Hey everybody, Rob Greenfield here. Today, I'm going to talk to you about the survival garden. What I mean by that is a garden where you don't have to go to the grocery stores or the restaurants, and you can live off of this. It can produce your calories. It can produce your nutrients. At the very least, it can get you through weeks or months of not having to go to the grocery store, so this is the survival garden. Okay, so why would I be the one to talk to you about the the survival garden? Well, I recently finished a year-long project of growing and foraging 100% of my food. So, for one year, every single thing that I ate either came from my gardens or that I foraged from the wild. Down to the salt, the oil, all my calories, my nutrients, my protein, my fat. You name it. So I have quite a bit of experience and this survival garden that I'm going to be talking about today is specifically going to be for where I did this project, which is central Florida. This survival garden is more for a warmer climate, but there's a lot that you'll be able to learn from this video, no matter where you are, and, most importantly, wherever you are, you can grow an incredible amount of food. It's just a matter of adapting to the correct plants that are designed to not just survive, but thrive in your area. So, I'm going to start off right away with calories. #1, I'm going to share sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes are a truly amazing crop. A lot of us know sweet potatoes for the potato itself, but what a lot of people don't realize is that the greens are edible as well. Between the nutritious greens and the calorie-dense tubers, they're one of the most important crops that can be grown as far as putting out an incredible amount of calories and nutrients. I probably grew 600 pounds of sweet potatoes in my year of growing and foraging all my food. I'm just blown away at how much you can grow. Now, a lot of people imagine these little orange ones at the grocery store, but they come in all shapes and sizes. I've seen sweet potatoes that are up to 13 pounds and I've been blown away at how much sweet potatoes you can grow in a relatively small amount of space. In a standard front yard, it's possible to grow all of your calories. Let me say that again. It is possible, in a standard front yard, to grow all the calories you need you need with different tuber crops. So, the second one that I'm going to talk about is called cassava or yuca. For those of you who still haven't heard either of those words, it is what tapioca is made out of. This is the true survival food. Over a billion people around the world depend on it for their very survival. It's twice as calorie-dense as sweet potatoes, at about 700 calories per pound, is what I've read, So, it is truly, truly calorie-dense. A couple of pounds of this per day meets your calorie needs. That said, it doesn't have a lot of nutrients, but we'll get into the nutrient crops soon. So, the beautiful thing about cassava is you literally just take a stick of it, a branch, you take that branch, you stick it into the ground, come back 12 months later and you've got yourself a whole cassava tree or bush or whatever you want to call it, with the tuber under the ground. You don't plant it like a potato. You plant it with a little cutting, basically, and you can actually eat the leaves as well. Now, cassava, or yuca, has cyanide in it, but a lot of foods have cyanide in it and it's just a matter of cooking it the right way. Again, a billion people live on this around the world. You just have to cook it. So, that's yuca, or cassava. One plant can put out 10, 20 pounds of tubers from one plant. The average one that I've gotten in central Florida is probably around 5-10 pounds of tubers. So, that is cassava or yuca. That's #2. #3 is another really great tuber, another calorie-dense crop, and that is yams. The genus and species that I've worked with is Dioscorea alata, if that's how you pronounce it. In Florida, this has actually become invasive. It has made it out of cultivation. I believe it's originally from Asia, possibly Africa too, and it's a commonly grown crop for many people around the world. Now, when I say yam, a lot of people think of the orange ones that you get at the grocery store, which we call sweet potatoes and yams, interchangeably. No. A yam, the largest one that I've ever harvested was 150 pounds! Imagine, I weigh about 150, 155 pounds. The one I harvested, the biggest one was 157 pounds, so the size of me. They get massive. An average one might be 10, 20, 30 pounds is not abnormal. And the beautiful thing about all three of these first crops is that, most of them, you can largely set them and forget them, especially yuca or cassava. Those are drought-tolerant. They don't need a lot of nutrients and 12 months later, you come back and you can have a whole survival garden. You can do your fence around your property all with yuca and yams, and just have a living fence of serious calories to be able to come back to when it's needed or just when it's desired. But, back to the big yam, the average one, 10, 20, 30 pounds, they're delicious. I actually prefer them over potatoes and they are a vining species, not an edible leaf, unlike the yuca and the sweet potato. Both of those have edible leaves, but this is just another beautiful calorie crop. Now, another calorie crop that I want to mention is potatoes. The crops that I'm talking about are a little bit more for the warmer climates, although sweet potato is something that's grown throughout, but potatoes are a standard that can be grown all across many climates. It's not one that I have a lot of experience with. I have grown it in Florida, but that is a really wonderful crop that you can grow in huge volumes as your calories. So, those are four calorie crops. The next one I want to get into is, indeed, a calorie, but it's also a delicious fruit and a favorite food of many people around the world, and that is bananas, and I'm also going to talk about plantains. Bananas are a true survival food. You can take one -- bananas, by the way, you don't plant them from seeds. You plant them from a pup, which is basically a small plant. How bananas work is they send up babies or pups, little shoots out the sides. If there's a huge stand of bananas, you can just dig one of those up with part of the corm, plant it, and in a few years' time, you can have a whole stand of bananas. So, bananas in central Florida, where I did my year, for example, within about 12 months, they can be starting to produce. Within a few years, you can be talking about huge quantities of bananas and plantains. Now, bananas can be eaten green, fried, for example, or you can wait until they're ripe and you can eat them as a delicious banana. You can also actually dehydrate the skin and the banana, whole, dehydrate it and then blend it to make a flour. Then, of course, plantains are a staple of many, many, many people all over the world. Those can be eaten ripe, as a delicious sweeter flavor, or they can be eaten savory, when they are still green. So, that is the banana. You can grow hundreds and hundreds of pounds of bananas. You can start it with something that you can get for $10 or $20, or for free. The next one that I want to go into is papaya. Papaya is extremely versatile. Papaya is a tree, but it's not your typical tree. They will last, generally, about maximum seven years. 3-5 years might be pretty normal. They're a very soft tree. You can basically push them over. You can cut down the papaya tree just with one swipe of a machete, but the fruit is a beautiful fruit and it's very versatile. So, of course, you can wait until it's ripe and then it's a nice, sweet orange, or you can eat it while it's green, more as a vegetable. I make sort of like a sauerkraut with it, a papaya kraut by fermenting it. Then, people all over the world use it green, as a vegetable, whether pickled or sauteed or raw. What's commonly known is Thai green papaya salad, for example. I love to make a coconut curry out of my green papayas. If you're dealing with wasps, a pest that often comes for the papayas, then the best thing to do is not wait for them to get ripe and eat them green. So, this is a great staple crop, not as calorie-dense as the earlier calories I mentioned, but very filling and very much has calories to it. Now, in a colder climate, something that actually somewhat resembles, in my mind, the papaya is the zucchini. Zucchini, in a colder climate, is a true survival crop. I hear stories all the time about people saying that, in the northern climates, they have so many zucchinis that they have to put them on their neighbors' doors to try to get rid of them, but their neighbors hide from them because they don't want them because they have so many. The reason it reminds me of papaya is because they can grow very large and in extreme abundance, and they can be cooked in a similar manner, and they don't, again, have an incredible amount of calories, but they have a large amount of sustenance and can really fill you up. So, that's the papaya and, for some people, the zucchini. Speaking of zucchini, what I have to mention for the survival garden that I'm talking about is a heat-loving, heat-tolerant squash. For me, that is the Seminole pumpkin. It's amazing what you can do with one seed. Most people, with their pumpkins and with their squash, when they buy them at the grocery store, what do they do? They take those seeds out and they throw them in the garbage. At the very least, you could compost them, but what you can actually do is plant them especially if they're a local variety. When I had dinner with a friend, I took home the pumpkin seeds from Seminole pumpkins. From two pumpkins, the seeds of that turned into hundreds of pumpkins, many, many, many meals to come. The Seminole pumpkin is my favorite pumpkin, personally, my favorite squash. Wherever you are, your survival garden can definitely include squashes. The next thing that I want to move on to is talking about a little bit of protein. For me, one of my favorite sources in the garden is pigeon pea. Now, pigeon pea is a perennial crop. It's not a bean that has to be planted year after year. It's actually a tree that will continue to put out pigeon peas and sometimes multiple times per year and even throughout the year. They're a truly delicious -- they're called gandules. They're very popular in Puerto Rico and other parts of the Caribbean, other parts of Latin America as well. They are truly, truly delicious. I have eaten a large amount of them and have never once got sick from them at all. In fact, my friend and I actually even made tempe from them. So, there's a lot that can be done with them. So, that is pigeon peas and, along those lines, the next one I want to talk about is ground cover beans or peas. For me, my favorite one is the southern peas. Now, there are many types of southern peas. You've probably heard of black-eyed peas, for example. There's many different types of these and I don't know the names of all of them, but we're talking about spreading the seed on the ground. It creates a wonderful ground cover and it produces a lot of healthy food. It can also be used as a cover crop and as a nitrogen fixer to add nitrogen to your garden. Now, these can be eaten fresh or they can be left to dry on the vines, harvested once they're dry, and they can be stored. The same goes for the pigeon peas as well. So, talking about survival, these are foods that, when dried, you can have these lasting in your pantry for years. That's an important part about this, storage. Now, in the warmer climates, like Florida, for example, you can grow food year-round. In the northern climates, the key to success with the survival garden is producing as much food as you can during that window of time that you have and then preserving it for the fall. Now, for all the people out there who are saying, "Oh, you can only do this in Florida," I have to say, the most extreme abundance that I've ever seen was in the fall in places like northern Wisconsin, where I'm from. The abundance of nuts and different fruits, like apples and plums and pears and berries, is incredible -- so much more than I've ever seen in some warmer climates, so you just have to work with your area. So, those are a few examples of protein. We've covered calories. We've covered some protein. Now, I want to get into some of the very nutrient-dense foods. The really good news is that a lot of these nutrient-dense foods, whether you want to be self-sufficient and being able to exist without a grocery store or restaurant at all, these nutrient-dense foods are a no-brainer for everyone because they take very little work. They can save a lot of money. They're some of the healthiest foods out there that you can eat and, environmentally, they're one of the most logical things to grow at home because shipping greens is one of the least efficient things that we can ship. So, I'm going to talk about perennial greens and the first one that I'm going to talk about is moringa. Now, moringa is also called the vitamin tree or the tree of life, and it is truly the tree of life. it's one of the most nutrient-dense plants on Earth. Supposedly, it's about 20% protein by weight, as well, so a lot of greens and vegetables actually do have a lot of protein in them as well. Moringa is a perennial. You can start it either from seed or you can take a cutting, stick it in the ground and have a moringa tree. You can make a wall around your property with moringa. You can dry moringa leaves, turn it into a powder, and you have your own multivitamin that you can travel with, and it's also a really great crop that you can trade. You can trade others this nutrient-dense powder that you make for other things that you need, or you can actually make a little business out of it and sell it. The next green that I want to talk about is katuk. Katuk is another perennial green. By perennial, what I mean is you plant it and it produces year after year after year. Up in a northern climate, a beautiful perennial is rhubarb. An average rhubarb plant can last for 25 years! Imagine you plant it and 25 years, every spring, it just keeps coming back. Annuals, you plant once (for example, carrots) and when you pull it, you eat it, and it's dead. Then, in between perennials and annuals is self-seeding annuals. These are ones that you let go to seed and they keep spreading their seed and they keep coming back. Once you've got them going, you've got them going. So, in the survival garden, I highly recommend working with perennials and self-seeding annuals as much as possible. So, I mentioned katuk and the next one that I want to talk about is chaya. Chaya is an ancient food. It's been eaten for thousands of years. I don't remember if it's the Mayans or the Aztecs, or possibly both, that have had it as a staple part of their diet. It is also called tree spinach. Very calorie-dense. This one also has to be cooked because it has cyanide in it, just like I mentioned with the cassava or the yuca, but again, it's just a matter of preparing food right. All things have to be prepared right, whether it's coffee or chocolate or the way you're producing your beverages, like beer and wine. Once you start to connect with your food, you see there is a process, a way of doing things. But chaya is a beautiful one. This is one where you can literally just take a stick of it, put it in the ground and, after you have a few trees of chaya, you can be spreading chaya to your entire neighborhood. Another one that's very drought-tolerant-- With the survival garden, the key is planting things that are very tough, that don't need to be consistently watered, that don't need a lot of nutrients, that don't have too many pests, and all of these things apply, generally, to perennials over annuals. So, the survival garden is one that you can walk away from and, three months later, you come back and your food isn't gone; you have more food than when you left. So, that is chaya. The next thing I want to get into is another green and that is perennial spinaches. So, there are all sorts of perennial spinaches. There's Brazilian spinach and New Zealand spinach, Okinawa spinach, longevity spinach, just to name a few. Malabar spinach is another one. There's probably a good dozen or so that are grown in the area where I have done most of my growing. Again, these are perennials that you can plant once and they can keep on coming back and coming back. So, with those perennial spinaches and the chaya, the cassava leaves, the katuk, and the moringa, that right there is quite a bit of diversity in itself. So, there is a saying and that is, "Let thy food be they medicine and let thy medicine be thy food." Now, in 2020, that is, "Let your food be your medicine and let your medicine be your food." Pretty basic. Now, the beautiful thing is that, yes, our food is our medicine, but there are some especially medicinal plants that we can grow to really give ourselves that important immune boost and to really just take care of ourselves. I'm talking about holistic medicine, holistic healthcare, taking into account everything that we're doing -- our food, our water, the way we move our body, the way we live our lives, but we can grow a lot of our own medicine. The #1 that I recommend in this survival garden is turmeric and ginger. Turmeric, you take those little rhizomes, you stick them in the ground, and 7-9 months later, you'll have a lot more turmeric. Most of my friends' gardens, who have turmeric, they have more than they can deal with. Ginger takes a little bit longer. It takes more like, I think, about a year and a half. I've successfully grown ginger, but it takes longer to get it to be a large amount and to get a lot to harvest, but very, very easy to grow. So, turmeric and ginger, very easy to grow and very, very important medicines. There are many different medicines. One that I recommend growing is elderberry. Along with honey that you can get from your bees, you can make elderberry syrup and this is one of the most incredible natural medicines that prevents cold and flu. I like to take a spoonful of my elderberry syrup every single day. It's one of my favorite things and it's also an extremely delicious treat. So, I've covered calories, I've covered some protein, and I've covered greens as nutrients. Those three things right there can take care of a massive, massive amount of your entire needs. You could probably live just off of that, but there's no need to because there's such an abundance of other foods. I'm going to name a few other things right now that are really easy and important to have as a part of this garden. That would be peppers. I grew serrano peppers, starting from one seed from a pepper from my friend's garden. I, for a year and a half, had a serrano pepper plant that put out well over 1,000 peppers. Wherever you are, there are peppers that will survive and thrive. Peppers are a great part of any garden. Then, herbs. Herbs add flavor to your food. Living off of your garden does not in any way mean not eating delicious, delicious food. In fact, it's often far more delicious. Some of the absolute survival herbs that I've grown would be Cuban oregano. Grows like crazy. It's a huge oregano leaf. Then, there's lots of other ones. African blue basil grows into shrubs, brings in an incredible amount of bees and pollinators. So important to have different plants that can bring pollinators into your garden and herbs are one of the easiest things to grow. You have cilantro and basil and dill, just to name a few. Herbs are a very easy beginner plant too. If you're just getting started, herbs are a really great place to start. I'm going to mention just two more, even though there are so many more plants that I would love to talk about, but a truly amazing one is daikon radish. We're talking about a radish that can get this big, that can become self-seeding, that's coming back, that creates a great ground cover, that can be chop and dropped, and you can ferment this and make a wonderful radish kraut or mix it in with your different krauts. It's delicious, it adds a lot of value to meals, and you can produce incredible quantities with it. That's the daikon radish. Wherever you are, radishes can be a part of your game and radishes are one of the fastest foods to grow. You can get them in about 30 days. Now, a garden could be complete without tomatoes, but tomatoes add such an incredible value to life. Where I did my survival garden, that would be the Everglades tomato. In really hot climates, it's often the very small tomatoes that you want to work with, not the really big ones, but in northern climates, you can produce so much tomatoes that you could not possibly eat them. So, tomatoes are just a beautiful, beautiful thing to have in the garden. Then, one last thing that I'm going to mention is garlic or onions really add an incredible amount of flavor. Garlic is also a great antimicrobial and antibacterial, a really important one for fighting off sicknesses. In central Florida, my big ones would be garlic chives and then society garlic. These are perennials that do really well. I also grew garlic. That's harder in the southern climates, but I did it successfully, but in the northern climates, garlic is an easy one. So, that is my survival garden. I've covered your calories, your protein, your greens. There are more things than that; however, if you have just this going and you work with the perennials over the annuals, we're talking about almost never having to take a trip to the grocery store. This is my tips, especially focused on a warmer climate. In future videos, I will have some that are specifically focused on colder climates, so make sure you come back and tune in for that. If you got a lot out of this video and you found it to be really useful, then definitely I encourage you to subscribe to this channel. If you have questions or comments, put them below. Hit that Like button to make this get out into the world so people can see that it is possible to live without grocery stores and without restaurants, and live in a way where we are working with the Earth, rather than against it and where we can live happily and healthfully with food sovereignty right in our own communities. Love you all very much. See you soon. Subtitles by the Amara.org community
