I Lived Off Of Gardening, Fishing, Foraging, and Bartering for 30 Days. Here's How It Went

Is it possible, practical or realistic to live off the land in an urban environment? This time the grunion race was very successful. Guys, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen. Watch this. Ah, t

here

we go. They hit us! So I picked five pounds of beets. We have mail from another fellow survivor. I just made an exchange with Epic. We have 36 eggs

here

. So I have to do things like this, but man, it's so exhausting trying to get 100 percent of your own food. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening, where my goal is to help you develop a greener thumb and really expand that greener thumb into a more holistic view of how we actually get our food.

This is the question I asked myself. I was having a conversation with some very good friends of mine and we always like to think about these scenarios. What would you do if the zombies came? What would you do if there was a meteorite that hit the earth? These apocalyptic scenarios and how we could survive them. And I always told them, guys, I may not be the best fighter, I may not be the most skilled at hunting, but you can't kick me out of the group because I'm the only one who knows how to grow your food.

That made me think. I said, can I really live off the land here in San Diego for a month straight? And I did it from June 1 to June 30 of last year, 2019 and I called it Apocalypse Grow Challenge. So, in this video, a video that I honestly never thought would make it to YouTube because it wasn't for that purpose. It was just to see if I could do it. But here we are. You're going to see how I grew, fished, foraged, traded, enough food to survive. Well, you will learn that I did not prosper but survived thanks to the land.

Without further ado, cultivate that Like button. You know you have to, because this is a truly epic saga and let's get into the video. The first thing we have to expose are the rules of the challenge. You may not agree with the rules I set, but these were the rules and I followed them as perfectly as possible. Here we go. The date that started was June 1 and I had to go until June 30 of last year, that is, 30 consecutive

days

. I gave myself 90

days

, so three months before the challenge I was allowed to grow food and preserve it, grow food and store it, or even fish and preserve or freeze it.

I didn't really do much of that though. So, delivery time of 90 days. The rules were that I could only eat what I could grow, fish and forage myself, and I was also allowed to trade with other people, as long as I traded them for something they grew or produced at a fair market value. . I couldn't say, hey, I'm Kevin from Epic Gardening, here's a potato, give me 42 eggs. It does not work like that. I had to make it as fair as possible. Now the other things I allowed myself were: I allowed myself to drink water from the city tap and I allowed myself a small bottle of olive oil and a thing of salt.

Those are things I couldn't realistically produce. Maybe the salt from the ocean, but I couldn't produce the rest. So those were the starting points. And I also had a body composition scan, which I'm going to show you right now. Well. So the first day of the challenge you can see is 6/1/2019. We're pretty tall here at 29.3% body fat, 232 pounds, fat tissue 68, lean tissue 155.9. The rest of these things don't really matter much. It's like a left-right imbalance and all that. I really cared about fat and lean tissue. And remember 232, 68, 155 and kind of high body fat if I'm honest with myself.

Well? That is the beginning of the challenge. So, with that 90-day deadline, that led me to think that the growing part of this problem has to be solved from two angles. The first angle is your calories. How are calories grown? The second angle is nutrient density. And, first of all, calories will be the most important. Without them, you will find it very difficult to meet the challenge. So I said, what can you grow in 90 days that has a certain amount of calories, at least some not? The lettuce and all that is not very good. So I looked at sweet potatoes, potatoes, beans, peas and things like that.

And the potatoes are by far the standout. I chose three different varieties, Warba, Norland and Yukon Gold. And I grew them with a variety of different methods because I wanted to make sure I didn't bet all my chips on one method and underperform. So I grew them in grow bags. I grew them in five gallon buckets. I grew them in the ground. I grew them in raised beds. And I also grew them underground without hilling them, which is something a lot of people do with potatoes. And that is what I did. I planted about 20 pounds of seed potatoes.

And this is what happened. Well, here is plant number one. There is a lot of foliage here and a lot of potatoes. Watch this. Are you serious right now? Watch this. Dude, look at that! I have never seen a Norland Red grow so big. That's crazy. So that was my initial reservation. And what I did as I moved into the first day of the challenge was I said I should probably do a little bit of fasting before this. Because I was breaking out of a lot of these addictions, if you call them that, you know, sugar, caffeine, gluten, all these things that I just couldn't eat on the challenge.

And I didn't want to go through five different types of withdrawals on the first day. So, a couple of days before the challenge, I did a 48-hour water fast to clear my mind and take on the challenge. And then we start from there. Here we are, day one of the Apocalypse Grow Challenge. As you can see, we have put a lot of effort into the potato. So let's go over everything we have here. I have a Berkey water filter that will help me filter any water I may capture during this challenge, although I still allow myself to use city tap water for this month-long challenge.

I have some pickled vegetables that will be a nice spicy addition. She's a gardener, I think her name is? And then I have some red potatoes, some yellow and some white. We're around the 80 pound mark, so there's quite a bit of potatoes in there. And then I have dried loquats right here. This is about a total of, I would say, eight to 10 pounds of dried fruit. And then I take some green garlic powder. And that's it with my reservations and I'll probably end up exchanging them. So the goal is to swap for honey, potentially swap for cooking oil, and swap for eggs.

My goal is to reach 90 eggs so I can have three eggs a day. That would be a small increase in protein and fat and would also keep me from going crazy eating potatoes. So, on the first day, the reservation. What's up guys? This is Kevin, back to my boy Steven Cornett. It's good to be here. This is the first trade I will be doing for the Apocalypse Grow Challenge. Steven has the chickens of his, which I'm sure you've seen in many of the videos we've made. So you have 24 beautiful eggs here and Steven has ordered some potatoes.

So I love potatoes. Trade number one for Apocalypse Grow is now done and I can't express how excited I am. So having these eggs is going to be super, super nice. I'm glad I could supply you. These potatoes too. Yes of course. Now, while the potatoes were a real reward, they weren't going to be enough to get me through. Or even if they were, it wasn't going to be a fun month to live through. So what I decided to do was log onto some

fishing

forums here in San Diego and met this mysterious shadowy figure known only as The Coach.

He is an absolutely legendary angler here in San Diego. He took me under his wing and he showed me very simple practical tips and tricks of the

fishing

trade. So he was picking up on things like sculpting. He was fishing for perch, mackerel. And I was able to save some of them for the challenge. But what really made this challenge as far as fishing goes, because remember fish and protein and fat, things that I can't grow quickly and that's why I needed them, was something called a grunion run. Now I'm going to explain that in the next few clips.

How are you all? It's the third day of Apocalypse Grow. There is a full moon. It's June 3rd and that means it's the grunion race in San Diego. Which means I have four days to try and catch some grunion. So for those of you who don't know what that is, it's a type of small silvery bait fish that comes ashore to lay its eggs. You know, the females come up, lay their eggs in these trenches and then the males come up and fertilize and then everyone settles down. Crazy! The spawning period is from March to June.

The protected time is April and May, so it is the peak spawning period. It is now June and now, according to regulations, you are allowed to take grunion. But the rule is that the rules are very specific. You can't catch them with nets. You can't catch them with poles, rods and reels. You can't catch them by digging holes. You can only capture them naturally by hand and place them in a bucket to capture and store them. You can't catch them with the bucket. For this challenge I will try to get a good amount of them. We will see.

Guys, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen. Watch this! Thousands, thousands of them. Oh my God. Check it out! It's like 1:00 a.m. m. right now and look at that. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine grunion on my first grunion run. Pretty excited about that. Quite tired. Actually quite hungry. But I'm going to save them for tomorrow. Running, I actually took off my boots and jeans and was running in the ocean in my boxers. I was screaming and getting so excited when I got these grunion. Because they are difficult to get. Anyway, I just cleaned and filleted them.

We'll probably use them at a grunion meal tomorrow. Hopefully, in the coming days we will have many more too. I'm going to make my cousin come down. So, it's time to go to sleep. Alright, day three Apocalypse Grow, we're off. It is June 4th almost midnight. This time the grunion race was very successful. Oh, I've been running on the beach for about 45 minutes. I'm just trying to catch all these guys. Check it out. I don't know if you can see it, but we have to get these guys home, clean them, prepare them, and probably make a stew for tomorrow.

I'm thinking of potatoes. Potatoes, beans, grunion. I'm tired guys. Trying to do the Apocalypse Challenge in the smallest space I had, which is a 15 by 30 foot growing space, meant that I really only had to grow potatoes or could only grow potatoes to even have a chance. So I have to do things like this. But man, it's so exhausting trying to get 100 percent of your own food. With enough grunion to last me at least a little while, as well as some forage for trade, I moved into the world of

foraging

. Now remember that all this time I'm still pulling produce from the garden.

We are reviewing the vegetable pod. Maybe in a week or two I can start cutting and harvesting that again. My nutrient dense vegetables are coming out. I harvest beans every day and eat as many as I can. But I'm basically depleting my garden daily just to try to get enough food. And then I said I have to go outside. There are a couple of different things I did. First of all, there is a whole app called fallsfruit.org that has a Google map overlay of the different fruit trees in your area that you can publicly forage from.

So I started doing that, but I also reached out to a couple of friends and we found this amazing kumquat tree. Day five Apocalypse grows. I got a lead on some kumquats that were going to waste. I actually mean they're going to waste, look at the ground. In fact, they are falling all over the floor. In case you don't know, super rich, very acidic and you can even eat the skin. So we're going to harvest as many as we can and I'll probably eat a lot of these because I need some sugar in my life after not eating cookies and stuff.

But also, um, these will be a great barter. So let's go ahead and harvest. Check it out guys. We have tons and tons of kumquats. We're just raising money, being good neighbors here, raising this. But we didn't even make a dent in this. There are still hundreds or thousands of lo or kumquat left, sorry. He's still on the street. Looks great. This will be a fantastic fruit barter. Check it out guys. Look at all this. Delicious, delicious, delicious. So I picked five pounds of beets in a friend's garden in exchange for three and a half pounds of kumquats, I think.

And I harvested about 11 pounds of the forage. Very good trade. I'm definitely not going to need 11 pounds of kumquats, but I find these beets and especially these beet greens really delicious and nutritious. So trade number two for Apocalypse Grow, complete. So far in the challenge,

bartering

has gone very well. So I bartered with about four or five people, some in person and some by mail. We have mail from another fellow survivor. So I'm going to go over some of the things I have here. I got all this zucchini and squash from my friend growgdimensional on Instagram, swapped some rare seeds and got a garden consultation.

We have one of the botanical destroyers, this is the nettle. Nettle so dehydrated and pungent. Some spring and summer, winter and fall fire cider. SomeCalifornia bay leaves. I need bay leaves and I didn't have access to them. I want to make a vegetable broth. And so I can start making some potato and fish soups. Honestly, the one I'm most excited about is lemon because I haven't eaten a lemon in eight days and lemons are very versatile in the kitchen for recipes. He sent me a lemon, some kind of fire cider powder that I can use. Kenna Cote on Instagram sent me some blackberry jam and some of her homemade soaps.

This is called Nocino and it is a liqueur made from vodka and black walnuts. It smells delicious. It's like a little liquor after dinner. I haven't drank alcohol in this challenge, although I don't drink that much either. But having this homemade liquor ah man, I can't wait. Needless to say,

bartering

has worked quite well for this challenge. How are you all? So I've got a long pole pole here with a little worm and apparently you can catch some sunfish down here. That's why I want to show you how easy this is. There are no guides on this.

You're just old school throwing a worm into the water. Check it out. That's how easy it is to catch these guys right in the water. Boom. They hit you, you take it out and that's it. We'll drop it into this little hole. Take it, take it, take it, take it. Here we go. That easy. It's too small to keep, but it really is that easy. Here we go. Check it out. Here we go! They beat us. Boom. Check it out. Immediately! As the days

went

by, I got into a good rhythm with some kind of potato-based dish.

I just boiled my taties. Hey, doesn't this one look weird? It's a rock. I just, I just boiled. Oh, it's hot! Oh! I just boiled a stone. Some kind of dish of fish and pickled vegetables and lots of water and then just going out into the world and trying to find more things to eat. So I

went

to a place in eastern San Diego County where, for some reason, they decided to plant a ton of mulberry trees as a

gardening

tool. But really if you reconsider, it's not the best thing to do. And you'll see why in a second.

But for me it was incredible because blackberries are delicious, nutritious. They have some calories and there was a plentiful, plentiful amount. So now I'm standing in the shade of a mulberry tree. I found one in the area. Super excited! Let me show you the little fruits. Let's see if we can get one here. They are small, smaller than normal I would say, but you can see them right there. So the way to do this is you can see them all over the floor right now. All the ripe ones are all over the ground. And that means they fall off quite easily.

So what that means is take a tarp and we'll just shake the branches and see how many we get. Maybe a couple pounds of blackberries just by shaking the branches. And it could have been all day. I mean, there's probably over 50 pounds, if not over a hundred pounds, of blackberries in there. It's just that access is a problem. It is difficult to reach. So I got on this bench and I shook it like crazy and then they started falling. And I'll tell you one thing. Apparently these are more nutritious than blackberries. I almost want to say I prefer the taste.

It's fucking good, guys. So a large amount of blackberries will be a nice little addition of fruit to the Apocalypse Grow Challenge. Free fruit picked in a park. There is nothing better than that. Day 10. Day 10 of Apocalypse Grow, I just made an epic trade. We have 36 eggs sitting here living their best life. And a little mint. What did I change? About a pound and a half, two pounds of kumquats are sold. This is from a fellow apocalypse survivor who was actually full of eggs but had no fruit. So to her, a pound and a half or two pounds of kumquats was worth change for 36 eggs.

And I'm happy to make that trade because I needed that protein and fat. So, another successful exchange. To make this month even crazier, check out what happened during the challenge itself. Great day guys. Look what's here. Oh Lord. In fact we achieved it. Oh Lord! It took a long time to reach this milestone. Very cool. June 12 at the Apocalypse Challenge. Look who's here. Ryan from The Horticulturist. You've probably seen it in a couple of our other videos. Today we did a little bartering. Oranges, and what did I give to Ryan? We made a home-cooked meal of farm-fresh eggs with some vegetables, restaurant-style hash browns, and then some kumquat and orange juice for those citruses, which he has in abundance, right?

Like he's falling out of your trees. So, yes, we have another gift ahead. This is wine from. It came from Chrissy at Green Gardens Nurseries, another barter piece. When the challenge got halfway through, I felt like I had a bit of a rhythm going, you know, I didn't feel like caffeine anymore. I had no sugar cravings. Drink a lot of water. Energy levels, overall, were pretty good. The thing is that when you eat too few calories, you're simply eating too few calories and you can't really help it. So sometimes my energy would get pretty low and I would try to rest as much as I could.

And then as soon as I got that energy back, I would go out, go fishing, garden, try to make a trade, go look for food. But something that was really the bright spot of the challenge was the middle ground. On June 15, 2019, some friends of mine on Instagram, my friend Anne @realhensofoc, was actually doing the challenge with me at the same time on a much higher level. She joined me in this challenge and volunteered her home for what we call the Apocalypse Potluck. And then it was her, my friend Randi Freckled California, Brian @neverenoughdirt, Amanda @forageandgrow, and my cousin Jon @castandspear, who have an awesome fishing YouTube.

It's kind of like the Epic Gardening of fishing, right? And so we all connect together. We all brought things that we had 100 percent homemade, homegrown, or bartered, and created this incredible variety of food. We're at the Apocalypse mall right now doing some bartering. What's happening? We are exchanging garlic, eggs, jams. Jams, more eggs, more jams, vegetables, tomatoes. We have some garlic right here. Jonny's, what do you have Jonny? That? Do I have potatoes? I have spinach. Kale. He's about to do it, he's on day one and he's giving up his potatoes. Mistake. It's a mistake. At the Apocalypse potluck.

This is from freckled California. We have chutney. What is this one on? That's ragu. Eggplant ragout with fried elephant garlic on top and then placed on top. Oh, elephant garlic. This spread. Collected flowers too. Oh! After the potluck, I went home full. I felt complete in all aspects. My stomach was full. I was overjoyed, you know, I actually got to see some like-minded friends doing the same thing. It was really great. And I ate a lot of food. I literally hadn't felt full in two weeks and then I just stuffed myself. And that took me away for a moment.

After that, I fasted for a couple of days simply because I didn't feel like I needed the food. So I drank a lot of water. And after this point we actually hung out with some friends. I would trade some lemons. I would swap some microgreens. All that. And we kind of got into a rhythm with the challenge, which is where my filming stalled a little bit. I felt like I had almost been liberated. It was like living this new life and I no longer needed to follow it or journal and I just floated towards the end of the challenge.

When the Apocalypse Grow Challenge came to a close, I was so excited because I had a cool trip planned to Tahoe on July 1st. And that was like my reboot. I was going to eat pizza, I was going to do all this. But it wasn't over. I still had a few days left for the challenge. I had to say, hey, let me get that body composition scan again and see what happened. And I couldn't believe the results. Alright, we're close to the end now. I did it a day before the end and we have increased body fat.

That's really interesting and I'll explain why in a second. But my overall mass dropped a little over 10 pounds. My fat tissue only went down about a little less than two pounds, a pound and a half. But my lean tissue decreased quite a bit. And the reason I think that happened is because you're between 156 and 147. So I lost nine pounds of lean tissue. The reason this happened is because I was eating low calorie intake. I was eating a macronutrient profile that consisted more or less exclusively of carbohydrates with as much fat and protein as I could reasonably get.

So I think my body started consuming its own tissue to meet the protein needs it needed. Now I'm not a nutritionist or dietician or anything like that, but that's just my personal theory. You know, too few calories, there's nothing you can do. You're going to lose that game. And so my relative body fat increased, although in an absolute sense, I lost fat tissue. So it took me a little while after this challenge to recover from this. However, it was interesting to see that this is what happens. Now that I've had some time, almost a year actually, to think about the challenge and reflect on my performance and what I would do differently, here are some things I learned.

Number one, three months really isn't enough time to get enough of that garden food to count as growing everything you need to live. Basically, you can make potatoes in that time and you need a good amount of space. Although the potatoes did very, very well. And I will say that the method I prefer these days is to plant them in the ground and just not hill them up at all, plant them a little deeper. But of course, if you're in an urban space, five-gallon buckets and containers like a grow bag also work great. The other thing I really learned is the value of

foraging

and bartering.

Because basically, as soon as I ate potatoes, I had currency. Everyone will want homegrown potatoes. They taste absolutely amazing and that's why I might change them. But I was swapping something very calorie dense for things that sometimes weren't as calorie dense. You saw from the beginning that I swapped potatoes for eggs and that was more of a macronutrient swap. I just knew I needed some fat and protein. So I made a swap that made me lose calories but made me gain fat and protein. So what I decided to do from then on is that some of the things I was looking for, my kumquats, my loquats, my blackberries, I would look for them and swap them out for things that had a little more calories, like eggs, things like that.

As long as it was a fair deal for that person, then we would be set. And the other thing I learned is that I couldn't have done this without other people. Therefore, being one hundred percent self-sufficient in an urban environment is possible, and I know people who have done it and today, I could certainly do it today. No problem. But would I want to do it? That's the real question, you know? The value of the community that came to support me, exchanging things, coming, handing out pumpkins, all these kinds of things. I mean, that really was the value and I felt like I finally had a community of people around me.

Whereas sometimes when you're walking outside, every person you meet is a stranger. You don't know anything about them. You don't know anything about his life. Even if you are surrounded by people. It doesn't seem like the best way to live. So I learned a lot about this challenge and I want to do it again in a much bigger and better way. But man, it was a super, super fun time. And if I can do what I did in this challenge in the space I had, you guys can grow whatever you want. I hope you enjoyed this chronicle of the Apocalypse Grow Challenge.

I really wish during that month I had filmed better for you. I just didn't know it was going to get to this point and actually end up on YouTube and other places... And so I did what I could. Many of you followed him on Instagram. But anyway, thank you very much. If you have any comments on how you think I could have done this better, if you think I did something wrong, or any suggestions, please put them in the Comments below. And again thank you very much for the support on this YouTube channel. This year has been crazy in many ways, but in the

gardening

world it has been a really good year and I have all of you to thank.

All you new gardeners out there. You old gardeners who have been supporting us for a long time. I just want to say thank you and there are some really cool things I'm doing to give back. So until next time, good luck in the garden and keep growing.