In this engaging conversation, Mariette Frey interviews Marjory Wildcraft, a leading figure in the survival and preparedness movement. They discuss the importance of self-sufficiency, the differences between homesteading and prepping, and the current economic climate’s implications for individuals and families. Marjory shares insights on backyard food production, real estate market trends, and her experiences living in Puerto Rico. The conversation wraps up with practical gardening tips for beginners, emphasizing the significance of quality soil and community support. In this conversation, Marjory Wildcraft and Mariette Frey discuss the importance of quality soil for gardening, innovative solutions for soil contamination, and the benefits of growing your own food. They share personal experiences with health and healing through food, the practicality of starting small with raised beds, and the advantages of keeping backyard chickens. The discussion also emphasizes the significance of composting for healthy soil and the empowerment that comes from self-sufficiency in food production.
Chapters
- 00:00 Introduction to Self-Sufficiency and Prepping
- 03:01 Understanding Homesteading vs. Prepping
- 06:01 The Current Economic Climate and Its Implications
- 09:05 The Importance of Backyard Food Production
- 11:59 Real Estate Market Insights and Strategies
- 14:48 Living in Puerto Rico: A Unique Perspective
- 18:25 Gardening Basics for Beginners
- 26:25 The Importance of Quality Soil
- 28:52 Innovative Solutions for Soil Contamination
- 30:49 Starting Your Own Food Production
- 33:07 Healing Through Food: A Personal Journey
- 36:59 Growing Your Own Food: Easy Steps
- 39:10 The Benefits of Backyard Chickens
- 39:59 Composting: The Key to Healthy Soil
- 45:55 Empowerment Through Self-Sufficiency
- 47:16 The Holistic Approach to Health and Food
Mariette Frey is a relocation strategist, life coach, and host of the Moving Tips + Tricks podcast. Every week on Smart Move Monday: Coach Mariette’s Corner, she offers free coaching to help listeners move with clarity and confidence. Check out her favorite tools, trusted show sponsors, and more at www.decidingtomove.com. Free spots are limited — coaching roster opens soon!
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Survival Starts At Home: Gardening Hacks & Self-Reliance Tips With Marjory Wildcraft
Prepping Vs. Homesteading: Real Talk With Marjory Wildcraft On Food, Land & Freedom
Introduction To Self-Sufficiency and Prepping
This is a special episode where we’re talking about survival, prepping, and homesteading. I want to preface this episode by saying that there are some opinions that Marjory has that could be anxiety-provoking. I know that we’re in a sensitive time in our history right now. I want to make sure that you understand that this is an episode where we talk about some very interesting topics, such as the collapse of the US dollar, gardening, and surviving on your own. Go into this with your eyes wide open. Know that the opinions of Marjory and me are our own opinions. We have a very fun, colorful conversation, and I’m excited for you to read it.
Welcome back to the show, everyone. I am super excited for our guest. My name is Mariette Frey. I’m the host of the Moving Tips + Tricks podcast. Something that I’ve thought about for a long time is to go out of suburbia, go into the wild, start a farm, and live off the land. When the guest’s assistant reached out and asked if I wanted to interview this person, I skipped all of the pre-conversations and everything. We’re diving right in. I am very excited to welcome Marjory Wildcraft to the show.
She’s the neighbor that you want to have when the world goes crazy, which it feels like it’s very much about to happen. She is the female leader of the Survival and Preparedness Movement, so we’ve got lots to talk about. She’s the global advocate for homegrown food on every table. In 2009, she founded The Grow Network, which is the web’s best resource for modern self-sufficiency.
She has been featured by National Geographic as an expert in off-grid living. She hosted the Mother Earth News online homesteading summit. She’s listed in the Who’s Who in America for having inspired hundreds of thousands of backyard mini-farms, which I cannot wait to talk about. I have a garden box that I bought, so I’m getting started. Marjory’s work won the Reuters Food Sustainability Media Award, which is a huge deal, and she authored the prepping bestseller, The Grow System: The Essential Guide to Modern Self-Sufficient Living–from Growing Food to Making Medicine.
She’s got videos and books, and thousands of interviews on the radio and TV. She helped millions of people grow their food in their backyards, which I’m hoping to do this summer. She’s got this viral webinar. We’ll post it in the show notes afterwards, so you can jump on and take a look. I’m signed up to take it myself. Marjorie, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me on. When I was looking at your bio, I was like, “This woman has moved maybe a few more times than I have.” I have an incredibly changing life also.
Tell us about that.
Understanding Homesteading Vs. Prepping
It does turn into a science after a while of move to move, these boxes, this organization. I guess the folks in the military are good at that, also.
Yes, but they get help. They have people who come and help move them, but we don’t. I get cocky when it comes to moving because I’ve done this a million times. It’s hard every single time, isn’t it?
It’s the new patterning more than the actual physical move. Where are the spoons, and where did I put that? This is how you turn the lights on. We’re creatures of habit. It makes life easier to have some healthy habits. I’ve been all over the world and all over the place. I had periods of time when I was completely stable and not going anywhere, and then other times, extreme radical travel. At the moment, I’m in a rental, and that’s intentional. We were talking a tiny bit before the show. The US dollar is collapsing, and that’s going to happen in 2025. That has consequences for everybody. We can go into those consequences, but for me, strategically ahead of that, I have completely gotten out of any real estate I had.
I had a lovely little farmhouse in Colorado, and I sold it. No stocks and bonds. The stock market is such a crazy, insane, overvalued thing anyway. I’m not in there, and I’m not holding US dollars. I’m either in precious metals or in a few selected crypto, and waiting for this transition to happen, which is taking longer than I thought, but I’m fine with that. The market that I’m in, the real estate market, is very volatile. Everybody wants to sell. They’ll say, “I’ll lease to you for six months, and then I’m going to sell the property.” I move every six months, which is horrible because I got this stuff, and it’s not super valuable to anybody. I’m fencing, nest boxes, water systems, tools, hardware, but it’s a lot.
It’s cumbersome to move. I think it’s valuable. My friend Amy, who’s got the Grounded in Maine podcast, was super excited to hear about how this goes, so you may have to be on her podcast, too, because she’s phenomenal. Her moving from Maine to Virginia and starting her homestead there, you have to start over, you have to get all that stuff, and it’s expensive.
I moved to Puerto Rico a couple of years ago, and it’s another level of complicated here. It’s not that bad. It’s still a US territory, Home Depot is in the town next door, and Amazon delivers eventually.
The Current Economic Climate And Its Implications
I’m planning on going to Puerto Rico this summer. I have a couple of friends who live there, so I am going to have to come visit you.
Let’s have lunch and a coffee. That’d be so wonderful. We’ll do some video together.
I would love that. For somebody who doesn’t understand what prepping means, let’s take a step back. Homesteading is one thing. Let’s talk about what homesteading is, and then let’s talk about prepping, because I think that people often go into these situations very optimistically. I’ve watched Homestead Rescue. I’ve watched every season of that show, and you always get these people who are like, “I could learn all this stuff on YouTube. My garden would be perfect.” Yet, they’re sitting in the middle of a homestead that has terrible minerals in the ground, nothing is growing, and they have no water source. Let’s talk about what homesteading is first.
The Grow Network, which is the community that I’ve built, isn’t a whole bunch of homesteaders. Honestly, if you’re a homesteader, you’re a prepper. I think it’s more of an idea of identification. Most of the behaviors that you do as a homesteader are identical to the behaviors of a prepper. Certainly, most homesteaders are very aware of the precariousness of the world situation, whereas I think the preppers have more of an attitude of being at the forefront, the motivation. We were talking about growing your own food, starting to make your own medicine, and regaining some elements of self-reliance. With that, of course, even homesteaders are concerned about defense. That’s an issue.
Community is so vital, building community, focusing on working within the community, and helping neighbors. Honestly, I think it’s more an attitude than a real distinction because you’re doing the same behavior. The homesteaders are doing it because they want to choose this lifestyle, whereas the preppers are doing it because they think, “I’m not going to have any choice, so I’m going to do this.”
Homesteaders choose this lifestyle because they want it, while preppers adopt it out of necessity, thinking, 'I may not have a choice, so I’ll prepare for it.' Share on XI’m somewhere in between.
If I might riff for a minute, my promise for being with you and for everybody, we are very close to this thing completely imploding. A boy, Roger says, “You go bankrupt slowly, and then it happens all at once.” We’re on the edge of it happening all at once. The consequences of that are that the banks won’t be working anymore. You may lose all your money in those accounts, and your credit cards won’t work. We’ve all seen the grocery stores freeze up or have food unavailable back in 2020.
No toilet paper.
The Importance Of Backyard Food Production
That has already started to happen. For example, the price of eggs shot up, and they supposedly have gone down a little bit. I promise you that another sign that we’re in the endgame of extreme volatility. We’re seeing it in the markets. One day it’s up, and then the next day, it’s down. It’s extreme volatility. We’re seeing it everywhere. I hate to call them leadership, but they make this decision, and then they make that decision. They are completely contradicting themselves. We’re in the endgame for the US dollar. It’s almost over.
I’ll tell you where we’re seeing it very practically. I do have that free webinar at the BackyardFoodProduction.com website. There, I show you how to grow half of your own food in your backyard. Even if you have no experience, you’re older, and you’re out of shape. One of the first things I recommend people get started with is a small laying flock of hens. With the price of eggs skyrocketing, all of a sudden, everybody decided that they wanted to buy baby chicks, and they wanted chickens.
Right now, I’ve contacted quite a few of the major hatcheries in the United States, and there is either nothing available or never will be available. If you’re lucky, you may be able to order some now, and they’ll deliver in October. That’s scary. It’s happening. Backyard food production hasn’t been a real big push. The market for that is small.
The businesses for that are small, and those businesses can easily be swamped and overtaken, which we’re seeing with the baby chick market. Interestingly enough, as a side note, you’ll see this in the webinar at BackyardFoodProduction.com. I don’t recommend starting with baby chicks. It looks similar, but it’s a different set of skills from keeping a set of laying hens.
It takes about six months to take a chick to where it’s producing eggs. Six months is a long time. People go out and buy some laying hens. I went and checked on Craigslist in Austin, Phoenix, and Philadelphia. Lo and behold, there are still laying hens available for sale. It’s like the toilet paper thing. People know they need to do something, but their focus is not in quite the right direction. You need to get started right now.
Real Estate Market Insights And Strategies
I’ll give you another reason. People know me as growing food, backyard food production, gardens, chickens, and all that. In my prior life to this, I was a professional real estate investor, and I had made my first million by the time I was 40. I still love watching the market and money flow. Our banking system is completely bankrupt to the tune of about $1 trillion. The backstop for the banking system is the Federal Reserve. That is bankrupt to the tune of probably $1 trillion. The backstop to the Federal Reserve is the US government, which is bankrupt.
Elon Musk or the DOGE team found these fourteen magic computers, which are apparently computers that create money. There are no bonds created with it or anything. You type into it. Here’s the routing number and account number. I need $100 million. It creates $100 million and sends it to that account. There’s no accounting, no tracking, nothing. If one of those computers existed, it’s a problem. Fourteen of them, we have no idea how much money they have created, but every extra trillion dollars that they create means that the value of the dollar that you have in your wallet is less and less.
As the DOGE team uncovers more money that’s been created, the dollar’s lost 99% of its value since 1913 when it was created. Now, it’s truly in the end days. You need to be prepared because the scenario for that is you can’t buy anything, and your dollar doesn’t work. The grocery stores and all those things are not options anymore.
What if you already own a house? I know you said you’re renting and you’ve taken your money out of stocks, but playing devil’s advocate, wouldn’t you want to have a place to stay if things are collapsing because it’s your safe space? How does that work?
I would. If I could find a property now that was suitable, I would buy it in a minute, and I would not care about the price.
Maybe you can come to my stateside.
Yes, absolutely. Your homestead, start developing that, plant fruit trees, get the gardens going, build a chicken coop, hunker down, get to know your neighbors, all the things that you do. For whatever reason, I’m still moving around. If I could find a property, I would. In the real estate market nationwide, Florida is leading the way. It’s collapsing.
It’s crazy even finding this place. I moved from Charlotte to Indianapolis. I was renting in Indianapolis cause I was doing what I call a city proof of concept, to see if I wanted to stay there. It turns out I didn’t. I was coming back to Chicago, where my family is, weekly. It worked out well because I ended up coming back here. A friend of mine had flipped a house. It’s tiny, but it’s adorable. I love it.
The kitchen is amazing. I’m doing a ton of cooking, which in my apartment was not something that I could do. I did a lot of cooking when I was in Charlotte, but the point of my story is I looked and looked and couldn’t find anything until I found something. I feel like with you, you know exactly what you need, exactly what you want, and everything. That’s sometimes how it happens. The way that this happened was so random. My dad and his wife are considering moving a little bit further South in the suburbs of Chicago.
My dad’s wife, Kim, has lived in this house for 75 years. Her parents built it. When they passed, she bought it from the family estate, and then they’ve lived there ever since. They’re getting to a point where they want a basement, they want a ranch, and all of the things that they want in a different home. They want to move it further south, where they have a little bit less to take care of. They have a huge, beautiful yard. They are master gardeners, gorgeous, but it’s a lot to take care of when you’re in your late 70s.
The point of my story is that they were coming to see this house because my friend had renovated it, to see what updates they should make on their house. I happened to tag along, I walked in, and I was like, “This is my house. I have to have this house.” Even though it was less expensive than my house in Charlotte, because of the interest rates through the roof, 7%, my mortgage is $800 more than it was in Charlotte. I had a bigger 700 square foot, bigger house. The market right now is so crazy. There’s such little inventory that, even when you do find that house, you almost have to jump on it right away. Otherwise, it’s gone.
That’s an interesting market. Here, it’s the other way. We have a huge amount of inventory. Sellers are cutting their prices, but I live in a little tourist town, Rincon, which is famous for surfing and areas that are hugely inflated by Airbnb. The Airbnb market is collapsing. Tourist towns tend to be falling flat now because people have bought that second home. They rent it out. They were making a ton of money. Plus, they had a place for themselves and a beautiful location they liked. That formula no longer works.
Now, everybody is doing it.
Now, they’re all, “Do a long-term rental.” There’s now a flood of long-term rentals and people dumping the properties. That’s part of why Florida’s tanking, and then parts of Texas. That’s the situation as the market is dropping pretty dramatically. I do believe the market will be dropping uniformly across the United States. Every market is going to be.
Living In Puerto Rico: A Unique Perspective
It’s got the right size at some point. You’re in Puerto Rico, so island living is a little bit different. I’ve not had anybody on the show from Puerto Rico. It is a US territory, right? What does that mean in the grand scheme of things? Are you guys voting? What’s that all about?
The last thing I care about is voting. Politics is like a soap opera that people don’t realize they’re involved in a soap opera. If you watch a soap opera, you know it’s fiction. You watch politics, and people believe it. It’s fiction. That’s my opinion on politics. Fundamentally, you can fly here on your state ID. You don’t need a passport or anything. It is a US territory.
It’s beautiful.
If you want to be right on the beach in a particular neighborhood, it’s going to be $1 million, but by and large, I find a lot of it is fairly cost-effective. You can still find properties here. As I said, Home Depot is here. Some of the things that you feel like you need are here and available. The US post office delivers here. But then again, it is like its own little Latin American country in some ways. Spanish is the dominant language. You can get fine with English, but it is the dominant language and the legal language. There is the Latino culture, which I love. They’re way noisier than Americans are on the mainland. It’s fun. I love it. People go, “Oh, the hurricanes, I love it.” We had the island-wide blackout for two days here. What it was, they said, it’ll either be 24 hours, 48 hours, or two weeks, whichever is longer.
For you as a survivalist, that’s like, “Here’s the Super Bowl. It’s game on. Let’s do this.”
I’m living in an off-grid house right now. I didn’t even know if somebody had to text me and say, “Don’t go to the gym because the gym’s going to be closed.” I love it because I think there are more solar panels per square foot on this island than anywhere. The infrastructure is so poor. Everybody has at least a 100-gallon tank of water somewhere, and people know about hurricane season. Preparedness is a part of the lifestyle.
San Juan is a big city, and those people are city people. They got their own particular version of ignorance, but the people out in the countryside, we know. Generally, there’s a high level of preparedness and an appreciation for somebody who is doing preparedness. I love it. It is a little rough. It’s slow, like, “You’re coming on Thursday. Which Thursday? Is it next week? Are you coming in the morning or the evening?” Things are a little slippery slidey like that. Honestly, I used to be a type-A personality and still have some of that, but it’s been good for me to say, “Okay.”
I heard, too, that from a tax perspective, it’s a flat 4%. That’s why a lot of people go there because you save a lot of money tax-wise, but I don’t know if that’s the whole reason. There are other sunshine taxes that you end up having to pay, like Florida.
They do have some incentive programs for people to move here. I honestly think it’s a good idea because this poor little Island needs some investment, attention, and love. If you have an online business, it’s a good thing. Look into it. I got into that program initially, and I didn’t end up making enough money to have it be worthwhile.
Which program is that?
It’s called the Act 60 program. You come in, and you can sign up for it. You do need to contribute about $10,000 to charity every year, which I love and do anyway. There are some other things, but there are people who moved here specifically for that. I moved here because I love chocolate, and it grows here. Chocolate grows on trees. If I’m going through the apocalypse, I want to have chocolate. For some people, it’s coffee. I’m not a coffee drinker. I also have always wanted to learn Spanish, so I love that I’m more engaged in that and salsa dancing. I used to live in Texas, and you’d go, “Would you please dance with me?” if you go two-stepping. Here, men are very proud. They dance beautifully. It’s a part of their machismo that they can spin a woman around, and I love it.
Being single, maybe I need to come down to Puerto Rico sooner.
I did this whole six-week thing of salsa. That was so wonderful. It’s so fun. I came here for the lifestyle. There are people who come here and hate it. Like you were talking about, you moved to Illinois, and you wanted to check it out. I recommend you do that. Come and check it out. Rent an Airbnb for a month or two. Check it out because it is different, but I love it. I’m having a great time here.
Gardening Basics For Beginners
I’d love to talk about beginning gardening because I wore my bee stuff for you. When the whole Save the Bees thing came about, I was the first in. In my last home in Charlotte, my whole wallpaper was honeycomb with little bees on it. I’m a big fan of the bees. I think I could have a bee. I could be a beekeeper because I’m not afraid of them. I love them. I have a friend who’s in North Carolina. They’re legit beekeepers.
All their homestead is many acres. I have a garden box that I bought. I haven’t even put it together yet. My neighbor next door, Mary, and I have both decided we’re going to grow food this summer. She’s got a couple of raised bed garden boxes that she and her son put together. I haven’t gotten that far yet because I’m doing some landscaping in my backyard and putting a patio in. I don’t know exactly what that’s going to look like yet. If somebody were like me, I picked up a book, I’m taking your webinar, what are the basics that I need to know? I know I need sun for at least six hours a day in the back. What are the basics that are easy steps for somebody that bought a house or moved into a new place and wants to garden?
I recommend what you’re talking about of a raised bed garden. Honestly, I like to build them out of cinder blocks for a couple of reasons. One is that a cinder block mostly weighs about 16 pounds, which is something that a woman or a small child can carry. You can build them, and you don’t need to glue them in place or anything. I like to build them two cinder blocks high. Part of the reason is that you can sit on the edge of it and lean in. It’s very good for people who have maybe a bad back, who can’t squat, or who have bad knees. The other thing I recommend is to fill it with the highest quality soil that you can get. The secret to a green thumb is good soil. Your plants get their nutrients and vitality not only from the sunlight and rain, but also from what’s in the soil.
The secret to a green thumb is good soil. Your plants get their nutrients and vitality not only from sunlight and rain but also from the richness of the soil. Share on XThe Importance Of Quality Soil
What makes it good soil?
When you pick it up, it should have that good, rich, earthy smell. I would recommend going to a local regional nursery that makes soil for you. They compost stuff and make soil. I want to give you one huge caveat. When you’ve been in Charlotte or Chicago, you probably never thought about this. What happens when you flush the toilet? It goes to the municipal processing center. They divide the water, the liquid part out from the solid part, and they lightly compost the biosolids. It magically turns into organic compost, which is an absolute lie.
It contains forever chemicals. It contains pharmaceuticals. It contains glyphosate. It contains everything that people have been flushing down the toilet. It’s listed often as organic because technically it’s an organic material. They bag it up into 40-quart bags and sell it to you individually. They load it onto big trucks, and they sell it to farmers. You want to stay away from that. If you open the bag and it has a chemically off smell. Sometimes they screw it up, and it does smell like human feces, which is rare, but it’s awful.
Things do grow well in it, I will say, but you’re also getting all kinds of stuff you don’t want, and you’re defeating the purpose of growing your own food. The local regional people who manufacture soil and compost things are going to be your best bet. Ask them. Does this have any biosolids in it? If they’re adding compost, where did that compost come from? I’ve read the 40-quart bags here. It’s called majestic soil, 4-inch letters. It says organic gardening soil. I’ve read every letter on the bag, and it said organic compost.
Innovative Solutions For Soil Contamination
When I called them up and I said, “Where did the compost come?” They said, “It comes from Caribbean Composting Company.” I said, “That’s the company that processes all this stuff from San Juan.” Good soil is important. If anybody wants to follow up with me, forever chemicals are supposed to be forever. People have said to me, “Marjory, I’m going to grow my own food, but we’ve got chemtrails. We’ve got agricultural drift. We’ve got all kinds of soil contamination.”
I ran into some guys who have an all-natural mineral and microproduct that they said would destroy forever chemicals. The first thing I’m like, “They’re going to get the white jacket out for you pretty soon.” We were involved in a project and kept running into them. Finally, I said, “I do need to.” I built a couple of raised beds and had contaminated soil in both, one I treated and one I didn’t. I sent in the results to a certified lab, Pace Analytical Labs, the largest lab in the United States.
Lo and behold, it destroyed forever chemicals. This is huge. Some of the microbes that are in that kit are also known to destroy glyphosate. I’m about to send in the results for that test. These guys also say it’ll remediate heavy metals. I’m still trying to find a lab that I can work with and design a test to verify that. It’s a total game changer.
What’s it called?
Starting Your Own Food Production
We call it the Minerals and Microbes Soil Detox Kit. I’ll get you a link for that. It’s easy to apply. If you have a quarter-acre yard, you would get twenty applications. It also includes 90 minerals, so it would be more than enough to completely detoxify your yard and then remineralize it, which is super important. It’s a kit I’m so excited about having recently developed. The raised bed gardens are great. To start out, what I’d recommend is to start small. For a single person, two 50-square-foot beds are great.
Your bed is 4.5×10 or 4.5×12 feet. Two of those. That’s all one person needs. It’s amazing. Don’t go crazy with a huge amount of land and put the soil in those raised beds. That way, you know this is my special high-quality growing food soil, so you treat it differently than whatever the random ground is. I go in more depth on that at the webinar at BackyardFoodProduction.com. Here’s a little bit of a shocker is I don’t recommend people do gardens first.
Interesting. Why?
If the timing is perfect, which in a lot of places in the United States, it’s perfect right now, but most of the time during the year, even in the winter or the summer, it’s not perfect for putting a garden in. A backyard flock of laying hens is so much more productive. I recommend six laying hens. It’s a good amount to start with. A laying hen will lay, on average, about 250 eggs a year. They take a little time off if it gets too hot or too cold. There’s a thing called molting where they lose their feathers. They got to change things out. If you have six hens, 250 eggs, 1,500 eggs a year. That means you have three egg omelets for breakfast and 33 dozen eggs to give away, trade, or eat in other ways. That’s huge.
I don’t know if my village allows them in my backyard, though. I would have to look at that, but that sounds amazing because I paid $7 for a dozen organic eggs. A friend of mine is a naturopath. She has a farm that she works with, and she’s getting me on the list. They have such a long wait list for healthy organic food, which is good. Music to my ears.
Healing Through Food: A Personal Journey
I am in remission for celiac and Crohn’s. I’ve had every doctor in the world tell me that you can’t heal that. Keep taking the medicine. I was losing my hair. I was diagnosed with Crohn’s. I was hospitalized for five days. I knew that I had celiac. I was diagnosed with that in college, but I never did anything about it because there wasn’t a ton of information about it.
Fast forward a couple of years out of college. I moved to San Francisco, and I thought I was going to die. I couldn’t even stand. My whole body shut down. They put me in the hospital, took them three days to figure out what was wrong with me. When they finally did, they said I had Crohn’s. They put me on this non-steroidal anti-inflammatory.
I’m taking this for a couple of months. All of a sudden, my hair is falling out in clumps like I had cancer and I was going through chemo or something. I went to my gastro, who is a world-renowned gastroenterologist. I said, “Help me understand, from what I’m reading, it’s all what’s sitting in my guts.” At the time, microbiome and words like that weren’t top of mind for people.
I was reading medical journals, and I said, “From what I’m seeing in the naturopath world, I should be able to eat good food and heal through food.” He said, “Put your big girl skirt on and take the pills.” I go, “Challenge accepted. I’ll see you in three months.” I didn’t take a single pill. I went on this anti-inflammatory, vengeful diet.
My hair grew back beautifully, nice and thick. My skin was glowing. Everything was amazing. I wasn’t sick anymore. I didn’t have any type of IBS symptoms. I did this for almost a year. When I went back six months later, because I skipped my three-month appointment, he said, “See, the pills work.” I said, “I haven’t taken a single pill. I specifically came here to tell you that. All my hair has grown back, no thanks to you. This is how I’m healing it.”
I found another gastroenterologist who had more naturopathic-type holistic views. I did a colonoscopy every year for eight years, because that’s what you have to do when you have Crohn’s to be Crohn’s free and in remission. I’m happy to say that in the last several colonoscopies that I’ve gotten, there are no traces of celiac at all and no traces of Crohn’s.
This is something that I have dealt with for a long time, but I healed through food. I feel like people don’t take that seriously enough. They keep eating processed food. I could see every once in a while having a cookie or something like that. Last night, I had pizza from my absolute favorite pizza place, but I had dairy, wheat, gluten, all that stuff. I feel fine.
Now, you want to grow your own food. Your own food will take it to the whole next level.
Growing Your Own Food: Easy Steps
There’s the dirty dozen and things like that. You can look up and see what it is, but growing your own food has been so incredibly interesting to me. I haven’t lived in a place recently where I could do that. I love kale. I have kale at almost every meal. I love collard greens. What are some of the easier things to grow that grow fast that I can get my hands dirty on?
Let’s think about the logistics of a plant. Leaf greens are the easiest and quickest to grow. Sprouts are even quicker. Not a lot of calories in there, but a huge amount of nutrition and life force, which is very important. I know the broccoli sprouts have a lot of sulfur, which has been good to shown to mitigate if you have had PFAS exposure, where there was a big thing going on around that with back when the Ohio train wreck happened.
For the plant, all it has to do is make leaves, and that’s pretty quick. You can get leafy greens up and going, kale, spinach, bok choy, all of the great classics. You can even eat your broccoli leaves, by the way. You don’t necessarily have to eat the floret. All they have to do is make the leaves. It’s very quick and simple. Now, something like a tomato, a cucumber, or a squash, the plant needs to make the plant, all of its leaves, and then it gathers the energy to make the fruit.
It’s going to take a little longer. It wants more sunlight, but that’s because it’s producing a fruit. Those are going to take a little longer, be a little more challenging, but we’re still not talking about a couple of months. It’s not hard. Of course, if you plant a tree, that’s wonderful. Your retirement account, don’t forget about social security, is planting some fruit and nut trees. They take a lot of work up front.
The Benefits Of Backyard Chickens
You plant them, you take care of them for a few years, and most of them don’t start producing for five years or so, some ten. It’s so much easier because then you’ve got harvesting to do, a little pruning. Having a food forest with these perennials is your retirement account. To go back to the chickens, I recommend that because it’s so fast. At the webinar at BackyardFoodProduction.com, I show you an example of what the chicken coops look like. If you have a modicum of carpentry experience, you can build one in a couple of weekends.
Having a food forest with these perennials is essentially like having a retirement account. Share on XIf you don’t, you can hire someone, there are things you can put together. There are all kinds of places you can get a chicken coop and a little run, and you can get set up in a very short period of time. Buy some feed, get the water, go on Craigslist, get some laying hens. After the hens have settled into their new environment, after a couple of days, you’re producing eggs in your backyard, within a few weeks.
Isn’t there waste, too, that’s good for the compost for your soil?
Composting: The Key To Healthy Soil
Absolutely. That’s the other real key to why you want to have livestock. In the city of Austin, many years ago, if you had chickens in your backyard, you were considered unsophisticated, had lower property values, and everything like that. There was a bunch of us, I was at the forefront of this, but I was involved where we turned that conversation around to the point now where the city of Austin has classes and subsidizes backyard chickens. The reason is they have found that chicken owners have 30% less waste that goes into the landfills because they’re feeding their chickens their scraps and their other stuff. They have less waste.
The landfill usage is a big problem for a municipality, so they will subsidize you getting a coop. They have classes on how to take care of chickens, but then that nutrient cycling, which is what you want to do when you’re in your yard with the chickens, that’s another step towards self-reliance of having your own compost and your own fertility going on there. You compost what the birds are doing.
I also have begun juicing again. I go through these phases where I juice a ton, and then I don’t juice at all for a year. I’m in that phase where I love juicing. I don’t know if that type of compost, the pulp from all that stuff, is good for composting.
Absolutely. That’s wonderful. By the way, your own homemade compost is going to be far better than anything you can buy commercially. You should think of soil as the gut microbiome for the plants. In your gut microbiome, the more diversity you have, the better able you’re going to be to digest all kinds of stuff, and the better your immune system is going to be. The big commercial composters usually only have a few ingredients that go into that compost.
Maybe it’s municipal wood chips. Maybe it’s old candy bars and bread from some candy factory. A friend of mine had a big composting company, and the Mars Candy Bar Company said, “Can we send you a semi-truck full of these candies?” It has so much sugar in it. The problem with large-scale composting is that if it gets too hot, it bursts into flame. It was a huge composting thing. It was on fire. You had to have the fire department out there.
To go back to your compost pile, I don’t think you’re going to need to worry about that. You’ve got that banana peel, maybe the leftover stump from that broccoli, you’ve torn up that paper bag and put it in there, a bit of the chicken manure, leftover scraps of this and that, some leaves. You’ve got this real diversity of ingredients in there, and it engenders a diversity of microorganisms in the compost. That gives diversity to your soil, which helps strengthen your plants. Your compost at home is going to be far better than commercial compost. Often, we all need to buy some commercial compost to get started, but you want to be composting at home in more than one way. You want to have a couple of compost piles.
Your home compost contains a diverse mix of ingredients, which fosters a variety of microorganisms. This diversity enriches your soil, helping to strengthen your plants. Share on XI’m excited about this. Mary, my neighbor, and I share an easement. All of these volunteer trees have grown through my fence. They’re getting in the way. They don’t even bloom, I guess. We had a landscaper who does both of our lawns come and cut them down, but we asked him to keep the branches and the twigs. He was kind enough to wrap them all, bunch them together for us. We are both sharing all of this, and that’s going to be the ground level.
I just moved, so I have a bunch of cardboard and boxes, and I’ve been saving my egg cartons, because they’re all compostable. I’m going to be building this little thing to try it so I can go bigger next summer or even later. We’re putting windows in my screened-in patio, so it’s almost going to act like a greenhouse this winter, which I’m even more excited about. That’ll be a good heat source for me, but I can also potentially grow throughout the year to see if I can keep it up. When your assistant reached out to me to see if this would be a good fit, I was like, “I have so many questions.” Thank you for answering.
Empowerment Through Self-Sufficiency
It’s so wonderful. The journey you’re on is so empowering because you start to look around, think, and go, “What can I do here?” The Earth is very abundant when you start to tap into it. There’s so much in our lives that we don’t need. I always love the challenge of the creativity of “This is happening. What do I need to do? How can I reconfigure this? What is this shape for?” This might be a strange piece of metal, and it had some other function, but you’re looking at it and you’re like, “That could work over here.” There’s this wonderful thing.
I’ll tell you a funny story. A lot of people in apartments, condominiums, and small stuff often ask me, and of course, I talk about sprouts, herbs, and the things you can do. I also say, “If you hold a question in your mind and you want it answered, the universe wants to support you and help you.” You can use whatever religion you have, God, or whatever. I use the universe. You say, “I’ve got this question, how can…” and so for a while, I got questions so much about, “What can I do if I live in a small space?” What are the things that people can do?
The universe will answer you, but you have to be very open-minded and open-hearted to receive that answer. For me, one of the answers came in the form of my teenage son, who was growing psilocybin in his closet. We deal with that as parents, but then I found out with him, you can grow mushrooms in a closet. You can grow mushrooms in an apartment or a condominium. As I said, the answer will come to you. It’s not going to be in a window factory.
You may have questions like, 'What can I do if I live in a small space? What are the possibilities?' The universe will provide the answers, but you must be open-minded and open-hearted to receive them. Share on XAs a mom, you’re like, “Let’s talk through this.” Resourceful. I love it.
He’s a good little businessman. We’ve got to deal with that.
The Holistic Approach To Health And Food
People are microdosing these days. A friend of mine runs a veteran organization. He was a Navy SEAL. He went through tremendous amounts of PTSD. He had several tours through different war-torn lands. He came back a whole different person. His wife said, “If we don’t do something about this, you’re either going to take your life or I’m going to, so let’s figure this out.”
He ended up going somewhere in Mexico and went through a ton of microdosing through the course of a couple of weeks. He’s a completely changed man. It’s because of some holistic, all-natural thing that we in the States are not willing to even experiment on, given how amazing their results are. I’m all in with you on this holistic, all-natural. This has to be the way we go. Otherwise, people are going to get sicker and die sooner.
Your own story. Are you in your 20s and 30s? You should not have Crohn’s disease. People have Crohn’s disease. They have heart disease. They’re having cancer. Kids who are 20s and 30s. It’s because the food supply is devoid of nutrients, and it’s loaded with toxins. It’s very simple. I may possibly be doing something with an AHA organization. We’ve been talking. I’m not sure because that political stuff does not interest me at all. There are a lot of reasons for illness, but at the physical level, it’s too much toxicity and no nutrition. That can be corrected with homegrown food. I often say the process of growing food is more health-beneficial than the actual production.
Just mentally, it’s a good exercise in taking care of yourself and supporting yourself.
Going outside, getting a little bit of sunlight, some fresh air, plants, and animals. Your electronics, water, and soil don’t mix, so you’re going to get away from that. It’ll be good for you. It’s an incredibly beneficial activity overall. At this point, I feel it’s been essential for a long time. People haven’t realized it.
I’m so grateful that I had this conversation with so many people. I have someone I know who I used to work with who was getting blood transfusions for Crohn’s. I said, “Here’s what worked for me. Try it. What could it hurt?” For him, it was 60 days. I said, “For the next 60 days, take all of these inflammatory foods out of your diet. Wouldn’t you want to get those three hours back a week that you go for blood transfusions?” He’s like, “Yeah,” and he did. Slowly but surely, he was weaning himself off medications. Doesn’t have to get a blood transfusion. People don’t realize that the food that you eat directly impacts your command center, which is your gut. If we keep hurting our guts, it’s going to keep hurting our brains, and we’re going to have more mental disease and breakdown.
I love what you’re doing. I love that you’re teaching people how to do this. I’m so grateful that you chose to come on my show. Thank you from the bottom of my heart because I think you’re doing big things. I hope everybody goes to see your webinar. It’s BackyardFoodProduction.com. How can people find you otherwise?
Once you get on there, we’ll start getting you involved in the newsletter. I post almost daily on Substack. That’s another way. Even if you’re an apartment economist or you’re not in a situation yet, I recommend you go to Substack. I post a lot of 5 to 15-minute videos that teach you something. That way, you can start learning and getting familiar with it without even doing it yet.
“I use this old school bus as a storage technique for all my proper stuff,” or “Here’s how you can regrow scallions,” or “Here’s how I’m doing container composting.” That way, you can start seeing it happen, even if you’re not doing it yet. You have some familiarity with it. BackyardFoodProduction.com, I think it’s @MarjoryWildcraft on Substack. I’m doing a lot there. I fell in love with Substack. It’s got a great community there.
I haven’t even heard of it, but I’m going to go and find it right now and make sure I sign up. You can be my virtual neighbor from Puerto Rico, and then I’ll come visit you this summer.
Definitely reach out. By the way, at Substack, I read all of the comments, and I’m doing my best to respond to all of them. If you want to reach out to me there, that’s a great way to get to me directly.
Thank you so much, Marjory. I love this conversation. I will post all of the information so everybody can get that, but thank you again.
Thank you.
Important Links
- Marjory Wildcraft on LinkedIn
- Grow Network
- The Grow System: The Essential Guide to Modern Self-Sufficient Living–from Growing Food to Making Medicine
- BackyardFoodProduction.com
- Grounded in Maine Podcast
- @MarjoryWildcraft on Substack
About Marjory Wildcraft
When the world goes crazy, you’re going to wish Marjory was your neighbor. Marjory Wildcraft is the female leader of the survival and preparedness movement. She is the global advocate for “homegrown food on every table”. In 2009 she founded The Grow Network which is the webs best resource for modern self-sufficiency. She has been featured by National Geographic as an expert in off-grid living, she hosted the Mother Earth News Online Homesteading Summit, and she is listed in Who’s Who in America for having inspired hundreds of thousands of backyard mini-farms. Marjory’s work won Reuter’s Food Sustainability Media Award and she recently authored the prepping best-seller The Grow System: The Essential Guide to Modern Self-Sufficient Living—From Growing Food to Making Medicine. Via her videos, books, and thousands of interviews on radio and tv, Marjory has helped millions of people grow food in thier backyards. Catch her viral webinar “How to grow lots of food in your backyard even if you have no experience, are older, or out of shape” available at www.BackyardFoodProduction.com.