Perennial vegetable questions

15 years ago

I appreciate perennial vegetables more with each passing year - asparagus, rhubarb, chicory, sorrel, walking onions. I tried growing Jerusalem artichoke but for their flavour, size and the time it took to prepare them they didn't seem worth the effort. And nobody in the house is fond of horseradish.

Are there any other perennial vegetables for zone 6 and under? How about annuals that self-seed so reliably they're as good as perennial? Arugula and black-seeded Simpson lettuce have been self-seeding prolifically for the past two years, with excellent flavour; can they be relied on to self-seed year after year, and maintain that quality?

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Comments (15)

justaguy2
15 years ago
I am a fan of perennial fruiting plants. Grapes, pears, raspberry, blueberry etc. While they aren't veggies, they certainly are edible and delicious.

For the greens I have noticed that if allowed to go to seed they generally do self sow freely, but at least for me they didn't stay put so I don't allow them to self seed anymore. Maybe it was the birds, the wind, my feet or what have you, but I had greens popping up all over the place even as the original plot thinned out over the years.

I am kind of a neat freak with the garden so having plants grow where I don't want them irritates me :)
pnbrown
15 years ago
I don't have much experience with arugula, but a friend has had it as a self-seeder for many years. Lettuce does not perform as well as a naturalized self-seeder for me as do mustard, russian kale, and parsnip. I wish it did. I think the reason it doesn't is that lettuce is not fully cold-hardy, but perhaps naturalization isn't in it's nature (so to speak). I did have Simpson 10 years ago and I remember that it self-sowed vigorously and re-appeared for a couple of years but then petered out. Simpson, BTW, is the favored lettuce traditionally in rural florida gardens.
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I mix my gardens - herbs, veggies, fruits, etc. side-by-side so I do exactly what you are suggesting. A couple of suggestions: 1.) DO NOT plant toxic medicinal herbs in with edibles. Keep those in areas where mistakes won't happen. Even if you are sure where everything is, others might go to the gardens and not know any better. I realized this when my youngest child (a budding gardener) got old enough to go to the gardens himself and pick lettuce, spinach, purslane, and manner of other edible stuff from the garden to munch. I plant various blooming plants in certain areas to attract pollinators plus they're pretty. That year I had some foxglove planted in one of those areas. Nothing bad happened, but I had to do some special instruction and ban picking anything from that garden bed. I no longer plant anything that "dangerous" near to the edibles. 2.) Plant your asparagus where you can mow the bed. We mow ours in the spring before anything sprouts. Clears all of last year's debris - necessary. 3.) Check the plant's needs. Not everybody likes the same soil. Blueberries are a prime example. I have to put them in a special bed and amend the soil because they love high acid soils. That is not what I have. See what sun, water, soil ph, richness of soil, etc. requirements they have. Put like needs together. 4.) I often have small areas in the veggie bed where I start perennials like coneflowers. It's a bit of a nursery. But I have to end up moving them before working the beds the next spring. It takes effort and can hold up working the soil. If I was smart, I would just have set areas for this but that never seems to happen and probably never will. 5.) Check out companion plantings. Sources like Carrots Love Tomatoes can give you great advice on what to plant together and what not. 6.) Blooming herbs, perennial or not can attract many beneficial pollinators to your garden. Pollination by insect is requirement for success with many foodstuffs. I have calendula, marigolds (tagetes), marshamallow, borage, chamomile, and other blooming plants always next to or intermixed with the fruits/veggies. 7.) Raspberries sprawl. Best to have them not intermixed. Have a dedicated area. But be sure to encourage some wild rubus species that grows around you which you enjoy to a wild corner of your property. They often out preform the specially bred cultivars I've bought and planted. Of note, wild raspberry leaves do make a nice tea. Raspberry leaf tea is often drank medicinally for women's issues. 8.) I would plant some pole or runner beans by your arches. Some like "scarlet emperor" and hyacinth beans are quite ornamental. Some peas are as well. I like "dwarf grey sugar" for its pretty blossoms and edible pods. 9.) Encourage your youngling helpers to suggest some additions to the garden. It makes it more fun for them. Many vendors sell "kids" collections of seeds if you need some suggestions. FataMorgana
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Jerusalem artichokes escaped on me - I am still trying to eradicated them- Round Up may be next. Mint I am finally getting under control. I have tarragon, rhubarb, oregano is literally everywhere (which I don't mind so much), chives, onion, and garlic. I love the tomato surprises and hope for them each year. Had some parsley spreading for a while but that has stopped. Would like to have blueberries and strawberries and some fruit trees too. Oh have some wild raspberries and Day Lilies too - every part of the Day Lily plant is edible at different stages and take no care to grow. Now also letting the Purslane grow too. Very easy and requires no care or watering. Oh I usu get some lettuce volunteers too but Purslane will take its place soon.
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Scott, That is interesting, so do you think you were getting a cross-pollinated plant that was a cross of corn and Johnson grass? For several years I grew corn in a 'corn cage', which is just a fenced plot with a woven wire fencing 'roof' on top so that I could totally exclude raccoons from the corn. It works great. Well, except that I had it along our south property line, across the driveway from the main garden, and Johnson grass from the property next door kept growing under the fence and popping up in my corn cage. When the plants are young and small, it can be challenging to tell the corn from the Johnson grass, though as they get larger, it is easier to tell. I spent a lot of time over several years digging out the Johnson grass, but finally gave up on growing corn that close to the uncontrolled Johnson grass next door. I didn't plant anything in the corn cage last year, and this winter I'm going to take down the corn cage fencing and move it elsewhere so that maybe I can grow corn without Johnson grass mixing in with it. Here were we live with heavy, dense woodland on three sides of us, coons in summer in the corn patch are about as common as the Johnson grass itself and I cannot harvest any corn at all unless I protect it from the coons with a corn cage. It is annoying, but we have to deal with the terrain and wildlife we have, so a corn cage likely will always be a part of my gardening effort here. Johnson grass is everywhere here in our area---growing in every bar ditch, along every fence row, in every field of nature pastureland and along the side of every rural road, so I don't see myself ever really getting rid of it because no matter what you do, it is growing right at the property lines all around you and, not respecting fences, creeping and crawling into areas where you thought you'd eradicated it. Mowing keeps it down, but the minute you stop mowing it, or it is too wet to mow for a while, you've got Johnson grass everywhere again. I'm just happy if I can more or less keep it out of the actual fenced garden. When I've dug it out by hand, I've found rhizomes bigger around than a human thumb and they often run for yards and yards through dense clay. I have found them even 12-15" below ground in my effort to dig deeply and find them all. And, I'm not finding and removing them all, but I do the best I can. Even when I dig as deeply as I can and remove every piece of rhizome I find, I still get new Johnson grass regrowth within a few weeks. Most people here around me just rototill their gardens once or twice before spring planting time arrives, thereby chopping up each big piece of Johnson grass rhizome into a million small pieces, and new grass grows from each small piece. Then, they plant, and (usually by May) new Johnson grass grows up along with whatever they planted and, in fact, the Johnson grass outgrows what they planted. Most folks (not gardening maniacs like me) just let the Johnson grass grow in their garden and eventually abandon the garden and let the Johnson grass take over. It happens every year. After a few years of that, they decide it is impossible to garden here with the Johnson grass and they stop. I refuse to let the Johnson grass win. It may grow right up to my garden fenceline every year, but I do my best to keep it out of the garden, even if it means looks of digging. The people here who do manage to keep it out of their gardens are diehard gardeners who dig it out, plow it up, cut it down, etc., whatever it takes on a weekly basis to at least keep the Johnson grass shorter than the corn and tomato plants. I put down heavy-duty commercial-grade landscape fabric in my garden pathways with mulch on top of it so at least I don't have to fight the Johnson grass and other grasses in the pathways, and it works pretty well, but those Johnson grass roots will run 20-30' underneath the landscape fabric and then pop up right where the landscape fabric ends. It is hard to defeat a type of grass that is that determined to grow, so the battle never ends. Johnny, All that works for me is digging it out, but that is not practical for you. (It really isn't practical for me since digging in the unimproved clay along the fenceline is really tough and time-consuming but I still try to do it when I can.) I think that plowing deeply will work well, but you'll never get rid of it all. Those rhizomes and roots are just too persistent. I don't know if there even is a herbicide that still kills Johnson grass (and I wouldn't use one anyway). Most Johnson grass has become herbicide-resistant. I see people here spray herbicides along their fence lines and it knocks back all the grasses and weeds temporarily, but the Johnson grass still comes back within just a few weeks, so all they are doing is killing back the growth above-ground, and then the rhizomes put out new shoots very soon thereafter. Even if they spray monthly, they aren't actually killing the plants because as soon as they stop spraying, they have just as much Johnson grass as they had in the first place. I've been told that if you mow the Johnson grass weekly without fail, you'll eventually weaken the plants enough below-ground that they die. The theory is that by never allowing the topgrowth to get big, there won't be enough energy going into the roots and rhizomes to survive indefinitely. Ha! We've been mowing our property regularly since 1999 and if we go about 3 weeks without mowing the bar ditches and fields, we have Johnson grass everywhere. If all those years of regular mowing haven't eradicated it by now, they aren't going to, are they? So, you know, regular mowing and plowing doesn't eradicate it, it just knocks it back for as long as you're mowing and plowing. Go a few months without mowing or plowing the Johnson grass, and you get a stand of it that is head-high in a remarkably short period of time. The drought of 2011, when most of our area went about 60-70 days with virtually no rain at all, did see a lot of the Johnson grass appear to die. It withered, wilted, turned brown and seemed dead......and everyone rejoiced, thinking that maybe one good thing would come from the drought. Nope. When the rain returned in late August, the Johnson grass was about the first thing (along with bermuda grass) to rebound. Dawn
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pseudacris_crucifer
15 years ago
We tried purple potatoes in 2005, and carefully harvested everything (or so we thought). They came back in 2006. I wanted to rotate the bed, so I was careful to get every spud. But they came back in 2007, and again this year.

On the down side, each year the spuds have more canker. Next year I'll definitely kill all the resprouting potatoes as they come up, so as to give that bed a good long potato rest.
paulns
Original Author
15 years ago
Replanting the lettuce every three years or so doesn't sound too bad...I hope the arugula self-seeds indefinitely here too. One of our asparagus beds is now full of it - the 4' path between two rows. An edible cover crop? I will probably weed it out of the rows themselves.

Pat, your self-seeded parsnips grow well, full size, year after year?

Something new here this year is that the row of leeks I let grow and bloom in year 2, because they were too skinny to harvest - they make show stopping flowers - this fall I was pulling out the dead stalks and noticed new 3-5" plants growing from bulbils, much like garlic cloves, around the old roots. I started cutting the stalks instead of pulling them, wonder if we'll get another batch of leeks?

About those tiny purple potatoes - twenty years ago a friend of a friend smuggled some into the country from Central America between his toes. The friend passed a few along and we planted them. Exotic - tiny - hard to get rid of. A good survival food if it came to that.
A perennial vegetable I've been reading about is sea kale, which should grow well in this climate (northeast maritime). The flavour when young and blanched is said to ressemble cauliflower. Don't know if seeds are available anywhere.

Here is a link that might be useful: sea kale
paulns
Original Author
15 years ago
This arrived in the inbox a while ago and looks promising. Free seeds.

Here is a link that might be useful: edible perennial dock
ekgrows
15 years ago
How about chard? I'm in zone 5, and for the past 2 years, mine came back after long, cold winters. The variety I grow is erbette from Cooks Garden. I have also had good luck with the wild arugula - sylvetta. I do let it go to seed, so not sure if it is overwintering, or self sowing. Either way, I haven't had to replant it for years.

The sea kale is also known as sea beet, and is available thru the SSE membership book.

There is a vege called skirret that Fedco seeds sells. I haven't tried it, but may be worth looking into.

Oh - and re the dock, a lot of weeds are edible! Dandelion, purslane, dock, etc. Might want to research that a bit! :)

Here is a link that might be useful: fedco skerrit
flora_uk
15 years ago
Point of information so that people don't end up ordering the wrong thing..... Beta vulgaris ssp. maritima (sea beet) is not the same as Crambe maritima (sea kale). Both are UK natives but are entirely different species. The confusion might arise from the use of the common name 'sea kale beet' for Swiss chard (Beta vulgaris ssp. cicla) presumably since both plants have broad mid ribs used as a vegetable.
paulns
Original Author
15 years ago
Our self-seeded arugula was hot and bitter in the summer, but the new greens were fantastic in the fall.

Is it safe to generalize that the old and wild varieties of vegetables are more work to prepare for eating, raw or cooked, than modern ones, or modern versions? For instance this description of skirret, a relative of the carrot and ressembling parsnips, says the main root is tough, but the smaller roots around it are very tasty.

I've just found this Seeds of Diversity catalogue online - huge database (4000+ tomatoes), not so many available seeds.

Here is a link that might be useful: seeds of diversity skirret (skerrit)
crispy_z7
13 years ago
I have always tried to raise anything that self-seeded or came back from the year before, be it a random single tomato or a corner of a bed with greens, but the last few years I have been trying to purposely encourage self seeding/germination instead of ruthlessly pulling up "weeds" and tilling beds for perfect monoculture.

Right now in my garden I have large patches of mustard and collard greens that are flowering and going to seed.
I scratched up the surrounding soil and added some leaf litter, branches,etc to give cover for the seeds and allow them to germinate better.

A few years ago a friend of mine pointed out the lamb's quarters "weeds" that I was tilling/ chopping down were actually very tasty greens. Last year I encouraged patches of it to grow right in my vegetable beds (whereas before they could only be found in neglected corners)

One perennial vegetable I am pretty fond of is some leeks I "domesticated" from some I found at the weedy edge of a friend's woods many years ago. So far I have planted these at two houses I have lived in since, they taste great and there's the insanely cool giant purple ball flowers they make.

Someone earlier mentioned berries and fruits- natural perennials. So far I have apples, wild and domesticated grape vines, native persimmons, cherries, low and high bush blueberries, pears, wild black berries, domestic thornless blackberries, as well as some more exotic things like Kiwis, Mandarin oranges, citrangequats, Surinam cherries, pindo palm/jelly palm,pomegranate, and kumquats.
I bought a Goji berry plant (wolfberry) recently- known as a "super fruit", it is packed with nutrients and minerals.

Being that I live in Georgia, the "peach state", I need to get some peach trees....
feijoas
13 years ago
'Dividing leeks', chives, garlic chives and Egyptian walking onions are my perennial alliums.
Some Andean chillies are perennial, although z5 might be a bit much for them!
My spuds, like pseudacris_crucifer's, refuse to be anything but perennial. After a few years of being casual about disease potential, I'm making sure they're all out this year.
Herbs are a vital part of my veggie garden. The Mediterraneans may not cope in z5, but the mints (corralled!) are pretty indestructable.
Parsley, dill, chervil and coriander self-seed generously.
jolj
13 years ago
Bamboo shoots,Garlic,Collards(up to 4 years),Radicchio,nesting onions,Ostrich fern-fiddle heads, Oca-Oxalic tuberosa,Chinese artichoke- a mint,any mint,chives,rosemary.
Day lilies flower,Violets,Bee balm,Red bud,Rose of Sharon, all these flower are edibles.

Here is a link that might be useful: Perennial vegetables
peter_6
13 years ago
I would add danelions and self-seeding Russian red kale. Regards, Peter.
gardenweb_mooreds_com
12 years ago
You should check out the awesome book 'Perennial Vegetables' by Eric Toensmeier. He lists names, descriptions, growing info and pests for over 100 vegetables. Some are tropical only, but at least half are god for zone 5.
pnbrown
12 years ago
You can't 'add' self-seeding russian, Peter, since I already mentioned it! And several years before you, to boot....

Paul, the self-sown parsnip is very invasive and tends to produce many-forked roots, though some always come single and good.
chickenfreak
12 years ago
I'm about to plant some seedlings of perennial bunching onions; I don't have experience with them, but my understanding is that they keep clumping, rather like chives.

I've also read that salsify can be treated as a sort of perennial salad green.

Would you count potato onions? They do have to be dug and replanted, I think, but I still think of them as "perennial" onions.

Perennial vegetable questions

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