Growing Ginger Inside And Other Experiments
This past winter, I attempted to grow ginger inside our home.
At first, it was growing very well. I was super excited. It appeared as though this experiment would be a success.
Then the weather turned cold.
The Dear Wonderful Hubby and I keep our average home temperature at 16.5C/62F.
This, we discovered, is too cold for ginger. The plants decided the growing season was done and they…died.
Our growing ginger inside our home experiment failed.
And this is what gardening is – an experiment. We try something. It might have worked for other gardeners but our growing conditions are a little bit different and it might not work for us. Or it might work ever better!
We don’t know until we try it.
(smiles)
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Gardening – 2026 – The Year Of The Herbs
One area of the garden I plan to really focus on in 2026 is
herbs.
Specifically herbs that overwinter well. I plan to split the 3 containers of oregano (assuming they survive the winter) into 6. I plan to plant more containers of mint, thyme, sage, try rosemary, experiment with other herbs. I’m super interested in growing chocolate mint. I merely have to figure out a way to source those seeds.
Herbs, fresh OR dried, are very expensive in my part of the world right now. And worse than that, they are often hard to find.
And they add such flavor to food. Plus many herbs ward off the bad bugs in our gardens.
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Overwintering Peppers. Again.
Last winter, we overwintered mini sweet bell pepper plants inside our home for the first time ever.
(You can read about those adventures here – https://tasteofcyn.com/2024/11/23/gardening-bring-mini-bell-peppers-inside-update/ )
It took a bit of work and we didn’t see a huge increase in pepper production.
Yet we’re overwintering pepper plants again this year.
Why?
Because of diversification. We overwinter some plants. We start some new plants. That increases the odds that SOME of these will produce peppers.
This world is a wild place right now. Many scientists tell us we’re in a new, not-yet-experienced climate system. We don’t know what will work.
So, in the Sax household, we’re trying as much as possible and hoping for a win.
(smiles)
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2025 Gardening Lessons – Plant More Perennial Herbs
2025 was a challenging gardening year for me.
BUT I did learn a lot and that will make it an invaluable year in the future.
One of the things I learned was…
I need more herbs, preferably perennial herbs like mint, sage, thyme and oregano, herbs that overwinter in Toronto and that I don’t have to buy and plant every year.
These herbs not only add some much needed flavor to dishes. But they also ward off unhelpful insects i.e. pests like flea beetles and Japanese beetles while supporting helpful insects like bees and butterflies.
That protects the rest of the garden.
I badly needed that protection in 2025’s growing season. The insects chumped quite a few of the vegetable plants, stripping them to their stems.
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Overwintering Perennial Herbs In A Cold Climate
Last year, I watched a video about how to overwinter perennial herbs in a cold climate like mine (Toronto).
I took the container of oregano, buried it to its rim in the ground close to the house, and covered it with an evergreen branch.
We had a cold, snowy winter (for Toronto). The container of oregano had over four feet of snow on top of it at one point.
But that gardening expert was right!
The oregano regrew in the Spring. I dug the container out and moved it back to its spot in the backyard garden. And it provided us with oregano all summer.
This year, I’m using the same technique with the sage and the mint, as well as the oregano again.
If this works…again, we will have these herbs forever.
This makes me so very happy.
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