Not a problem.
So would I be OK in considering what things I could sell or trade in the local markets? So long as it was profit from what I could forage or grow in excess of my needs it qualifies as living off the land.
Am I getting that right Dweste?
This means I might do like the west coast mushroom and berry picking travelers. If I had a homestead I might grow some specialty herbs for local restaurants and gourmet stores.
One of the points would be to grow crops that don't lend themselves to massive monocrop cultivation, mechanical harvest or travel well. In other words, the stuff which agribusiness operations can't deal with yet.

For an example Mulberry jam might be a good product. Mulberries travel poorly and have to be hand picked because their ripening time is spread out too much. On the other hand they are very tasty and sweet. A person should be able to produce enough in a kitchen from two trees to make it worth doing.
If you had kids they could pick while Granny and Gramps did the canning.

If you were in the north eastern states or Canada then maple syrup could be another good thing to do.
Maybe a few bee hives.

If you were on the wet west coast, lets say Oregon, Washington or B.C. you might do pine spike mushrooms, chantarelles, wild currants, salal, and possibly cedar incense bundles.

If your travels took you though eastern Oregon, Montana and Alberta you might want to time your trip to gather sweetgrass or prairie sagebrush to sell in the new age type stores as incense.

If you are traveling about the sunbelt you might want to look at a bit of rock hounding.
I have met a few people who were living on the water and they included work on other people's boats as well as some salvage work in their strategies.
However, I am not a boat person Dweste, so I will leave that part up to you.

I might be going off thread a bit, but I see no reason to limit people's options by failing to consider the other human resources around them.

I think it is all good and within the scenario. I'd like to experience more mushrooming.

This weekend I heard a short piece on National Public Radio
that was discussing modification and exploitation
of coastal areas by pre-historic man. It was a sort of a
promo for a Science Magazine article. The particular thing
that caught my attention was: stone walls that collected
sand and allowed clam farming.

Here is a link to a Summary
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/325/5943/952

I have not read the article, but thought it might fit in
with your coastal research.

Thanks. Happened to hear it myself.

That's pretty much what native americans and later the chinese did around the turn of the century with their shrimp and abalone camps. Now thats some gourmet survival eating right there.

I think that hardly any of us have any idea what "self sustaining" means, and that the majority of us (myself included) would fare very poorly if we tried to live off the land for any length of time.

Given that my garden this year produced less than 1/4 of what I expected and that winter is coming, if I knew I had to feed my family this winter and I had no supply of local food, I'd pack what I have now and get out of the area - head south where it's warm.

Migration has always been a coping mechanism for survival.

I'm not too far away from the self sustaining generation, my fathers generation was the first to have a job outside of the family farm, my grandfather never held a job outside the farm but even he wasn't fully self sustaining, he sold animals and crops to buy things he needed. You need a lot of land and a lot of hands to work it, a lot of buildings and animals.
You need someplace to store your food, my family had dug out the side of the mountain and then walled off the front to make underground storage. Then you need to store the crops for the animals, barns for the hay, corn crib, oat bin, etc. You need a smoke house and/or place to salt the meat for storage. You need a wood/coal shed for haeting your home and/or barn. You need to have food and supplies stocked up in case you have a bad year or two to get you through those. You need to have a large family as a good% will die young and you need some to take care of you when you get old.

Thanks Eugene for the invaluable and sobering been-there-done-that.

Foxfire series?

Foxfire books.
They were about old time mountain living.
You can find the first 4 of them on Scribd if you want to look at them.