Defiance as Stewardship and Self-Reliance: Growing Perennial Vegetables

Wolfy
3 days ago
7 min read

My grandparents’ three acre garden was a closed system.

Nothing essential came in from the outside. Seed stayed. Tubers stayed. Crowns stayed. Fertility cycled through animals, compost, and time. During the war, what left the garden left as food.

There was no seed catalog because there was nothing to order. No annual reset because nothing needed restarting. The system carried itself forward the way any competent system does, by remembering what worked and discarding what didn’t.

They saved seed at the end of the season because that was where seed belonged. They traded when something else proved a better fit. They didn’t chase novelty. They selected for survival, yield, and reliability. The garden wasn’t a collection. It was a system that refused to be replaced.

Perennials made that possible.

Asparagus didn’t need to be replanted. Alliums multiplied without instruction. Greens returned when the soil was ready, not when a schedule demanded it. Roots went deeper each year, pulling minerals annuals never reached. Labor went down. Stability went up.

Nothing about this was sentimental. It was efficient. Closed systems always are.

What reads as defiance now was simply competence then. The refusal wasn’t ideological; it was structural. A system that doesn’t need external inputs can’t be pressured by them. It can’t be marketed to. It can’t be hurried.

Stewardship, in that context, wasn’t care-taking. It was authorship. The deliberate act of closing the loop so the work didn’t have to be done twice.

That is what we lost when we learned to start over every spring.

And it’s why returning to perennial systems isn’t regression. It’s restoration—of closure, of memory, of control.

Why Close the Loop

I remember when COVID landed on our shores. Not the press conferences. Not the graphs. The panic.

It showed up quietly at first, then all at once. Garden centers stripped bare. Seed racks empty. Every online retailer and wholesaler sold out. The same social feeds that used to argue about tomatoes were suddenly full of the same question, over and over: Does anyone have seeds? We're starving!

People were hoarding them the way they hoarded toilet paper. Trading messages in private. Calling old contacts. Showing up at local seed banks with a new tone in their voice. Those banks had their moment—their this is why we exist moment—and even they didn’t have enough.

That’s when it became obvious what most gardens really are: they are open systems pretending to be resilient.

They work as long as supply chains work. As long as trucks arrive. As long as someone else remembers what you forgot to keep. When that breaks, even briefly, the garden breaks with it.

A closed system doesn’t panic.

It doesn’t need to react. It already has what it needs because it never outsourced continuity in the first place. Seed is on hand. Divisions are in the ground. Fertility cycles locally. The work continues at the pace it always did.

That’s not ideology. That’s insulation.

There are other benefits, less dramatic but no less real.

Money stops leaking out of the system. Not just seed costs, but the quiet expenses that pile up when everything is temporary. Soil amendments bought to replace what was stripped.

Fertilizers purchased because nothing stayed long enough to build fertility. New starts every spring because last year’s effort left nothing behind.

Perennial systems reverse that flow.

You chop and drop instead of hauling inputs in. Biomass feeds soil. Roots do the mining. What grows there feeds what comes next. Over time, the system stops asking for purchases and starts generating surplus.

Labor changes too.

Not less work—different work. Fewer frantic windows. Less bending to deadlines you didn’t choose. More observation. More timing. Less panic. When something fails, it fails once. When it works, it keeps working.

And then there’s the quiet benefit no one markets: Agency.

A closed system doesn’t respond to trends. It doesn’t care what’s popular this year. It doesn’t need to be updated. It answers to conditions, not calendars. To weather, not marketing cycles. To taste and nourishment, not novelty.

That kind of autonomy doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t scale well. It doesn’t photograph cleanly. It can look ugly to the neighbors.

But when the world tightens, when supply thins, when money gets careful, when certainty disappears, it keeps feeding people who planned for continuity instead of convenience.

That’s the point.

Not self-sufficiency as fantasy. Self-reliance as structure.

And once you’ve felt that difference, it’s very hard to unfeel it.

How This Actually Begins

This doesn’t require an all-or-nothing turn.

You don’t have to burn the beds, swear off tomatoes, or declare yourself finished with annuals.

Closed systems aren’t built in a season. They’re assembled gradually, the way trust is.

Most people begin by reducing pressure, not making declarations. One bed shifts. One edge changes. One part of the garden is allowed to stop restarting every spring.

That’s enough.

The system doesn’t care about your ideology. It responds to what you place in the ground and what you allow to stay there.

With that said, these are the questions that always surface.

Question One: Will I Miss Some of My Favorites?

Yes.

You will miss tomatoes grown exactly the way you like them. You will miss cilantro that behaves for six weeks before bolting in protest. You will miss the ritual of spring planting and the dopamine hit of quick harvests.

And then—something unexpected happens. You stop missing them as much as you thought you would.

Perennial systems don’t replicate annual flavors. They replace habits. They introduce bitterness, depth, mineral density, and seasonal reliability. You discover that sorrel does what lemon once did. That chicory earns its place. That perennial kales offer steadiness where variety once lived.

You lose some favorites. You gain new ones—usually quieter, usually tougher, usually more honest.

And the relief comes not from what you’re eating, but from what you’re no longer rebuilding.

Question Two: Will I Create a Nutritional Deficit?

No. And in many cases, the opposite.

Perennial vegetables tend to be:

Deeper rooted, accessing minerals annuals never reach
More bitter, which correlates strongly with micronutrient density
Slower growing, resulting in less diluted nutrition

Chicory, sorrel, perennial brassicas, alliums, docks, nettles—these are not marginal foods. They were dietary anchors long before nutrition science learned how to measure them.

What you lose is novelty density. What you gain is nutrient density.

Perennial systems don’t chase balance across dozens of crops. They achieve it through consistency and depth.

If variety matters—and it should—it comes from rotation at the plate, not reinvention in the soil.

Question Three: How Do I Begin—Without Burning the Whole Garden Down?

You don’t start by removing everything. You start by reassigning roles.

Annuals move to the margins: containers, small beds, places where disturbance already belongs. Perennials take the foundation. They carry the weight. They define the system.

Good substitutions help ease the transition:

Salad beds → perennial greens (kales, sea beet, wild rocket)
Lemon and vinegar → sorrel and chicory
Scallions → perennial alliums
Spinach → perennial brassicas and docks

You stop asking the land to perform annually. You ask it to remember.

Begin with one planting model. Four plants that belong together. Let them settle. Observe a full year. Then add another.

Perennial systems don’t reward urgency. They reward patience, because patience is how they’re built.

The Planting Models (Full Set)

These planting models were developed and tested in Zone 8a/8b, but they are not zone-locked. With thoughtful substitutions, the structure holds across climates because each model is organized by function, rooting behavior, and long-term coexistence—not by specific cultivars.

Each model consists of four true perennial vegetables. Four is deliberate. It’s enough redundancy to stabilize the system without tipping it into management overhead.

You don’t have to install all of these. You choose one. Then another. Over time, the garden stops restarting and begins accumulating.

1. Perennial Greens Workhorse

daily harvest, winter reliability

Perennial kale (including Homesteader’s Kaleidoscopic. Thank you, Chris Homanics)
Daubenton kale
Perennial arugula (wild rocket)
Sea beet
Turkish Rocket

This replaces the classic salad bed.

2. Deep-Root Backbone

mineral access, long-term stability

Asparagus
Wild chicory
Patience dock
Sorrel

These anchor a site and quietly improve it year after year.

3. Allium Defense Ring

edge control, pest pressure reduction

Egyptian walking onions or Nabischon Bunching
Perennial leeks
Garlic chives
Welsh onions

This model belongs around trees, vines, and beds you want to protect.

4. Structural Brassicas

biomass, presence, orientation

Tree collards
Perennial kale
Taunton Deane kale
Cardoon or artichoke

These plants shape space. They are as architectural as they are edible.

5. Starch & Storage Perennials

calories that matter

Jerusalem artichoke
Apios (groundnut)
Skirret
Chinese artichoke

This is where resilience becomes tangible.

6. Shade-Tolerant Foragers

understory, woodland edges

Hosta
Stinging nettle
Ostrich fern (fiddles)
Mitsuba

These thrive where annuals struggle and tools are rarely welcome.

7. Nitrogen + Food Alliance

soil building with yield

Apios
Siberian pea shrub
Goumi
Sea buckthorn

This model feeds both soil and people—slowly, steadily.

8. Wet-Foot Specialists

hydrology zones, seep edges

Water celery
Watercress
Lotus
Arrowroot

If water insists on being present, this model puts it to work.

9. Bitter Survivors

mineral density, neglect tolerance

Wild chicory
Perennial dandelion
Sorrel
Perennial arugula

This model holds ground where attention is scarce.

10. Protected Perennial Producers

warm edges, microclimates

Chayote
Yacon
Perennial pepper (Capsicum pubescens)
Scarlet runner bean

This is where careful placement replaces brute effort.

You can grow peppers in a pot and bring in for winter.

How These Are Meant to Be Used

These are modules, not recipes.

You don’t mix them randomly. You repeat them. You place them where their behavior matches the land. You let them mature before judging them.

Annuals can still exist. They just stop being structural.

Once you build around plants that return without asking, the garden changes character. It stops demanding constant input and starts carrying memory.