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.