Recommended dual use plants?

I deliberately grow things I can use more than one way: flat green beans we like when young, but also are shell/dry beans when mature. Luffa, which can be eaten when young/tender or dried and turned into fire starter or skin scrubbie, etc. I grow snow peas, because they're expensive here and frozen sweet peas are so cheap... ditto large heirlooms. I plant 2 types of potatoes: fingerlings to use early and others for storage.

What other veg/plants you grow that you do anything similar?

TIA!

I only grow one kind of potatoes though I use them as fingerlings, new potatoes and just regular potatoes.

Most of my herbs were for medicinal use and for flowers for pollinators.

Parsley was used for cooking, garnishes and a home base for butterfly larva.

An interesting question Jennie - as one of the permaculture principles is stacking functions, it's a good one to think about.
I think most of my plant dual use are in the structure of the plant - for example I get straw from my grains, biomass from jerusalem artichokes, legumes are nitrogen fixing as well as providing peas and beans. My root crops attract predatory insects when going to seed. I did discover this year that fava bean tops are actually quite tasty, so I will definitely try harvesting bean tips again.

fava bean pods developing

I'm yet to try cooking the whole bean pod which I've heard are also edible young, as I'm still trying to save most of the beans for seed at the moment, so don't actually eat much of the crop as yet!

My gardens have just been planted with a bunch of turnips, radish, kale,collards, etcetera. All of these leaves are good in salads, as wilted greens, and the in soups. And of course, turnips and radishes produce edible bulbs. These are both good in small amounts in salads, sliced thin and sauteed in butter, or chopped into chunks in a soup or stew. Turnip roots are also good mushed up like mashed potatoes.

Nancy Reading wrote:An interesting question Jennie - as one of the permaculture principles is stacking functions, it's a good one to think about.
I think most of my plant dual use are in the structure of the plant - for example I get straw from my grains, biomass from jerusalem artichokes, legumes are nitrogen fixing as well as providing peas and beans. My root crops attract predatory insects when going to seed. I did discover this year that fava bean tops are actually quite tasty, so I will definitely try harvesting bean tips again.

fava bean pods developing

I'm yet to try cooking the whole bean pod which I've heard are also edible young, as I'm still trying to save most of the beans for seed at the moment, so don't actually eat much of the crop as yet!

I'd never heard of using fava bean tips before -- thanks! I had heard of eating Brussel Sprout tops, but have never had a plants that would work. When I find them in the market with stems, the stems are dried out, so I've never tried cooking them. I have 3 plants which are about 8" tall, now after epic battles with cabbage butterfly caterpillars/mould; it's unlikely I'll actually get any sprouts this year except the tops, which look like small cabbages now.

I've never grown favas, as most of the info I've found about them has them fall planted in England and we're in New England and I have no idea how to adjust that schedule for here? That's another question I asked here a bit ago... I finally found a Royal Hort. Soc. book, illustrated, that shows what they mean when they say X or Y, like lifting and sorting potatoes. Some of it's obvious, some not so much. I always assumed that "pea brush" were just put inbetween/around the plants, it wasn't until I found that book I saw they make 2 rows of brush, both sides of the seed drill. That will probably work better than what I've done previously, although growing them up an old TV antenna did work fairly well...

I have several challenges: 1)I was raised in SoCal by someone who did not grow veggies, but roses and decorative, tropical plants. 2)We are on a downhill north face of a mountain with too much shade, and my top soil is 1" on top of a sand leach field, so the nutrients have to be replaced a lot. 3)I have a 30 day shorter season than any of my neighbors because of the last factor. The cherry tomatoes I planted from seed in May are just now fruiting, most of them will be frost bit before I get anything from them at a guess. And the fruit I've gotten is < a dozen, so far. It makes it interesting, I will say!

Jennie Little wrote:I've never grown favas, as most of the info I've found about them has them fall planted in England and we're in New England and I have no idea how to adjust that schedule for here?

Broad / fava beans have a spring sowing, as well as the hardier autumn sown (often Aquadulce family) varieties.

Apparently, soil temperatures to germinate broad bean seeds is 7°C / 45°F - 15°C / 60°F will work.

Hard frosts will kill them back, especially if they're not the overwintering varieties, or if they've started flowering?

We grow pumpkins in our food forest as a ground cover, food for us, and as food for our cows, chickens and hogs. We make compost piles and plant them with pumpkin seeds, then let them run everywhere. They'll run over the grass and weeds, and we just try to mow in front of them so they can root in the ground and keep running. Seminole pumpkins are really good at this in our hot, humid, zone 8b climate.

There are quite a few plants grown for a primary purpose but also offer one or more secondary purposes.  As someone already posted, radish greens are excellent, and indeed they are primarily grown for greens in some parts of the world.  Sweet potatoes also offer wonderful greens. Just about any kind of brassica greens can be cooked up like collards and be hard to distinguish from collards ( broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage etc.)

my goji berries only ever produce a few ripe berries per year, but i periodically eat new growth shoots throughout the growing season.

maypops give fruit and the leaves are used medicinally.

Mulberry trees are awesome.

Can coppice them endlessly for high protein animal fodder or biomass. Hugely prolific fruit producers.

Can keep them small or let them grow into huge shade trees. I've heard you can use them to raise silk worms too.

Alder Burns wrote:There are quite a few plants grown for a primary purpose but also offer one or more secondary purposes.  As someone already posted, radish greens are excellent, and indeed they are primarily grown for greens in some parts of the world.  Sweet potatoes also offer wonderful greens. Just about any kind of brassica greens can be cooked up like collards and be hard to distinguish from collards ( broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage etc.)

Sweet potatoes are a cheat code. Along with sunchokes, they have been incredibly neglect and abuse proof for me.  Put some in an area I gave to the chickens. They massacred the greens, but it trellised itself on the fence out of their reach and continues to pump out greens.

nashturshums..

you can eat the flowers - peppery
you can eat the leaves - tender and tangy
you can make an amazing herbed vinegar with the flowers
you can add the green seed pods to salads etc... peppery/mustard-ish
you can add either the flowers of pods to stirfrys etc..
you can pickle the green pods and they come our similar to capers
they are easy to grow
they are pretty
they can repel insects in some cases

they are the bomb - cheers!

Raspberries! Not only are the fruits packed with antioxidants, easy to grow, and have an extremely wide picking window, but a 2nd additional use is the leaves make a delicious medicinal tea / extract. A 3rd use depending on how you manage your patch is a green mulch, at the end of the season we chop and drop anything above ground and they regrow from shoots the next year and produce in fall.