cardoon for sure. Flowering cabbage.

What do you do with Cardoon and is flowering cabbage edible?

Chard looks good through the summer and into fall. And Giant Red mustard is quite colorful (plant in mid-August for a harvest now). Both are easy and fairly pest-free.

Rodney

Rodney, is Giant Red Mustard spicy? How to you use it, raw or cooked?

Cardoon I harvest around Thanksgiving (whole plant), and store in cellar for later use (in two weeks it blanches). It is the freshest thing in January, but it needs careful peeling (I posted about technique in the past). Flowering cabbage is the best tasting cooked cabbage but does not keep as well as regular cabbage in the cellar.
Chard is nice but leaves developed in cool weather look different and scrawnier than regular summer leaves. Daikon looks good but is not as hardy as the rest. All of these you harvest whole plant, avoiding a front yard mess.

My redbor kale looks great - I have planted it as an ornamental for the past two years. The plant is about 2 1/2 feet tall with ruffled purple and green leaves. The photo was taken while it was still warm, but right now it's all dark purple. The color makes the cabbage caterpillars easy to see and pick off before they do much damage.

Sweet potatoes planted in a tall wide planter will spill down and spread outwards. Heart-shaped green leaves, and the vines reached about 6' for me this year. Once the soil temperature gets to 50 degrees, the potatoes will stop growing, and they need to be harvested before a hard frost which may damage shallow tubers.

Scarlet runner beans will bloom from midsummer to frost. They are tall vines which need strings or some other support and have bright red flowers that hummingbirds love. The very young beans can be eaten and steamed as green beans, and the older pods can be left until they are dry when the maroon and pink seeds can be harvested for use as dry beans (and to save a few for planting next year.)

If you want to consider perennial edibles, I also like the large leaves and bright red stems of my rhubarb. I usually let the plant bloom (a tall frothy creamy white fountain of tiny flowers) and when they start fading, cut them off. If you have acid soil, both cranberries (tiny-leafed evergreen vines with minute pink flowers and large red berries that last all winter) or blueberries (white spring flowers, summer berries, and bright red fall foliage and some types with colored winter twigs) are quite ornamental.

I grow all those I listed above. Others I like but I haven't grown include artichokes which have similar large leaves to cardoon (you eat the leaf stalk on cardoon and the bloom buds on artichokes, but I'm told the flavor is similar), bright lights Swiss chard (green leaves with brightly colored stalks in pinky-red, gold, and orange), and alpine strawberries, which don't have the offsets that regular strawberries have, and come with gold leaves or white berries as well with regular green leaves and red berries.

Ornamental cabbages are edible, but the leaves are sometimes small.

Thanks Glib, for that explanation. Good idea about harvesting the whole plant and no mess for the front. Does Cardoon tastes like Artichoke?

Nice photo of your Redbor Kale, Babs. It is pretty! WeâÂÂve been eating Kale all summer too. We grew Dinosaur Kale, but I started it late and it was growing through the heat and was on the bitter side. IâÂÂm waiting for cold weather thinking it might sweeten it up. Nice looking plant if I could get the timing right.

We do like sweet potatoes. I want to try those next year. A large planter would be a great idea.

And I saw someoneâÂÂs photo of hummers on their Scarlet Runner Beans and I definitely am going to try that next season.

I used to have Rhubarb, but no one ever ate it so I gave it away. Maybe I should try it again. My soil is about 6ph in most spots. I did add blueberries this season and used sulfur to amend the soil. IâÂÂm also mulching with pine needles and sawdust. WeâÂÂll see how that works out next year. Right now the foliage is SO red. Really nice.

Yeah, Giant Red is spicy. Young, tender leaves can be used in a mixed salad if you want a radish-y type flavor. Best to cook older leaves.

Rodney

Cardoon is similar to celery, but a lot better IMHO.

I know you said 'vegetables', but how about some herbs too? Many/most are perennials, and some have very nice flowers - pollinator attractants...Rina

Thanks Rodney, that Giant Red is really pretty too and I haven't tried that before.

Glib, I like celery that sounds like it could work out. Thanks.

I have grown Herbs in the vegetable garden, that we use but I like to keep it to annuals in my raised beds. In the front where I am creating a new bed, I could use perennial herbs. I do already use Marjoram, which is a great plant for bees and nice filler for vases with flowers. Do you have any suggestions?

My fall lettuce is looking gorgeous, but the red varieties are particularly ornamental.

Carrots, the green foliage is really bright and contrasts nice with the fall colors.

Ltilton, when did you start your lettuce? I probably started mine a month ago, which was too late, because they aren't even half the size of a head yet. Less sun on the bed in the fall, may be the problem, but I wondered if you started yours earlier than I did.

Carrot foliage is pretty. Not sure I have a deep friable spot to grow those, but does sound like it would work.

Lettuce in our high tunnels is always pretty.

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Carrots

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prairiemoon - I started my fall lettuce at the beginning of August. It had serious setbacks when the rabbits got into it, so it was delayed until after I put netting over it, when it took off.

It definitely helped that this was a very cool summer.

Jrslick, well you certainly don't have an issue of not having enough space! Great photos, thanks, very attractive!

Ltilton, I am going to have to get the timing down better. It was a good summer in a lot of ways. Wonder what it will be next year. :-)

I would grow herbs that I would use.
I have lovage; salvia (sage-you need to check which is hardy in your area); fennel-bronze is beautiful but it seeds so you need to cut off seedheads or vigilantly pull out unwanted seedling early on (taproot); thyme; French tarragon; bee balm; anise hyssop; lavender; chives (white and/or purple flowers) oregano...(so many are grown as ornamentals)
Rina

If you eat bulbing fennel, that would be very nice in a front garden with the added bonus that animals are less likely to browse it and humans are less likely to abscond it too.

For more inspiration, try Rosalind Creasy's Edible Landscaping book (it may be available in your library). Also try looking at some permaculture sites for ideas. Sea kale is beautiful (I hope to get some next year). One book with some good pictures is Paradise Lot. They also have pictures on their website that could prove inspiration. Of course, there are also strawberries.

Rina, we are growing all the herbs we use already. Chives, Thyme, Basil, Cilantro, Parsley. I guess since we grew up without using fresh herbs, we never got in the habit of it. We added Greek Oregano this year and no one used it all summer. I also have an Ornamental Oregano that we donâÂÂt use either.

Other herbs I grow just as pollinator attractors. I used to grow Bronze Fennel, but the Perennial bed it was in, had a make over and it just was too big at that point. I love that plant too. I am going to try it again if I can figure out where to put it. Mine did reseed but very gently because I do mulch my beds. Love lavender, for dried flowers and to put into drawers but IâÂÂm short on sun and donâÂÂt have enough room for it to make it worth it.

Thanks for the list. One of these days, weâÂÂll get a cookbook specific to herbs and use more of them.

Tishtoshnm, no one is a big fan of fennel here, but it is a very pretty plant true. Good idea. We started a strip of strawberries out there last year. I'm not an alpine strawberry fan, so I used both June bearing and Everbearing. I 'm still trying to work out how I'm going to manage that with all the offshoots etc., but so far this season it filled in pretty nicely, but I won't have room for another crop of offshoots next year, but I'll figure out a way to keep the new outshoots and probably remove the old plants.

Thanks for the book suggestions. I hadnâÂÂt thought of permaculture as another list of ideas. And Paradise Lot, and the Rosalind Creasy book sound right up my alley.

Also, I was just thinking that leeks would be beautiful in an ornamental type bed. They have a nice, almost sculptural look to them and still look healthy in the fall. When it is dinner time, you could easily go about and pull a couple. On the perennial front, walking onions could be interesting as well.

While we are talking about fall crops, I like to know if perennial leeks are different than regular leeks?

Do perennial leeks take over the whole bed?

Do you have garlic chives? They have a pretty white flower late in the season. Also, Thai basil has lovely purplish leaves and the variety I grew this year (maybe Siam Queen) had large flower heads.

nhbabs' kale looks beautiful.

Calendula is an edible flower and readily self seeds for me. Seeds dropped during the summer are starting to blossom now (NH near Concord). Might give you a little color when everything else is not blooming. Parsnip foliage looks pretty good right now, too. We won't dig the parsnips until next spring.

Hi Defrost, no, I don't have garlic chives, I have regular chives, that bloom in the spring. I've read that garlic chives are invasive so I've stayed away from them.

I do like Calendula though it's been awhile since I've grown it. I should try it again. I have a number of Nasturtiums that are looking pretty good right now. Those have done very well this fall.

Thanks for the ideas! :-)

I don't think garlic chives are as invasive as regular chives but you can solve that by cutting off the seed heads. Now that you mention it, I have some nasturtiums that are still blooming in a narrow patch between two buildings so they are semi shaded.

Thanks Defrost, I find that I have to really want reseeding to take on a plant that has to be deadheaded to prevent it. Never fails, that my good intentions of deadheading get sidetracked. [g]

I was looking at one of my nasturtium plants today that is just thriving. Huge, healthy looking, blooming. Didn't do that well all season. I hope I can collect seed for next year before a freeze gets them, because this one plant seems exceptional. I see seed heads, but they're still green.

Mine are in my vegetable beds in the corners or along the edge in the middle of a long bed. My vegetable plot gets 6 or 7 hrs tops in summer and less in Fall, so maybe they prefer the shadier conditions of Fall.

Chard:

Curly Kale:

Self-sown and deliberate salad leaves and Red Russian Kale:

Purple Sprouting Broccoli - harvested March onwards:

Red Russian Kale (self-sown):

Self-sown Nasturtiums - until we have a frost:

And a very typical view across a British Allotment in Autumn - Dahlias and Dustbins. (Not my allotment, my neighbour's.) All photos taken this morning - November 3rd.

FloralUK, Thanks so much for all the photos. Really cheerful and attractive. Love the Nasturtiums and that Chard really is very pretty. How low a temperature do Dahlias, survive? I don't have room for them in my Veggies bed, but maybe the Perennial bed.