Last year, we decided to invest in a freeze dryer. And despite its hefty price tag, it really came down to one thing: I knew that I wanted my family to have a pretty extensive supply of long-term food stored for a variety of reasons, including general preparedness, but also knowing we want to live off of our own food source one day.

We needed to have backup food security in case our harvests don’t pan out.

So I did the math, and I realized that when you get beyond about 6 to 9 months of food supply that you want to have saved, it makes more sense to actually start doing it yourself and preserving it than to pay for fancy MREs and long-term packaged meals. For me and my growing family of five, it was just wiser to do it myself.

Enter the freeze dryer.

Why Freeze Dry Herbs?

While the majority of what I do in my freeze dryer is actually things like meats—because it’s so expensive to purchase high-quality freeze-dried meats from brands—I still actually really love to freeze dry herbs.

The reason why is because as the food in my refrigerator just gets old, maybe because I haven’t used it, I can always grab those herbs on their last few days and freeze dry them. It limits my food waste. But also, once it’s freeze dried, it stores for so long. And so I end up with freeze-dried seasonings in my pantry ready to go.

And if you’ve ever tried growing herbs in your garden, you will quickly find that some of them run rampant. If you have an excessive amount of rosemary or basil, you don’t have to just pluck it out of your garden and not know what to do with it. You can freeze dry it, and it lasts for a very, very long time.

How to Actually Freeze Dry Herbs

First, of course, you actually need a freeze dryer to begin with. Please don’t mistake this with a dehydrator. You need a freeze dryer.

Before you freeze dry, make sure your herbs are dry or else that freeze dry process is even longer than it needs to be. You also do not need to destem them unless you’re talking about something with thick stems like thyme. Simple things like rosemary or even cilantro—I don’t bother to destem at all.

Here’s the big thing with herbs: greens can be really deceiving. Make sure you pack them down to fit in the tray, but don’t let them clump together. It’s better for the tray to be light than for it to be too densely packed, or else it’s not going to actually freeze dry.

You can also mix the herbs that you put in a single batch. It doesn’t all have to be the same thing. Like, you don’t have to have all cilantro in all of your trays. I’ve mixed and not had an issue with the flavor at all.

You’ll freeze dry it as you normally would until it is fully dried out. The general guidance for anything you freeze dry is about 24 hours, but I’ve found that a lot of the things I run are closer to 18 to 24 hours. So you’re still looking at a day, just for general best practices.

After you take it out of the freeze dryer, just blend it up and it makes it into a powder. I blend mine up and then I add it to protein smoothies for a super green kick from herbs that I actually had in my garden. I’ve also used freeze-dried cilantro in my rice when I make cilantro lime rice, and you can hardly tell a difference.

Then you can store it in mylar or in glass jars. If you store it in a glass jar, I would personally say keep your typical pantry guidance of 12 months. But if you’re storing it in mylar, I would say many, many years. Nothing beats a good old-fashioned sniff test and visual test before you consume something, though.

Building Food Security One Skill at a Time

Nothing beats fresh herbs. But on the other side of the coin, nothing beats freeze-dried herbs—or freeze-dried anything—in terms of its saving power. It all depends on which goals are most important to you in that moment.

For us, this is what self-sufficiency looks like in real life. It’s not just about having a freeze dryer. It’s about knowing that when our garden produces more than we can eat fresh, we’re not wasting it. And when the herbs in my fridge are on their last day, I’m not throwing them away. I’m preserving them for my family.

If you’re ready to build this kind of food security and independence in your own life, I’d love for you to check out my Sovereignty Blueprint course. We go deep into practical skills like food preservation, building pantry systems, and creating real options outside of the conventional food system.

And if you’re thinking, “This sounds great, but I don’t even know where to start”—start with one thing. Maybe it’s freeze drying herbs. Maybe it’s canning. Maybe it’s learning to cook from scratch. But when you stack these skills on top of each other, you’re building a foundation of true family sovereignty. That’s what we teach inside Sovereignty Blueprint.