into my salt. Ocean water is about 3 1/2% salt. So that means a 5gallon bucket of ocean water has about one pint of salt. It’s a very simple process of making. I will sometimes boil it down. In the ideal scenario, I’m already having a bonfire and I will put it on there so I’m not using extra resources. When I am on the road though, sometimes I will just simply put it into the Instant Pot and it just boils off. I can set that outside and then just keep topping it off. Better yet, I pour it into glass baking trays and let the sun do the work through dehydration. And in a glass baking tray, it takes about a week for that whole amount to evaporate and then to be left with salt crystals. The other thing that I do is I just carry the salt water with me. And then when I’m cooking soups and stews and things like that or wild rice, I’ll just use that ocean water as part of the broth or part of the water for the cooking. And that way I don’t even have to make salt or really do any uh extra work. I’m just able to use that in my cooking.

Another staple that I harvested during this time is yaupon holly. The genus and species is Ilex vomitoria. This is one of the only caffeinated plants that grows wildly. It’s said to be the only caffeinated plant that grows in the continental United States. It grows abundantly through the Gulf Coast area from North Carolina down to Florida and over to Texas. It’s a relative of yerba mate. It has the same nutritional profile basically as yerba mate or green tea. Yaupon holly is an incredibly abundant resource in Florida. It’s something that’s grown commonly as a landscaping plant and it also grows abundantly in the wild as well. I actually don’t drink it myself because caffeine gives me a racing heart. But I love to serve yaupon holly at foraging school to help people see an alternative to coffee, an alternative that is actually truly beneficial to our earth. And then of course wild greens. I ate wild greens while I was at Wander wherever I was going harvesting wild greens. But the big challenge, there was some serious cold in winter and a lot of the wild greens and many of the plants died back substantially, which made for much more challenging foraging.

During this time, I got a lot of help from people. Some people, you know, see what I’m doing and they think it’s very individualistic. And yes, there is an element of individualism here. Uh, I am certainly the only one that’s foraging all of my food and medicine in this experience and experiment, but I couldn’t do this without the support of others. So, so much of the harvesting and processing is done with others. Often it’s foragers, experienced foragers taking me to the places that they already know, sharing their knowledge, and people who don’t know what they’re doing, but are really wanting to learn, who join me, and then help me with the harvesting and the processing. Wild yams is a perfect example of that. I got a lot of support with digging up the wild yams and then with uh processing them. And I really couldn’t do this without the support of other people. And the reason that I need that support really is so that I have time for teaching. After the week of food prep, now it was time for foraging school, a weekend long immersion in foraging. And we had dozens of people sign up. But we ended up with the coldest day in I think 39 years. got down to about 18 degrees there in central Florida and that was really challenging for a lot of the Floridians, but many people still came out and we had about a group of 50 people learning all about the food and medicine that is growing freely and abundantly in Florida. I co-taught with my colleague Eric Joseph Lewis at Wander along with Wendell and Nancy. It was a truly enjoyable experience. Our meals were primarily locally sourced, including many foraged foods. We really dove in learning about two dozen different foods and medicines and the many different skills that it takes for really being able to break free from the grocery store from identification, harvesting, processing to learning about safety and sustainability and ethics of foraging. I’m teaching many more foraging schools this year throughout California, Washington, Oregon, Wisconsin, and the East Coast, Minnesota, and Detroit, Michigan. So, you can go to robingreenfield.org/foraging school if you’d like to go to a foraging school. Not only did we have the coldest day in almost 40 years, but their neuro virus came through and numerous of my colleagues got sick as well as many of the uh attendees ended up getting sick after leaving. But I was so grateful that I made it through the entire foraging school without getting sick myself, which was a nice testament of letting your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food. many sick people around, sharing hugs and connections with so many people and I managed to stay resilient through that.

So many people would be wondering how is my health doing? When I was in St. Pete, I stopped into a doctor, Dr. Doug Shapiro, and he had reached out to me through social media early on in the endeavor saying that he would like to help me with tracking how this is going on a more medical level. And as many of you know, I really avoid the western health care system and am for the last 15 years very minimally involved. But I thought it would be incredibly interesting to see my blood work to really see the vitamins and the minerals and if any issues arrive and that a lot of people would see like, well, one, can I meet all of my needs through what’s growing abundantly and freely all around us? and to be able to see the inner workings of that I think would be a both interesting and unique way to get a lot more people uh into this conversation. So I went in for one of my first doctor checkups in quite some time. I was very pleased that he said everything is looking good. All of those details are published on the website at robingreenfield.org/foragingyear. So all the details from the checkup and the blood work are all published unedited on my website. And the summary of that visit was that there were no issues that he saw whatsoever at that point. Everything was looking good in the general checkup. And his encouragement was not to lose any more weight. The weight that I was at, which I had lost a handful of pounds up to this point from the beginning, were in a good baseline state. But he said at about 8.7% body fat that it would be best for me to maintain that and not lose any more weight. I didn’t do my blood work then. I did my blood work a little bit later on. And so that will be shared in a future video. One other note on that is I reached one year without using a toothbrush, toothpaste or dental floss. just using twigs and pine needles and fishbones as toothpicks and practicing a very natural hygiene. And I went into a dentist who I had seen years in the past and she I was grateful to see shared with me that she could see no issues. We didn’t do x-rays but uh one year without a toothbrush, toothpaste or dental floss that experiment is going quite well so far.

So the real reason that I was in Florida, the number one reason was to do a tour to share knowledge with the people and help people on this journey of breaking free from the global industrial food system and really deeply reconnecting with the earth. Some people assume that the reason that I went to Florida is because you can’t stay in Wisconsin for the winter and that it’s a it’s an absolute must. And that’s definitely not the case. What I had found up to this point is that I definitely had my needs met and would be able to stay through a winter in Wisconsin. And of course, the simple way to do that is you harvest the abundance of the spring, summer, and fall. And then you store that through drying, canning, freezing, wild fermentation, and cold storage, all the different ways of preservation. But I am uh someone who from a young age didn’t want to stick around for the winters and really likes to be warm. So besides me wanting to share this knowledge and teach, I also just am in the natural flow where I spend winters in warm places. So, I was very excited to have this ability to be immersed in this year of foraging all my food and medicine, embodying this message and taking the message to the people. I did a tour throughout most of the major cities of Florida and many of the small cities as well. And as I was immersed in this, I was leading foraging walks and giving talks in many different communities.

At the beginning of this tour, after having made it through the whole foraging school without getting sick, I actually got sick for the first time. It was a pretty strong head cold. I experienced some nausea and diarrhea and headaches and real fatigue and tiredness. And this lasted through my time in Gainesville, Orlando, and into St. Pete and Tampa. And that definitely made it much more challenging. What I mostly did, I didn’t take any medicines. I didn’t break out of my commitment to the year of foraging all my food and medicine. No painkillers or anything like that. The main thing that I did is I embraced that I am human. Therefore, I get sick. It’s part of the human experience. And my immune system is designed to, you know, ward that off. And the resilience of my body is designed to be able to heal over time. So I continued eating nourishing foods and taking in the medicines from the land and getting sleep. Although I was probably sick because I had spread myself too thin with all of the uh traveling and all of the talks and plant walks and I continued on that. So, it took a little more time than ideal to get really back into things.

And the other big focus of this tour by visiting all of these cities is to do interviews with the media. I was so glad to see that I was able to reach the people of Florida through interviews in almost every city that I was in with the news channels, the news stations, radio, as well as podcasts and magazines. I was able to reach a lot of people in Florida, helping them to see that, you know, it’s Florida is one place where a lot of people think that all of these foods are toxic and poisonous and they’re going to kill you. And through just being able to talk to people through the everyday media outlets was able to really help people to see like, wow, that plant in my backyard isn’t poisonous. It’s actually edible. While I was there, I also produced a beginner video for foraging in Florida that introduces everyone to 17 different easy to identify plants that can change your life. And that video I highly recommend for anybody who’s starting their foraging journey in Florida and so grateful to been able to put that out there as something to leave behind for people to have an easy access to the knowledge.

So, of course, during all of this, there’s the real balance of being on the road, staying in new places every night or every few nights, giving talks and plant walks, uh, and then but continuing the 100% foraged diet and that can be a real challenge. There’s I was carrying a lot of food in the vehicle. My teammate Marielle did the entire foraging Florida tour with me. This video filmed in the Fort Meyers area at my friends Brian and Sun shares what I was traveling with. My diet right now is around a lot of Florida foods. This is the giant wild yam, dioscorea alata. And this is my staple food down here rather than my wild rice. And I eat this in many different ways. Now, as you can see, this takes up a lot of space. So, what I do with the wild yam is I dehydrate it into chunks and then I blend these chunks into flour. So, this is my yam flour. I’ve also made flour from green bananas that I’m foraging here, as well as mature coconuts. So with that, I’m currently learning to make dumplings and tortillas and interesting unique foods with these different flowers.

So one of the keys, of course, while I’m on the road, I’m doing a lot of foraging and it’s how do I condense those foods to make it much easier to travel with and help them to fit in the car. I’m eating a lot of coconuts. And you can just see the difference between having them inside of the husk and right here. And then even better is I dehydrate these into chunks that I can eat. I just opened up all of these today. Right now it’s like most days I have foods that I’m processing. Days go by, maybe even multiple days go by, but I’ve generally got projects open. uh foods that I’m dehydrating and storing. These yams have been holding over me for a couple weeks, I would say. Actually, in northern Wisconsin, I’m eating a lot of venison and fish. And I’m continuing my fish down here. This is canned mullet, so very easy to travel with. This is pressure canned. You can even see the layer of fat that’s on the top. Mullet is a very fatty fish, and I’ve been very productive and successful with catching mullet. So that’s my protein, my fat, and my calories to some large degree there between these. And then I’m eating a lot of fruit. So, you know, we have feral or wild oranges and grapefruits. These big grapefruits came from a park in Orlando. And these wild oranges came from the place where I hosted foraging school where they have this basically wild orange orchard that has popped up over the last decades. Over here is star fruit. I just harvested this in a public park in Label, Florida last night and that’s exciting. That was my first harvest of that. So I’m eating a lot of fresh foods down here. about 50 to 75% of my food I that I’m eating right now is food that I’m harvesting while I’m down here in Florida for January and February. So, I’m eating a pretty substantial substantially Florida diet. But that said, I brought a good amount of food from Wisconsin with me. I’ve got pressure canned foods. I’ve got dehydrated foods. A lot of my herbs and spices are foods that I brought with me from Wisconsin. Things that were that I can dehydrate and have in a really, you know, really compacted container. A really great harvest for me was wild onions in Gainesville. And I managed to make 2 and 1/2 quarts of this fermented wild onions. And this has served as my main flavoring. And wow, it is. Yeah, it’s really good. This is bringing a lot of value into my life.

The water that I’m drinking is water that I harvest either from springs or wells. And sometimes that does include wells at people’s houses, but no water that’s been adulterated. Chlorine, fluoride, water that’s as close to just from the earth. And I’m carrying generally with me about 10 gallons of water. I carry a cooler with me. And sometimes I have food in it, sometimes I don’t. I have some frozen plastic bottles and right now I’m eating a lot of fresh greens. So this is doc in particular. I’m pretty sure that this is swamp doc and this is the tastiest dock that I’ve had. I’m eating a lot of wild mustard, Biden’s alba, go cola or a little bit of go to cola, dollar, oxalis or wood sorrel. So I’m getting in a good amount of wild greens. What I have over here is my cooker. And that has wild yam in there with coconut and salt. And with that, I can add uh I can add some canned fish and easily have a complete meal on the road. I’ve got things pretty well dialed in where I’m able to eat really nutritious and delicious foods on the road. In fact, the food is becoming more and more delicious. I’m getting more skilled with this and bringing together the more complete meal. Throughout my time in Florida, I harvested and ate about 43 species of plants. So, a pretty wide diversity to go along with the 50 to 100 species that I had brought them with me from uh having stored in Wisconsin from Wisconsin and my other travels. Some of the highlights of what I ate while I was down there was the big dock greens from Orlando, the wild citrus in Orlando and Gainesville, the wild yams from Central Florida, the abundant greens in St. Pete and Tampa, especially from Sweetwater Farm. The coconuts in Fort Meyers and the Surinam Cherry in Miami. The loquats in Jensen Beach. more coconuts in Fort Lauderdale, the bananas in Melbourne, and the many weedy greens growing throughout the state of Florida.

After my time in tour, I was absolutely tired and it was time for my 10-day silent meditation, Vipassana. This is my fourth year of doing Vipassana meditation and this is at Jessup, Georgia, which is where I did my first Vipassana as well. The big challenge is that in Vipassana meditation you eat the food that is served to you and it is of course not foraged food. So I really wanted to do my Vipassana meditation. I did not want to miss out of a year. This is core to my life. And so what I did is I packed my 11 days 10day supply of forage food. I broke my year my previous year of complete transparency and I snuck in my foraged food. I felt okay with that. The reason why is because the most important part of a Vipassana is that you are dedicated to your practice and you are not distracting anybody else from their practice. And my uh eating of my forage food did not distract anybody else. But it was definitely a little bit of a dilemma having to sort of hide away eating my foraged foods. And the real challenge too was knowing how much that I need and not being able to cook for the entire time that I was there and not really having the ideal scenario. So this little video shows exactly what I brought to my Vipassana meditation. “I have about 3 lbs of yam flour cooked into yam bread of sorts with green powder, stinging nettle and basswood leaves in there. I have venison from a car killed deer and I have six quarts of that to eat one pint a day about. I have two quarts of coconut butter and one of them is really a backup. I don’t plan to eat both of them. So that’s pure coconut. I have dehydrated loquat and a little bit of dehydrated star fruit. And then a little bit of fruit sauces. So I have blueberry, applesauce, autumn olive or autumn berry. And then I also have some apple cider vinegar. I have 19 small oranges. And then I have a few herbal teas, roasted root blend as a tea, seaweed, salt, and evening primrose. So, this is 10 days of food at my silent meditation. I’m anxious to see how this goes.” I walked out of the meditation having gained so much clarity and insight, having really gotten what I was hoping to. If you’d like to learn about Vipassana meditation, you can read about that on my website at robingreenfield.org/Vipassana and I share the benefits for me, what I receive from it. But it is a deep level of letting go of what no longer serves. It’s a deep level of reprogramming the mind. It’s a deep level of finding clarity and peace, inner wholeness and completeness, of practicing nonattachment and impermanence, the reality of what we are. We are impermanent beings in an impermanent ecosystem. So it was a very deep practice and I welcome you to read about that on my website again at robingreenfield.org/Vipassana. When I finished the Vipassana I had just a little bit of food left. I had managed to bring just about exactly the amount of food that I needed and I did nibble on the plants that are growing around there. There was some foraging that continued as spring was arising in Jessup, Georgia.

That is the Florida chapter of my year of foraging all my food and medicine. Again, this was January and February, months four and five. And after the Vipassana meditation is the southern tour and then a return to my homeland of Wisconsin. So, I’d like to share some resources with you for your foraging journey. If you’re interested in all of the plants that I forage in Florida, I have a complete plant list that you can find at robingreenfield.org/foragingyear. If you’re feeling inspired and excited and you want to start foraging, you can go to robingreenfield.org/foraging and that’s my beginner guide to foraging which will really get you started. On there you’ll find our database, the find a forager database, and through there you can find foragers to learn from. We have over 500 different people who teach foraging. I am far from the only one out there who teaches foraging. I am hosting foraging schools across the country and would love for you to join. You can go to robingreenfield.org/foragingschool. We have day long and weekend long foraging schools that are just an incredible opportunity to build your community of like-minded people to learn the skills that you need to forage and also just have an experience of just really deeply connecting with the earth. My book food freedom, the story of my year of growing and foraging all my food is an empowerment manual for liberation through food and it’s available as an experiment in the gift economy. If you have not read that yet, I highly recommend it for this journey. And I would love for you to come out and see me if I am coming to your community. I have a west coast tour from California all the way up to Washington. I have an East Coast tour coming up in the summer and the fall of 2026. And I’ll have another Midwest tour as well. So, San Diego, Los Angeles, uh, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and many cities in between in May and June, and many, many talks throughout the country. You can find all of that at robingreenfield.org/schedule. We are planting 1 million community fruit trees and we would love for you to join in this grassroots collaborative effort of thousands of people doing this. That is at communityfruittreees.org.

So dear friends, one plant at a time. If you learn one new plant per month for a year, that’s 12 plants. And that can help you to break free. Break free from what no longer serves and really deeply reconnect with the earth. I’m grateful to be on this foraging journey with you and looking forward to sharing the chapters ahead. I love you all very much.