06 Discovering Self-Sustainability and Living Off the Land with Modern Homesteader, Chris Gilmore

Ever dreamt of surrendering city life to dwell in serene landscapes, live off the land, and cultivate a more profound connection with nature? Allow us to take you on a journey through the verdant trails of self-sustainability as we chat with Chris Gilmore, an inspiring modern homesteader based in central Ontario, Canada. Together with his wife, Chris has ingeniously intertwined a life of self-reliance with an eco-conscious business model, enriching his lifestyle while being a good steward of the land.

From his youthful influences to the fruition of his dream, Chris imparts an in-depth understanding of his ventures - Chris Outdoors and Wild Muskoka. He illuminates his transition from suburban upbringing to understanding the land's ecology, becoming an adept hand at self-sustaining practices, and building an eco-centric business. Coupled with personal insights, we delve into the importance of comprehending the land's ecology for a sustainable lifestyle, underlining our relationship with the land and other species.

As we wander through the rich tapestry of ecological dynamics, we highlight the importance of sustainable living and the impact we, as humans, have on our environment. We explore the complexities of diverse ecosystems and the nuances of land stewardship through the lens of Indigenous peoples. Wrapping up our exchange, we discuss achieving self-reliance through perennial crops and forest gardening, even in constrained spaces. Chris's narrative paints a vivid picture of his upcoming projects and a hopeful prospect of meeting in person to continue our enlightening discussion on living off the land. So, join us in this captivating episode where we guide you through the wild and wonderful journey of living off the land, sustainability, and self-reliance.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Everybody welcome back to the cabin Last week of October and we're getting the typical late or mid fall weather here, so it's been very damp, very cold. We're starting to get cold, very damp and very cloudy the last few days. The stream is full. You might be able to hear the water in the background. So it's a really important time when you're homesteading, when you're trying to live off the land as much as possible. Over the last few weeks I've been harvesting the last of the vegetables out of the gardens the potatoes, the leeks and what else, getting the garlic planted and things like that, but also hunting, so moose hunting and small game hunting and really getting into deer hunting this week. So this podcast, upcoming podcast is quite timely.

Speaker 1: 0:45

I'm talking to Chris Gilmore today. He's 10 years younger than me but he's doing something quite similar with his wife. They're living on a small homestead, actually pretty close to me here in central Ontario, canada, and he's very interested in land stewardship and ecology, forest management and homesteading skills. So very similar to what I'm doing and in a very similar landscape. So it was interesting to talk to him and compare notes and he and his wife have some interesting ideas and they're running an interesting business. In fact, what I really want to share with you is their story and how they're able to make a living sort of living off the land, certainly avoiding traditional jobs. So they're living a bit of an alternative lifestyle that's very similar to the one I'm living.

Speaker 1: 1:29

So I hope you enjoy this episode and then you go and check out Chris and Laura's businesses and their social media accounts just to see what they're up to. I think you'll find that interesting as well. So I hope you enjoy this episode and I look forward to seeing you back here at the cabin next time. Take care. All right, tell us who you are. I'm on with Chris Gilmore, but he's going to explain a little bit who he is and why we're talking.

Speaker 2: 1:59

Awesome, yeah, so thanks for having me in here. Yeah, my name is Chris Gilmore. I run, like formally, from a business perspective. I run two different projects Chris Outdoors, which is me teaching people outdoor education, traditional skills, survival, hunting, things of that nature, and then I also do some consulting and emergency preparedness and disaster preparedness. And then I also run Wild Muskoka with my wife, laura, who was a guest on a past podcast. There we live on a kind of 26-acre modern homestead so we forest garden there, we have gardens, we raise rabbits and chickens, and then I also hunt and fish and forage both plants and mushrooms as part of our sustainability journey. And I actually come from the suburbs, so my journey has really been how do you go from being a kid from the suburbs into somebody that is somewhat self-reliant? And I think that's kind of where I connected with the show and your project here.

Speaker 1: 2:50

What's your, if you mind sharing roughly your age 43. Okay so 10 years behind me and or 10 years younger not necessarily behind me, but 10 years younger than me, but similar journey. So you came from? So Chris and I are roughly in the same area of Ontario, canada, and you're from the south. I understand from Laura.

Speaker 2: 3:12

Yeah, yeah, I was brought up in Burlington in the suburbs.

Speaker 1: 3:15

So that's basically sort of like a suburb of Toronto, I would call it, and I grew up in a suburb of Toronto, you know, roughly 45 minutes to an hour outside of the city. So we're not I wouldn't call us urbanites, and neither one of us that, I think grew up city, but suburban, you know, to. What we're doing now is quite different. So how did you make that transition? At what age? Like when did you? When did you tire of, I guess, the suburban, or what attracted you when you were young to a more wild lifestyle?

Speaker 2: 3:47

Yeah, I don't. It's an interesting question the why, you know? Because I was really attracted to the outdoors from a young age. I think there was a couple of big influences and, without telling my life story, you know, my parents would take us camping in the summer. Now it was nothing like my outdoors tough now, you know, it was going to drive in campground for the trailer and we go for a couple of days and, you know, make popcorn and s'mores and all that. So nothing like I do now, but that was an influence. I also did Boy Scouts and I had a grandma that was an artist and she loved painting natural scapes. So as a young child I would go and paint with my grandma. So I think that was kind of what instilled the roots, even though other than that, I was living a very suburban lifestyle. But by my teens I knew I wanted to get out of the city. You know, I used to dream of being a mountain man, like I remember watching, like Jeremiah Johnson and some of those old shows as a kid, that's what.

Speaker 2: 4:33

I want to be, I want to have a big beard and live in the mountains one day, you know. So when I turned 19, I basically said I'm out of here, and I never really went back. You know, I went off to Fleming College. I studied the Took the Forestry program there, and then I ended up going on about a seven, eight year journey, just kind of traveling around North America working on farms, studying wilderness, survival, learning from as many people as I can. And here we go 20 years later I'm sitting here chatting with you from our homestead.

Speaker 1: 4:59

So I think that's interesting because that's very similar to me. I had the same exposures, basically I think most Canadians did. You know a little bit of cottage life, a little bit of like trailering or tenting, camping, and I lived on the outskirts or right on the edge of a town so I was able to walk into the neighboring township and get that outdoor experience. But to me it kind of shows that I think it's so innate.

Speaker 1: 5:22

I think we're drawn to nature, we're drawn to our hands-on lifestyle and that we're kind of especially with our education system, the way it's set up, we're kind of trained to be sort of drones in the system and that we go, most of us go down that path. And then, even when we do, some of us just never really give up that dream of doing that. So to me, like the wilderness family and the Jeremiah Johnson and those movies were so compelling and I would go out there and kind of reenact them on my little level as a young boy and that never really left me. But again, I went down the traditional path as well and then was kind of lured back into that or realized that that was on fulfilling. So to go down that path, so I'm glad to. It's interesting to hear that you have the same path, the same story.

Speaker 2: 6:10

And I was always quite you know. The other thing I should mention I was always kind of quite rebellious towards modern society as a youth, so I'm sure there was some sort of connection between that and kind of wanting to get back to my roots on the land.

Speaker 1: 6:20

Yeah, I always thought I would go back. I didn't even get my high school diploma because I was lacking credits, because I just had, I couldn't sit in class and think about school. But I was also so shy that I was more comfortable outside and alone in the wilderness that I didn't fit into that classroom environment. So I would call me rebellious too, and I've probably been seeking since then to never have a traditional job, or certainly when I did, I couldn't wait to get out of it.

Speaker 2: 6:49

Yeah, I'm definitely with you on that one. I mean I did do a handful of jobs in my early 20s but by the time I was 30, I was pretty set. I didn't want a traditional career path and I've really been working for myself since then. We started Wild Muskoka, which sells the wild forage foods, and I've done all kinds of different things within the outdoor education world, the forestry work world, but really all on my own terms, and that's really been. When I think about self-reliance, we often don't want to think about the financial side of it. We often think about the dreamy part, like living in the cabin and the hunting and whatever, but money is a reality, part of this world. So I do think about finances as part of my self-reliance journey as well. And how do I financially support ourselves as part of that journey without having to kind of cave to that nine to five or working within the confounds of a system? I really don't believe it.

Speaker 1: 7:39

Yeah. So setting up a life that requires less money, I think, is to me that was always the primary or not the primary, but it was one of the objectives so I could get a life where if I can't, if I'm not making much money, that I'm resilient and I don't lose everything. But then once that foundation is set, then I can decide whether I pursue more financial means. And that to me has always been only for the support of my family. It wasn't for me personally. I'm not drawn to expensive things or expensive lifestyle. But getting that foundation in place first to me meant having the skills and then some of the resources as a fallback. So building a cabin like I built my first cabin when I was well, first cabin non-log cabin, just stick frame, little tiny cabin on an island was when I was 17 and then early 20s built the cabin on a property and then I always knew that I could go out into society, act normally by society standards, but have that to go back to. So I was never going to go to zero.

Speaker 2: 8:41

Absolutely. It's a huge piece of mine in this world to like know that you're not fully reliant to. You know, I think about the number of people that just hold this low level kind of chronic stress because they recognize their dependency. And you know, and fortunately, on my journey to you know, when I was in my early 20s probably one of the most pivotal things in my early 20s I actually went and spent close to a year living on a cabin up in the mountains in British Columbia.

Speaker 2: 9:02

I was basically how sitting for a couple of different people up there. So it was off grid, out in the middle of nowhere and really by myself for months at a time. That's cool. It was me and a dog and a couple chickens and a couple of ducks and I really learned, you know, how simply I could live and I also learned how much I really enjoyed it.

Speaker 2: 9:17

You know I came, I found peace with being by myself in the woods and realized how much there was to actually amuse yourself. And suddenly you know urban pursuits that cost money were a lot less interesting to me than you know, these really potent experiences that you know with wild animals and you know crazy sunsets and hikes and viewpoints and even the challenges, you know, getting lost in the mountains and a snowstorm and literally having to find my way out, and you know just, the richness of that was just, you know, it became an obsession with me. I was like, wow, this is where life is at for me, you know, and what really feeds my soul. It's what I was designed to do, but you know this more raw lifestyle.

Speaker 1: 9:52

Yeah, yeah. And to live alone like that, to think, is like that's a fear that a lot of people have. There's a fear of isolation, a fear of loneliness, and I think spending time alone allows you to overcome that. It's like any fear you confront that fear and it's no longer something that scares you.

Speaker 2: 10:11

And it's a learned thing too, right, like it was hard for me at first and as time went gone, went on and I practiced more, I got much more comfortable with it, you know.

Speaker 1: 10:19

Sure yeah and then, but that doesn't make you an introvert who's not willing to then, integrate into society at some level, right, so you're married, and presumably successfully married.

Speaker 1: 10:30

So you're, and you have a business. So you're interacting with the public, so you're yeah, it's not like you became this hermit and you're incapable of functioning community wise. So that, I think, is interesting for people. That, because I used to get this question a lot when I was at the beginning of this journey, spending more time solo canoeing, solo canoe trips and camping trips and hunting trips. And number one question by far I got at that time was how do you learn to do this alone? Or how do you overcome that fear to do it alone?

Speaker 1: 11:02

And the great answer really is just to become proficient at something. You have to do it. First of all. You get in there and get your feet wet, one step at a time, but then learn the skills that give you the confidence that that bump in the night is nothing to be scared, nothing to be afraid of, because I know what the risks are, because I've spent some time researching and gaining experience to know what the real risks are and then trying to mitigate those as much as possible. So then you get rid of the fear aspect and now it's like now I can enjoy this, and now I want to the other part there, I think, is the relationship piece too, because the fear is kind of what holds us back.

Speaker 2: 11:35

But then once you get over the fear, theoretically you can still get bored.

Speaker 2: 11:39

But I find, as you develop your connection with the land and your relationship with the other species, when you literally start to get to know individual groups of deer there's a group of deer I've been tracking for close to 15 years now and I'll literally see the deer and be like, hey, I knew your great grandma, you know like to have that kind of knowledge of the wildlife and that kind of relationship.

Speaker 2: 11:57

You know. Suddenly that starts to fulfill that loneliness part or those other parts there, because you're in this really cool relationship with the land and with the cycles and that's super rich and I do think a lot of people are craving that. And maybe I've never even felt it on that level of depth before. And as an educator, one of the things that inspires me the most is helping people have those magical moments that are nothing short of life changing, you know, and they realize how rich that deep relationship with the land can actually be and they might not even know when they were missing it until the experience and it hits people hard and it's beautiful to witness. It's one of the things that actually keeps me coming back into society, and wanting to teach and connect with people is helping other people feel that.

Speaker 1: 12:38

I mean it's so exciting to share things, but for me it was always my family, so I would go and do something and learn something that I would like bring my wife along. You got to show you this. This is amazing, you're going to love this. And then it's the kids, and then now it's the community, and now it's a global community that I get to share that with. So that is exciting.

Speaker 1: 12:55

And then the idea of those relationships you're building, not just with people, because people think of community as the people around you. But community is the plant community, it's the wildlife community, it's, you know, the entire ecosystem and it's the people are part of that as well. And I think I don't like the divergence that we're seeing in society, where we have virtual living and then we have real living, with more people choosing virtual living and losing that community connection at the ecological level. So that's, that's a scary thing and they think that we are not part of nature. So they'd see us people like yourself and I, as extractive rather than participatory and as as community members, because we're in a community and we look after that community and your background and your passion in ecology and forest management is, you know, it's, it's probably important part of your journey, I'm assuming Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 13:51

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 13:53

That's interesting. I don't. Maybe we talk a little bit more about, I think, ecology, because we talked to them briefly before about stewardship of land, and I'm blessed with that opportunity to have a couple of pieces of property that are sizable enough to see well, first of all, diversity of ecosystems and my impact on those, but also how I'm so much more aware, by being a steward of that land, of how I could negatively impact it or how I could improve it. And the reality in most places in the world now is that land has been used. Almost all land has been used at some point that's habitable and it's been impacted in a lot of cases negatively. So what you're looking at is you think of wilderness A lot of times. It's actually not. It's actually not the original ecosystem there and it's evolving, maybe back to that state. But to participate in that process it's kind of overwhelming on one hand, but it's enriching. So I don't know if you could share your experience with what you're doing on your land, or how, or your education in that regard.

Speaker 2: 15:06

Yeah, yeah, there's a couple things that kind of come to mind for me. I mean one just to build on a point you were making there about, you know, I think, being brought up in the suburbs. I had this idea. So we used to come up to Algonquin Park, you know, which is the big provincial park in Ontario, in the summertime and as a kid, you know, I thought, oh, you know these vast virgin forests to the north that are like this wild natural landscape. And when I went to school for forestry, I realized that these forests you know A lot of them are less than a hundred years old. Like a lot of this area was logged to the ground in the 1800s. So what we look at today is these virgin, untouched natural forests are actually in heavily influenced by humans. And that was like a big kind of like shattering of my paradigm on one thing there, you know.

Speaker 2: 15:44

The other part I wanted to throw in there is just this idea that this is a great starting point, you know, and if you have listeners that are in a suburban place, they may be dream of going there. They don't, you know, whether it's being more self-reliance, whether it's having the farm, whether it's living in the woods. Whatever that dream is, or maybe it's even just being more prepared in an urban context, I think one foundational skill set to all of it actually is the knowledge of ecology, and that's something I'm huge in promoting and something that I actually grossly Underestimated in the early part of my journey. And the reason for this is, you know, whether you want to build a cabin, like, if you want to build a cabin, you need to know wood really really well. You know, and not just like the names of trees, but like what are the properties of the different types of trees, even in our wood stove. You know, I'll tell it kind of a quick, funny story, but that's with first winter that I was living by myself in the mountains. I was totally idealistic. I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I'm really lucky to still be alive. Honestly, like I did a lot of really dumb things that winter and I learned from it and I'm thankful for them. But I remember one of the first cold nights. I got really cold inside the cabin and I loaded the wood stove up with cedar and I had no idea that cedar actually burns at a different temperature than it's all the other firewoods that we had there. So, literally, you know, a half an hour goes by and my wood stove is glowing red, the chimney is glowing red. I came this close to burning down the cabin that night, you know.

Speaker 2: 17:06

So when we talk about you know, you might think okay, well, I want to learn how, I want to be a farmer, or I want to live in a cabin in the woods, or I just want to be more self-sufficient. What does that have to do with knowing the burning properties of trees or the, the names of trees, for that matter? You know well everything to do it. You know People that are competent in the outdoors and are self-reliant. You know those little nuances of like the temperature that different trees burn at is so important to efficiency on the outdoors. It's just as relevant to like what wood do I choose to make different tools out of right the properties of those woods. The same goes with plants, you know. The same goes with getting to know wildlife. So the more that we actually understand the individual species but then also the relationship between all of these different species, the better at we're gonna be at wilderness survival, at log home building, at Emergency preparedness, the more information the land is actually giving us at any given time to help us make decisions. So there's so much value in the study of ecology. So I really encourage people as a starting point, you know, if you're, if that feels like a big leap for you to, like you know, build that log cabin or get to the outdoors, you know, just start learning your trees, learning your plants, learning to track wildlife, because it's foundation to all of it.

Speaker 2: 18:17

And the third story I want to share just on that this is when I actually realized the importance of ecology. So I was working on a permaculture farm out on the west coast of Canada. I did a whole summer out there, spent eight months on this farm, and at that time I was obsessed with learning how to grow food because I wanted to be more self-sufficient. And I had the realization because I did care about stewardship and the environment in the land and that summer I kind of had this realization like I'm saying that I'm living on a sustainable farm but I realized I don't actually know anything about the forest around me. How do I actually know this farm is sustainable if I know so little about the ecology of the habitat around it? Like I don't actually have the skill set to be able to track the Implications of what I'm doing on the land. So that kind of became my.

Speaker 2: 18:58

My first obsession and my self-reliance journey was farming and growing food, and then my next obsession actually became wildlife tracking and ecology. Because now I want to know well, how do I actually gauge whether I'm being sustainable or not? Sustainability, organic, all these things are great buzzwords, but if you don't understand ecology, you have no way to actually ground truth, whether you actually are being sustainable. Like, are you having an impact on the insect population? That's then feeding into the birds, which feeding into the wildlife you know. Well, if you don't know what insects are there in the first place, how the heck do you know if you're having an impact on them? Right?

Speaker 1: 19:29

Yeah, I mean you deal with that. Once you get into this, you realize you're dealing with that on a daily basis and what I'm discovering and you're probably discovering as you're trying to farm or grow some food on this Landscape that we're on now, compared to southern Ontario and Laura and I talked about this a bit You're coming from a limestone based deep soil Ecosystem down in southwestern or southern Ontario that's a great lakes based up into these to this rocky, infertil, very acid ground and a lot of plants do, just don't, can't grow, like one where I have one of my gardens. It's so acidic there that literally like only things that grow or moss and punch parries and Inferns and I'm trying to grow vegetables on there, which then you get. How much lime do I add? And is that responsible? Because that line lime is going through the soil, because it's very sandy as well Into the water system and I could affect that.

Speaker 1: 20:26

So I have to be very selective and isolate when I make any kind of soil improvements that benefit me and my human needs and then my human impact With what's good for the environment. So then I have to choose certain things that Work better in that system. When I look around, there's blueberries, there's cranberries, there's other, there's raspberries, there's blackberries and there's a few oak trees, but they're in slightly different spots. So I have to choose all these little micro ecosystems where I can say, okay, I can manipulate this for the benefit of me and wildlife in the future, but over here I'm just fighting a losing battle. I'm actually gonna burn that. Burn it out for myself out, burn that part of the land out.

Speaker 2: 21:08

Yeah, well, you know, another thing that's really hit me, and I can't buy any means pretend to be an expert on this, but I've been fortunate to spend some time with a few different First Nations communities learning, and I really close friend of mine I don't know if you know Caleb bus grave he runs the Canadian bushcraft podcast but something he's kind of brought light to me too and this is again a little bit kind of bursting my bubble as the naive suburban kid Is that you know Caleb's ancestors, the Anishinaabe people. They've been tending these forests for thousands of years. So again, we have these idea of these like virgin, untouched by human forests. But the truth is that you know and again I'm not pretending to be an expert and know the ins and outs of this, but from my understanding a lot of forests around the world have actually been intended by indigenous peoples for a long time. So humans interacting and actually changing their habit, just like beavers do in every other species, is actually normal. And you know, we get labeled sometimes again, oh, you know how can you be a forger and you're extracting from the natural landscape Like that's bad, we want to leave nature alone and I think the reality is is, like you know, no species can live on this planet without changing their habitat. All species change their habitat. So if, as we develop our knowledge of ecology, what we want to do is become conscious of how we're impacting that habitat and try to do it with the other species in mind as we do it, right, but if I live in the suburbs and pretend oh no, I'm hands-off, nature, we're not gonna touch it, well, everything about my life is just coming from ecosystems that I can't see.

Speaker 2: 22:27

You know, it's funny that we had somebody ripping on us a couple of weeks ago on a social media post about oh, you're taking all the wildlife's food by foraging. And I thought you know, if you go in hard by even organic carrots, you know You're buying organic carrots that were growing in a massive field. The field was once a forest that was cut down. There's no wildlife in there, minus like insects and bacteria, anymore to eat your organic carrots. So how is organic carrots, you know, not extractive?

Speaker 2: 22:53

And foraging is because foraging we actually leave the whole forest there. You know All the other wild they for still moving through there, and what we're trying to do is like what is the fair amount for us to take and how much are we leaving for the other species. And you know I'm not saying we grow carrots, so I'm not ripping on carrots. You know that's a conscious choice. You know we've claimed a small amount of land that we've we've opened up and we do grow traditional crops, but by integrating in the hunting, the fishing, the foraging pieces. I actually believe strongly that where we're limiting our impact on the land and we're trying to be conscious about it, we're not being naive in saying that we don't have an impact if we just buy from the grocery store or from organic farms.

Speaker 1: 23:28

Yeah, the amount of life that's killed in that carrot field that you're you're describing. Not only was the forest cut down, all that, the plants and animals that, and insects that Required that ecosystem to live in that each year you're plowing, you're killing every mouse in that field, you're killing the things that come in to feed on the, the, the carrots and the carrot tops your feet You're you're killing all the weeds, like it's very, very destructive and it's you know, that just because you don't see something doesn't mean it's not.

Speaker 2: 23:56

It's not having an impact and you know, can I just throw something there that I think super relevant to you know, I think about how many people that are, you know, deal with like just grief and anxiety and stress and things these days. I feel like one of the biggest teachings for me in the self-reliance path to is actually Taking responsibility for your impact on the land and seeing it. You know, whether it's I'm actually taking the life of a deer or I'm actually cutting down trees, like you're not. You're actually facing all of these things head-on, which are very real human things, and for me, actually doing those types of acts has helped me very much like kind of reconcile just the challenges of being a species that has to take In order to survive. You know, and I wonder sometimes you know People that haven't had the ability to to kind of go through those lessons on a firsthand Experience. You know, does that show up in other kind of anxieties about life? Or?

Speaker 2: 24:48

or, you know, crises around morals and values you know Hunting has taught me so much about, just you know, reconciling life and death and the give and take of the natural world. You know it's been so healthy for me to go through that even the passing of my own family members. You know hunting has helped me reconcile, like death, you know. So I think there's really really deep lessons about life built into these self-reliance skills and if you don't experience them, you know it's a hypothesis of mine that that could actually lead to like a really having a really hard Mental time.

Speaker 1: 25:20

Well, I think that yeah, I mean reverence for life. I wrote an essay actually the only project I think actually completed in grade 11 English was a Was an essay on the reverence for life and and the hypocrisy against hunting and what you do learn like if you, if you look at, for example, the let's look at the the Compospuller, the garbage not likely compost pile garbage of a typical urban Resident who has no hands-on Connection with their food at all, compared to somebody who harvests their food. There's very little waste when you put effort into Harvesting your own food, whether you've grown it or hunted or fished or whatever it is. You hate to see one calorie of that thing go to waste. And that life reverence is.

Speaker 1: 26:07

You know, I can kill a deer, I can kill a moose or bear or fish or whatever to eat, but, um, you know the bird runs into the window like it has an impact on me, like I don't want things to die or suffer unnecessarily. So I have this really, really deep respect because, for one thing, I've seen that in person, I've seen things die and I've seen them die at my hands and I don't want unnecessary suffering. So I'm gonna do what I can to alleviate that. I'm gonna take the minimum if you live Somewhere where, if you just don't have that connection, your food you don't, you tend to just throw things out. You don't finish your food, you don't Treat it with respect, you don't um, you don't care about the ecosystem that it came from. You don't care about that care it filled, because you never have to see that care field. You don't know what's been displaced in order to grow that.

Speaker 2: 26:57

And I think you're right, the same still does go, even if you're having, you know, following a vegetarian lifestyle. You know, I think it's noble people that want to be vegetarian or vegan because they care about animals, like I absolutely respect and understand that. But again, if you haven't gone out and grow in those carrots yourself and then learned about the ecology around it, you maybe haven't had that epiphany one how much work goes into those carrots. Suddenly you appreciate it so much more, suddenly you're way more conscious of the waste. But if you don't understand the ecology around the outside, you're not actually where like, wow, this farm, like work.

Speaker 2: 27:26

There's actually a lot of animals not living because of my carrots, and that doesn't mean it's wrong, that's a part of life. It's just something that we all need to reconcile in our own way, you know. So when we're removed from those substantive things whether it's building my shelter or growing my food or collecting water I think it's really easy to kind of have naive judgments or illusions about how the world works. You know, when we do these things hands on, it's very potent yeah, manipulation of the land by indigenous cultures.

Speaker 1: 27:53

That's a real eye opener and it's funny because the property that I'm on right now, or building the cabin, there's an old couple of cousins actually there in their mid eighties. They've been hunting that land land next to actually Crown land next to my property for seventy years and when they started they said they used to walk through my property to get to the camp and they could see to the very far end of the property. They could see up on the hill if there was deer. They're coming down off the ridge. Today it's a forest with eighty five year old trees on it. It looks virgin, like most people see me cut those massive trees down that I cut down to build a log cabin out of. You don't realize that's there from this generation, like full generation, of the, these old timers that's grown into what looks like a mature forest but is very, not very not natural.

Speaker 1: 28:44

That was. It's a predominant species. Composition is because it is the way it is, because it was cut down. It was clear cut, it was actually farmed. I found an old wood stove in the most remote part of my property. That was part of a small cabinet, some point. You're like why would they choose this, not realizing what was field at that time? This was a little low land beside a low area with a little pond beside. It's completely different, so it's.

Speaker 1: 29:14

Even when you think landscape wasn't manipulated, it was. And if you look further back than that okay, because I get this comment a lot you know, don't touch that bear, that wolf that's circling us. A couple years ago, for example, they were there before you. And reality is like ten thousand years ago, when the ice retreated from this region, humans and animals probably moved in at the same time actually, and there's always been a relationship between humans and animals. Animals didn't, didn't have their own little Eden and they grew and they created relationships with one another without human impact. We always pursued them.

Speaker 1: 29:51

And when you give that example of Algonquin Park, which is one of the most heavily logged, heavily managed forests in the region, the wildlife populations there that you see along the main highway, that people drive to see the moose and then they don't realize that is the most unnatural setting to see that animal and that's not afraid of humans and sits there unless you take its picture, or what steps in front of a car and gets killed. Three animals everywhere else have been pursued for as long as humans have been on this planet and they've adapted or their behavior is actually more natural to avoid us. So this, yeah, it's. We gotta stop thinking.

Speaker 1: 30:33

Wilderness is wilderness. People are people and we should keep them separate. Because there is this movement in society where let's just keep people in the cities and keep wilderness preserved and not not interact with it. Except for a few managers here and there, we need to be on the land, we need to be manipulating it to our benefit, but also the wildlife benefit to the plant, communities benefit, but realize that we're part of that community and not separate from it and it's the only way we're going to revere that life.

Speaker 2: 31:05

Yeah, and that to me, that's actually where it gets fun. You know, it's such a deep journey like I love. You know, one of the hats that I wear within my work is I do consulting for landowners on how to take care of the forest, like things like permaculture. So whether it's growing food, forest gardening, growing mushrooms and just getting to know their forest. But I love helping people understand the ecology of the forest when they buy property and, you know, even be able to like tell that story to them and then be like, hey, you know, traditionally there should be way more white pines here, so why don't we actually cut down some of these maple trees? And you can now use that for firewood or for building and we're going to plant white pine in its place and we're gonna actually increase the diversity. You know we're gonna manage for oak for the wildlife or beach for the wildlife, you know, and we start actually, you know, like you call it, kind of manipulating. I like to use the word we're tending the forest and we're tending it. Love thinking long term for both our needs. So I can actually harvest firewood, I can cut green trees and I can build a cabin, but I can choose trees that by cutting this I'm actually allowing more oak to come in, which now are creating the good fat and protein for the deer and the turkey and the bear to get through the winter. So I think when you want to understand ecology you realize you very much can take in a way that actually is selective with what else is going to thrive, so we very much can harvest and give back to the land. And you know, on our homestead you know we'll always grow annual vegetables. We deal with the same challenges that you do acidic soil, sandy soil, it's really hard to keep nutrients Now, after we've had our homestead for 13 years now. So we're definitely hitting a point where we're starting to realize that kind of what works. We are getting better at preserving the soil integrity year to year. But we're also doing so much more perennial crop stuff and I think in this landscape, perennial crops and forest gardening just makes so much sense because you know you're allowing the soil ecology to stay intact.

Speaker 2: 32:50

You have an even in a modern world where we have really busy lifestyles, to grow perennial crops that actually come back year after year with very little tending. It's very practical from a self-reliance perspective. So we, you know, when we first started our farm. I learned to grow in on the West Coast and in Southern Ontario. So I kind of imagine myself in my early 20s. One day I would have a big farm, you know, and like acres and acres of open field and gardens and I'm actually really enjoying this pursuit of the northern growing where we have actually less than a quarter acre of actual attended garden now and on less than a quarter acre like we grow a lot of food.

Speaker 2: 33:24

Like every single day of the year we're eating stuff out of our garden. I mean, we've barely gone to the grocery store. We actually joke a little bit because when we go to the grocery store we think that the clerks must think that all we eat is junk food. Because we go to like grocery store for treats, you know we'll go and buy like a bag of chips and you know kind of our like guilty pleasures. We never buy vegetables, we never buy meat because we're growing all that and we're getting that all from the land. You know. But we've barely been to the grocery store since April, like hardly spent any money on groceries at all, and all winter long we're going to be eating. That's on only a quarter acre of land. Now we do have a bunch of perennial crops that stretch beyond that into the forest, that make up a chunk of our food there. So in this northern client, our climate sorry, I'm finding, you know, getting into the forest, gardening and the perennial crops is really making a world of difference in achieving self some degree of self-reliance.

Speaker 1: 34:11

And the forage knowledge that you're wife and you have right, and so the food systems. We have very again, very similar paths here and to me, forest gardening is the future. Like I keep hearing these arguments from people saying we can't all live like that, there'd be no land left. But you actually, I think probably we could, just again, I mean, there's economies of scale, obviously, and growing things on the prairies, like grain for example, makes sense, but you don't have to eat grain if you live here in central Ontario. There's plenty of nuts, fruit, wild game, fish, the plants that we can grow. There's the improvement of the land. What I'm discovering as I do these forest gardens is that the wildlife are getting half of it, which I'm totally fine with because I'm also increasing the population of the wild animals which I'm harvesting. So the apple trees that I'm putting in, the acorn the, the Oaks that I'm freeing up to so that they produce acorns better, the so many examples of that, even the squash that fed the groundhog this year instead of me actually found a porcupine yesterday eating squash out of my garden, which I did not know they would. Yeah, yeah, I kept seeing these teeth mark and like the two too big for squirrels or they're too small for the deer? No, there's no deer getting into the garden. So anyway, I finally found the culprit. So anyway, you all, these food for us allows you to integrate great food into the broader landscape for your benefit and for the animals benefits. But I see a future for me and for my family where we get I don't know what the percentage is going to be, but a large percentage of our food from those perennial crops, and I find that extremely exciting because I'm a lazy gardener. The guy knew that I've known that forever. I've always grown things as many perennials as possible or things that I could mulch like crazy, for example the wood chips. Even when I had a backyard garden in our old neighborhood so that I didn't have to weed, I was spending half an hour, maybe a week in the garden for the majority of the growing season.

Speaker 1: 36:18

So you can set up systems, first of all in the small spaces, like you're saying, a quarter of an acre and you can also set things up so that they don't take all of your time. Because if that's one of the things that stopping you from making the leap into this lifestyle, then you know, gain some experience but learn as much as you can. Take courses, whatever you have to do, to learn what's necessary, and try, don't do what I'm doing, don't work harder than you need to. By using Hand tools most of the time we're harvesting all your materials or working alone. There's way easier things to live life, ways to live life.

Speaker 1: 36:51

So, anyway, don't let that be one of the things that stops you that you don't have access to enough land. Because the other thing I did is that I actually Approach the local farmer in our old subdivision when I had real financial issues and was 118 acres and you said you do what you want with it. I just bought for a future investment and it's still sitting In the same state that it was 15 years ago when I did started this and he said you can manage it, do whatever you want with it, so 18. In 18 acres we had animals and and green crops on that. It was free, literally free, just so that it looked like it was occupied, so it helped out the landowner. So there is always ways to find a place to grow food.

Speaker 2: 37:36

Yeah, there's a lot of people with land that like the idea of this stuff but either don't have the time or they're getting older. So I think community relationships is huge in self-reliance, especially, you know, if buying land is a financial burden. I mean, we started out. We spent eight years volunteering on different farms and that's where we basically learn the knowledge then go do it ourselves. But there was a number of those farms that probably would have been happy for us to have stayed there long term and just been workers. You know, and probably live very cheaply and you know. So those opportunities are out there.

Speaker 2: 38:05

One other one I wanted to mention that I don't know if it's on folks radar, but I, when I think about, like the food that we actually grow, probably the one crop that has made the biggest difference for us in actually Reaching some degree of self-reliance with our food is growing mushrooms. You can grow and and even in an urban environment, I think people would be amazed how little work mushrooms are and how much you can grow in a small space and Even how nutrient dense mushrooms are. You know, I used to not think mushrooms like. I used to think, oh yeah, no, the little button mushrooms in the store. They must just be kind of filler that you throw on a salad. But you know, when you start growing shiitakes and oysters like they have protein, you know they even have small amounts of fat. They've got vitamin a, vitamin D, so they're nutrient dense foods.

Speaker 2: 38:44

But you can grow a lot in a really small space, like we started doing shiitake logs 12 sorry, 13 years ago when we bought our property.

Speaker 2: 38:51

And I have logs that are going on nine years of producing shiitakes now and I inoculated them once like this isn't like.

Speaker 2: 38:58

You know, I plant my carrots every year, the shiitakes I planted nine years ago and all I do is harvest now, you know, once a year and maybe I'll rake the leaves around them and it takes me 20 minutes. So nine years. They spru, spring and fall, but we grow more mushrooms than we can possibly eat in a year and you know we have our mushrooms over a couple of spots. You know it's probably like a 10 by 20 area, so not a huge area, but like in an urban environment, you could literally do mushroom logs on the back of a garden shed. You can grow mushrooms indoors vertically, like oyster mushrooms, all kinds of species, and yeah, it's incredibly low work for how much you actually return from them. So I'm a huge proponent of mushrooms being something you get into early in your journey of food security, just because how much they provide. And then, of course, if you layer on foraging on top of that, there's massive foraging potential for mushrooms as well, and we do for it.

Speaker 1: 39:48

It's an online course, mushroom growing course. I suggest you check it out.

Speaker 1: 39:52

You know, it's funny because this morning I just answered yet another couple of questions from Viewers, because I get this question every single day how are your shiitake mushroom logs doing that? You inoculated two years ago and I had the first small flush from one of the logs just a couple of weeks ago, two years now. I had some other logs that I had bought inoculated, pre inoculated, and they started producing almost immediately when I got ahold of them. But these ones here you would test your patience and I knew when I inoculated them that they were larger logs so it was going to take some time. But with that expectation I'm setting the foundation, and a lot what I do is setting the foundation for future resilience. So to know that six, seven, eight, nine years, maybe I'll get production out of those logs, is producing food for free in a shady corner by the workshop that would never grow anything else other than well. The irony, actually, is that it's getting. They're getting rained on upon right now by by acorns. So I've got this food producing tree Above dropping acorns onto a bunch of logs that are that are producing mushrooms and the dead logs around it. I got lots of oysters right there and some lions mean that Are wild. So all this food just some this one larry and a dense forest that does not look like it would produce food for humans. So one of the things that people are struggling with, like I said, is getting into the lifestyle, but also also so there's a financial aspect, which you talked a little bit about, but they it's Well, let me put it this way.

Speaker 1: 41:29

So when I started off my, I would say, self-reliance journey in my early, late teens, I guess, when I bought a piece of property and started building my first actual log cabin, I Thought I could live off the land.

Speaker 1: 41:43

So I moved up there when I was, I guess it was 21, in the fall, beginning of hunting seasons, and I thought, okay, I'm gonna see what I can do about getting all my calories. This was extremely naive, like I had no experience at this point, really, as far as how many calories it takes to feed an individual. So I'm thinking fish and game mainly, and some foraging. But If I hadn't brought food I would have starved. So basically, I brought a huge bag of rice and a couple cases of tuna, can tuna, but that the amount of calories and I've been figuring it out over the last couple years, I know, down to a calorie, pretty much, how much I can get out of each game animal or fish and I've calculated how then how much of each thing you would need, and it is daunting, like it's a real struggle. So when you talk about living cheaply off the land Whether that's growing your own food or harvesting, foraging what does that look like for you and how much, how important would be, would fishing game be in that?

Speaker 2: 42:52

Yeah, awesome question. Yeah, so maybe just for to give an overview of what we grow. So we've got our quarter acre homestead and really, you know, we grow a bunch of stuff. That's fun, that we eat all summer long, but there's there's only a handful of stuff that we actually preserve and put away. And what we've started doing is we focus more on the stuff that we can preserve and put away that actually provides calories over time, you know. So we grow a lot of squash now, we grow a lot of potatoes, we grow a lot of tomatoes because of we like our tomato sauces, we grow a ton of mushrooms and then all of the other stuff. Oh, and then we've gotten really into fermenting too, so we're doing like lacto fermented pickles. So I've probably got a whole winter, you know, of eating a cucumber a day. That's lack of fermented, which is good for your gut. And then cabbages as well, very cold-hearty. So those are kind of some of our staples. Carrots would be in there as well.

Speaker 2: 43:37

After that, we grow rabbits incredibly efficient, and the rabbits have been huge for building soil as well.

Speaker 2: 43:44

That's actually probably Even a greater benefit to our farm than even the meat we get from the rabbits is the amount of manure that we get from the rabbits and in a Ecosystem where our soil gets depleted every year.

Speaker 2: 43:54

It's actually we used to the first few years of our homestead. Every year we would go and buy soil from off-site and bring it in to grow our carrots, which was incredibly self-reliant, you know, and it was almost a bit of a kick, like people come over big. Oh, you're living the dream, you're living off the land and we're like well, not really because we spend like a bunch of money on soil that we bring in every year, but the rabbits and the chickens have actually allowed us to close the loop on the soil, that and composting, so we no longer need to bring in additional nutrients to the landscape because of our efforts. Now, on top of that, with the rabbits there's so little work and we get a. You'd be amazed like it's just me and my wife. We don't have kids, but one rabbit is four meals plus stock for us and easy to process off of one single rabbit.

Speaker 2: 44:35

Oh yeah, super quick and easy to process, you know, and there's good fat on them. You know, when you raise, when you snare wild rabbits because I've snared rabbits before too they're very lean, you know. So a lot of people think about you know, you hear the word like rabbit starvation or whatever you know, and wild rabbits tend to not have a lot of fat on them. Ah, farm raised rabbits are actually fairly fatty, which is really nice as well, so you are getting some good fats. Like when we make our broth, it's got a nice thick layer of good fat on it, so it's really good stuff. So that's kind of the food sources that we do, but the rabbits have been huge, and before I answer your question there, I am going to that.

Speaker 2: 45:11

The one other thing I will say is what we've realized is we can grow a lot of rabbits in a small space. We're not gonna ever grow beef on our farm, or are gonna have cows on our farm, right in our small little wood lot. We could probably do pigs. We've toyed with the idea, but, like that's, you know, we're not really set up for it. What we've realized, though, is, you know, we can trade rabbits with people that grow those other things. So we have a neighbor up the road that does pig and he does lamb and he does chicken Well, and we're now trading him rabbits for chicken. We have another friend that lives in southern Ontario that does beef and we're trading him rabbit for beef. So we're now taking the rabbit that we can grow a lot of in a very small space and bringing in other nutrients that weren't on the farm. So that's been huge in our self-reliance as well. So that's kind of like what we get from the farm stead and then we supplement it with what we forage, what we hunt and what we fish.

Speaker 2: 46:01

Now I don't fish nearly as much as I think I should, for where I live, you know, I live in the land of lakes and I just I'm too busy in the summer so I mostly only fish in the winter time. I do a lot of ice fishing, but hunting is definitely a big part of our meal. You know I aim to get a deer every year. My wife Laura just got her license, so hopefully we're now gonna get two deers a year. So we're eating venison multiple days a week all year long, you know. Supplement that with some duck, some goose.

Speaker 2: 46:27

And again, if you want to think sustainability, you know there's some species that are Declining. There's actually many species that are declining, right, and I think that's one of the concerns sometimes people have about hunting. It's like how can you go and hunt animals when there's species that are declining? And yes, that's true, there's a lot of things I do not advocate hunting, but there's actually a number of species that are actually growing in population. Right, canada geese would be one of those. Like, there's massive flocks of Canada geese. Right, there's a lot of meat on a Canada goose. Like a Canada goose breast is bad, you know. Again, multiple meals off a can of the whole goose.

Speaker 2: 46:59

You can make stock out of it afterwards. There is more gear where I live here than there was a hundred and fifty, two hundred years ago on this landscape. Now, right, traditionally we're actually more in like moose and even like woodland caribou habitat, which were wiped out a long time ago. So when people like you know how can you shoot deer when all these species are declining and they don't realize, if you learn the history of land, there's actually more moose here than there were sorry, more deer now Than there were a couple hundred years ago here, you know, and people have been hunting deer here for the past hundred years and there's still lots of deer here. So so clearly we've got management systems that show over a hundred year period that we're not wiping out the deer by hunting them here, right, so we were basically doing that on our homestead and then we're supplementing with with hunting CCs, but I absolutely focus on species that are more abundant.

Speaker 2: 47:46

I actually stopped hunting moose locally and this is maybe a little bit of a controversial comment. I'm not against moose hunting at all, but I do feel like where I live the moose have actually declined over the last number of years and I made a conscious choice to stop hunting moose locally. So I would actually like to find a camp up north to go and hunt moose at, where I feel good taking them. But as I don't actually feel great about taking them here, and you know I'm to each their own, you know I'm not against people harvest them here. I do think we can have a sustainable hunt here. But I've personally chose not to hunt moose here because I can focus on ironic.

Speaker 1: 48:18

I have a particular pocket of moose so I can walk out the door of the cabin and call them moose, and almost to the porch during the rut. Yet I can't get a tag anyway because the population in the general area, as you suggested is, is declining. It's low anyway. It's probably never been awesome moose habitat locally like you get pockets of really good habitat but otherwise not the greatest, but you I had to drive 20 hours north to shoot a bull this year with my bow and then I come home and they're like tripping all over themselves, all around me. But it's the pot.

Speaker 1: 48:57

I did a video on geese, actually seven years ago maybe, where I showed again giant canadas were introduced like in my lifetime, reintroduced because the population was completely decimated. A few giant canadas were brought into Ontario and they thrived and now that's the nuisance goose that you see in all the parks and golf courses and there are some places the limits, like 10 geese per day or 10 in possession. 10 geese is actually the same weight in meat, in calories, as a full-sized deer. So it's significant and it's an abundant species that actually needs control and in a lot of cases it can't even be hunted because it's in urban areas. So the overflow is what we're hoping to harvest.

Speaker 1: 49:46

But there's all kinds of examples that Wild Turkey was reintroduced by hunters in 1984 because they were eradicated from the province and I just had a flock of five walk by me on the front porch yesterday at the cabinet. And it's not. There wouldn't have been Wild Turkeys here ever in history, even when they were in the province. This is not the landscape that we'd be in. They've migrated up the road systems, just walking the ditches, eating and setting up new territory. So it's sort of yeah.

Speaker 2: 50:16

That's why understanding ecology and natural history is so important. You know a lot of people and I totally admit I've been guilty of this multiple times having kind of a judgment about a practice, and then when I zoom out and actually learn more about the natural history, or I learned more about ecology, I realized, oh wow, I was missing a really important part of the story.

Speaker 1: 50:34

And when I made that judgment, in the past, when the indigenous cultures were using this land, it's likely that my land that I'm homesteading right now would probably have been not utilized because they had the luxury of having within limits. There was conflicts everywhere, just like there is today, but they didn't have these ownership parcels, so they were able to move with the seasons, move with the game and move with the. They would overuse an area and then have to move on and then that area would remain fallow for a number of generations till it grew up again Because of our private ownership structure. Now, in these smaller parcels, that's where this land stewardship becomes so much more essential, because we can't degrade that land. We have to continue to recycle resources within that same property in order for it to not be depleted, and that's actually a greater struggle than maybe we've had any time in human history. So we can't just pick up and move on, and we have this higher population, so we have to be more and more aware, and I've mentioned this other times.

Speaker 1: 51:34

But this divergence is sort of forcing a virtual way of living and a more urban way of living and it's separating from the people that choose this wilder lifestyle and there's a movement to make people all live in cities and let's segregate from the wilderness. Let that go back to the way they perceive it always was more natural, as if we were never on the landscape, and I see that as just a detriment. I just see more abuse by corporations and other entities that don't have that connection with the land. I think we need to personally be hands-on and steward it properly. Every little piece of everything we do our energy, our food or, in our case, firewood or whatever we're using you're going to utilize it to the best of. You're going to make the most efficient use of every single piece of what you put your hands on.

Speaker 2: 52:30

Yeah, absolutely. I don't want to go down that tangent or that rabbit hole right now, but I actually have seen some really beautiful models that are starting to be worked on, because there are still a lot of indigenous people that do work the lands around here today, not in the way that they used to, but I do see a push towards kind of learning from some of these ancient ways that have proven to be sustainable. And I live in Williams Treaty territory and I've been in a couple of conversations where they're trying to re-bring back kind of traditional practices of tending to land and that's really exciting and promising to me.

Speaker 1: 53:02

I know, like you said, we probably can't go down that rabbit hole, but there's a lot of challenges, there's a lot of obstacles and I hope we can overcome them. I hope that there's enough people that want to preserve the old ways from any culture that can prevail over what's happening with the world right now. And just creating resilience I always say self-reliance to me is just taking more responsibility for your entire life, your family, your community, everything To participate more, to be excited like you want to get up every day because you can't wait to make a positive impact on the world or your family or whatever it is. I think men, now more than ever, we need to make that choice for ourselves and I think listening to this podcast and watching the content that we're producing and going to your courses and interacting with you on a professional level, are interested and want that or are craving that experience and that learning.

Speaker 2: 54:09

I think there's a lot of value. I touched on this earlier. But even beyond the practical part of self-reliance as some of these systems instructors that we've relied on, we realize how fragile there are there's a very practical reason to want to be more self-reliant and learn these skills. But I do want to just say it again I think there is a lot of people are struggling mentally in this world and I think there's a lot of value, even if you don't ever become fully self-reliant. I think there's a lot of value in pursuing some of these ancient pathways to actually support your mental health and your mental well-being in this modern world. I think they have a lot to offer.

Speaker 1: 54:44

To me that's almost primary, I think. The mental health, I don't know. I watch my daughters and I watch people of their age starting out and they're trying to figure out what to do with their lives. They're not drawn really to anything strongly Given these manufactured choices and they're not all that appealing in this move away from traditional family, for example, early to mid-20s, historically you were raising a family at that point. Now we're trying to fill that void with something else and trying to find meaning in something else. That's a struggle. You're fighting biology, you're fighting evolution here. There's got to be something else that's really meaningful to replace that. I'm just talking about kids. I'm talking about having a hands-on life and meaningful, fully participatory life where you're responsible for your food and your shelter and your warmth and all of the things that are just essential to survival, instead of just trying to fill our time with things that are manufactured. Just get in there and do the thing. Just get in there and do something. Do something physical, do something for yourself, do something for your family or your community. But don't get up and just think how am I going to fill this day? What entertainment am I going to seek? I think just get your hands dirty. I think that will lead you down a path that I think ends up in a meaningful life.

Speaker 1: 56:20

I think we're going to have to get together in person. We talked about this with Laura as well. I've mentioned before that we kind of live in the same area but we also kind of hang around the same people in the circle of friends and community. So we've kind of not run into each other, but I think it would be worthwhile maybe even doing a little hunt together or something. Talk more about this. I'm happy with the area that we're in. We seem to have a pretty good community, people that are like-minded. I think we've had a lot of people reach out to us, even personally, to get together more and to share our experiences and skills. We all have different resources at our disposal, so I think sharing that is a nice thing to do, so I'm glad we're in an area that promotes that.

Speaker 2: 57:17

Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 57:19

What work can people find you and what's next for Chris?

Speaker 2: 57:25

Sure, well, I guess two places to find me. So Chris Outdoors is kind of me as an educator as well as a consultant. So you can go to chrisoutdoorsca that's my website there and you'll see about my in-person offerings. Probably the best thing is just to get on the newsletter. I'm pretty good at sending out fairly frequently, like once a month, educational newsletters about tracking natural skills, and then you'll find out about the courses that I run there. You know everything from wildlife tracking to mushroom inoculations. I have an online mushroom growing course if you're on there. Oh, you know what I thought of too. Sorry, I just want to mention quick SR30. I created a coupon code this morning, so SR30, self-reliance 30. If anyone's interested in the mushroom course, they can go to chrisoutdoorsca, check out the courses and go to the mushroom course and that'll give you $30 off if you put in SR30. So that's where you can find out about me.

Speaker 2: 58:13

I do have a YouTube channel, although it's nothing like yours. I'm very haphazard as to when I post and I haven't really been building it, but I do have some videos on there and throw stuff up time to time. So that's the one aspect. The other aspect is wild muskoka botanicals. So we do sustainably wild foraged foods and drinks. So you can check out wildmuskokacom. We also do foraging walks and mushroom walks in the muskoka region, so you can check both of those out.

Speaker 2: 58:36

Yeah, and as far as what's next, you know we're getting the homestead ready for the wintertime right now. You know we've been getting our firewood stacked and we're getting ready for the wintertime right now. We're getting ready for the holiday season for the business. You know we sell a lot of our foraged foods during the holiday season and we're coming right into the prime of deer hunting season. So I'm going to be really focused on deer hunting this year for the next couple of months and then, come the new year, I'm going to get back into teaching again. So come January I'm going to be running some wildlife tracking courses and, yeah, yeah, a number of in person new in person courses are coming to the schedule in 2024. Probably going to do a hunting apprenticeship next year if people are interested. So, yeah, you can check some of that out. Chris outdoors Okay, great.

Speaker 1: 59:15

All right, I'll put all the links in the description show notes or whatever you have on podcasts and if you want to watch the video segment, if you want to watch this on video, then head over to YouTube. It's on my Sean James channel and we'll put some content from Chris actually in that video, so you'll get to see a little bit behind the scenes stuff as well. So I think it's valuable to go and check us out there. So I want to thank Chris for joining us and we look forward to seeing you back here at the cabin next time.

Speaker 2: 59:47

Yeah, I look forward to actually meeting in person next time. This was great, great Thanks.