Gardening Self-Sufficiency And Time
(This is a stock photo. Our water storage system isn’t as pretty. – grins)
The Dear Wonderful Hubby and I have a goal to be self-sufficient with our gardening.
Eventually.
If there’s ever a time when we can’t buy or otherwise obtain soil, fertilizer, water, containers and other gardening necessities from others, we want to still be able to grow vegetables and berries.
I hope that day never comes but we’re preparing for it. Just in case.
This preparation takes time. And resources. And expertise.
It isn’t an overnight, install it and be done process.
Making leaf mold, for example, takes at the minimum two years.
My first attempt was a disaster. I didn’t add enough water. The leaves didn’t break down.
I’m trying again and that will take at least another two years.
Putting together a rain water retention system, as another example, takes expertise and money. We’re building this system over time, adding rain barrels and storage containers to it every year.
Building a base of perennial vegetables and berries involves a GREAT deal of learning and babying the plants those first few years and money to buy the seeds/starts. I find we can only add a couple perennials every year to our garden successfully.
Self-sufficiency with gardening isn’t an easy overnight type of thing.
But then gardening isn’t an easy overnight type of thing.
(grins)
We can do this!
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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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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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