Essential Ingredients Podcast 045: Urban Food Hacking: Your Yard's Hidden Food Potential with Marjory Wildcraft
Episode Description:
“Once you start eating your own food, it expands your taste horizons and you can’t be afraid to experiment. If it doesn’t work out and it’s horrible, just put it in the compost bucket and start over. It’s okay, you’ll be fine.” —Marjory Wildcraft
Food is not just sustenance; it's a fundamental human right that we've outsourced to complex, fragile systems. This disconnection from food sources has transformed us into passive consumers dependent on a market that creates an illusion of abundance, masking a precarious supply chain that can unravel in moments. But we are not powerless. Our backyard is a potential fortress of food security, self-sufficiency, and resilience.
Marjory Wildcraft is a pioneering educator who teaches sustainable food production and home medicine skills. She has developed innovative systems for growing food in diverse environments, helping people reclaim their food independence.
Tune in as Justine and Marjory explore how we can transform our living space into a productive food ecosystem through urban gardening, home medicine, animal protein production, seed diversity, nutrient cycling, and economic resilience strategies.
Meet Marjory:
Marjory Wildcraft is the founder of The Grow Network, which is a community of people focused on modern self-sufficient living. 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 gardens. Marjory was the focus of an article that won Reuters’ Food Sustainability Media Award, and she recently authored The Grow System: The Essential Guide to Modern Self-Sufficient Living—From Growing Food to Making Medicine.
She is best known for her DVD series Grow Your Own Groceries, which has over half a million copies in use by homesteaders, foodies, preppers, universities, and missionary organizations around the world.
Beloved for her humorous, non-judgmental, get ’er done style, Marjory raised two teenagers in Central Texas and currently splits her time between Paonia, CO, and Puerto Rico. When she’s not building an online network, being “Mom,” and tending her family’s food supply, Marjory loves playing, running, doing gymnastics, skateboarding, acquiring skills from the Paleolithic era (yes, she is part cavewoman!), and experimenting with anything and everything related to food production and sustainability.
Join the I Can Grow Food webinar to learn the fastest and easiest ways to produce healthy and delicious meat, eggs, and vegetables with Marjory: http://www.backyardfoodproduction.com
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Episode Highlights:
00:20 Meet Marjory: A Journey of Food Security
08:00 Practical Tips for Urban Food Production
14:55 Transitioning to Home Medicine
21:11 The Role of Marketing in Sustainability
26:56 Preparing for Future Food Security
30:01 Integrating Ancient Practices with Modern Needs
33:01 The Nutritional Value of Backyard Livestock
38:54 Start Growing Your Food