I love the "idea" of perennial vegetables...

Mark Reed wrote:I'm also a little dubious of eating just anything because someone says it's OK and I know there are a variety of daylily species. The ones I have most commonly seen as being eaten are the wild orange ones and they are the ones in abundance here. It's worth a shot to try digging some up to see if I can find any variations in root size, although it might just as likely be due to environmental conditions rather than genetic. Still I could bring more of that type back closer to home.

Just occurred to me that if I wanted to harvest cattails, at least the tops rather than roots in would be most convenient to utilize my kayak, eliminate all the fuss and muss and maybe catch a fish too. Wonder how "cattail on the cob" would be with a nice mess of pan fried bluegills.

Yeah. I have a certain willingness to eat things if I know the genus and am sure nothing in the genus is toxic. I don't have that kind of confidence with daylilies, so I'll leave that to people who are more adventurous than me and just stick with the ones I know are edible. Honestly, there might be more information in Chinese or from other parts of asia if people have the ability to search for and translate the available literature. This is part of the reason I wish it was easier to collaborate with people who speak other languages.

Canoes were definitely the preferred way to harvest things like wild rice. Just shake the stalks into the canoe. Definitely a good option for the parts of cattails that can be harvested above water.

I have a little pond, more of a glorified mud puddle in my estimation. It was built, I'm guessing a long time ago by who ever lived in the log homestead, now just a pile of chimney rocks at the edge of my yard. I speculate that there was more water in the ground back then as the pond collects little to no surface water, it is just a depression that at one time must have contained a spring. It often fills up pretty good in winter but most summers goes completely dry. I think I'll try to transplant cattails into it but I don't know if they can tolerate a wet/dry cycle. If not then they won't be on my actual list of foods as I want to establish food production that is entirely within easy walking distance of my house.

I already have the hostas and daylilies and can easily increase them so will do so. I've worked on the pecans and grapes for years so they are pretty well established and self maintaining.

A lot of the things I read about are certainly interesting and no reason not to explore but can't lose focus on the real goal and the necessity to drive miles somewhere to harvest isn't part of that goal.  

Mark Reed wrote:I think I'll try to transplant cattails into it but I don't know if they can tolerate a wet/dry cycle. If not then they won't be on my actual list of foods as I want to establish food production that is entirely within easy walking distance of my house.

Try it. I had a cattail by my lawn (from a neighbor's pond). It took me a while to figure out what it was. It got regular water, but it certainly wasn't wet!

I've seen cattails growing in a roadside ditch that appeared to get really dry in our seasonal drought. I never stopped to verify how dry it was to the touch, but at 25 mph, visually, it matched hard concrete clay. During the rainy seasons, there were a couple of inches of standing water.

Mathew Trotter wrote:
Thanks, Karl. I got some "sea kale" seeds last year that I finally got around to starting this year, and they ended up being bogus. They were shipped without pericarp, so I had a feeling that they weren't really sea kale. It's still on my list, but I'd honestly love the larger florets... which I'm obviously not going to get with the sea kale.

Have you tried eating the roots? I think I heard that one of the related crambe species had slightly better roots for eating, but I've always been curious what people think about the flavor and eating quality.

Hi Mathew,

Sorry it took me so long to see your response! That sucks about your bogus seeds. Removal of the pericarp is very helpful for germination, but the inner seeds are fragile and may get bumped around in the mail. When I send seeds, I usually send instructions about removing the pericarp. I have also experienced a relatively low germination rate with my own seeds, so that may have contributed to your issues.

Yes, I have tried eating sea kale roots. Last spring I had too many volunteer plants and decided to dig a few roots up to share and to eat. If you like turnips, you'll probably like sea kale roots - which makes sense, because they are both in the brassica family. Personally, I wouldn't bother growing them for the roots. I am not a huge fan of turnips, and harvesting the roots can be problematic. It leads to lots of volunteer plants and requires aggressive digging in my "no-dig" beds.

I'd be happy to gift you some root segments and seeds if you'd like to try planting them again. I also have leftover year-old seeds and a limited number of seeds from this summer. I can send some of each. Like I say, germ rate isn't great, and may be worse for year-old seeds, but I expect the root segments will do pretty well if they don't get eaten by varmints this winter. The only downside to using my root segments is that there will be very little genetic diversity. My older plants are all clones of each other and I have only recently begun introducing more genetic diversity. The seeds will be more genetically diverse but harder to start.

You can contact me through this link to my website.

Cheers!

Trace Oswald wrote:Aimee, thanks for that.  It had some things that I will definitely try.  I do grow sunchokes, I just forgot to add them to the list.  I like them, but we haven't figured out a great way to prepare them yet.  Currently we roast them, but mine are kind of small and it's tedious trying to get the skin off them

Trace, my wife and I have grown and played with 'chokes for years. I had three varieties. One I'm getting rid of, it's totally obnoxiously strong and nasty flavored. The other two are good. We just scrub them, we don't try to skin them. One variety has reddish skin. It has loads of antioxidants in that red skin so we don't toss them.
Roasting, as you said is good. We also boil or steam them and mash like potatoes. One of my favorites is a 50:50 mix of mashed potatoes and mashed 'chokes with some brine pickled field garlic and butter. We also can them as pickles and relishes. I like them better than cukes. Their raw texture is like water chestnuts so into stir-fries they go. I've tossed thick chips onto pizzas. I've even dried chips, ground them into flour in a food processor and added the flour to bread and pizza dough. It's a heavy flour, so best mixed with other flours. They're good as hash browns, but if you freeze the hash browns, squeeze as much moisture out of them as you can before freezing. I tried fermenting them like cabbage into sauerkraut but because of their added moisture my brine wasn't strong enough and they got a bit musty flavored. We've fried them like home fries, tossed them into stews and soups, shaved them into salads ... I forget what all. There are recipes for pureed 'chokes and a few others we haven't tried. A restaurant chef downtown made humus several years ago which wasn't bad at all and I forget what he put in it. I've made wine out of both tuber and flower broth. The flower wine has a nice earthy tone by itself and it blends very well with fruit wines. I went a bit strong with the tuber wine, but it makes a good cooking wine. The French make a liqueur out of the tubers called Topinambur.

A lot of folks are trying to find perennial greens that taste decent when eaten raw or roasted.

Personally, I'm sensitive to the 'bitter' taste of most greens, and I'm rather particular about textures in general.  
Even spinach can be too bitter to eat raw if the leaf is on the mature side, and that's a very well-established 'sweet' leafy green.  Kale especially just tastes like bitter 'leaf' to me - I don't really understand people's love of it, aside from accepting that some people just enjoy the taste of leaves.
Mushrooms also - While I love the flavor, I can't stand the texture of most mushrooms.

Solution? Boiling & Blending

I make a lot of smoothies & soups with my perennial greens.
Instead of adding a bunch of sugar to sweeten & overpower the bitter, I use complimentary savory/creamy/acidic flavors so that the bitter flavor is at a level that is ok/acceptable.

Creamy Tomato, Basil & Greens soup
Creamy Squash & greens soup
Creamy Potato & greens soup
Chicken & greens soup
Chicken, Corn & Dandelion Root Soup - (When Dandelion roots are minced finely, I really enjoy the texture & flavor)

The key to adding greens to many soups is blending it or mincing it up very finely, so you never have to chew through a whole mouthful of super-bitter leaves.
Basil especially can go REALLY far in disguising the bitter flavor of other leaves.

I have personally eaten very young dandelion greens, Hosta baby leaves, and plantain baby sprouts - they all share a very mild 'asparagus-salad' flavor that I could easily eat with a balsamic vinegarette, but would not enjoy eating raw, on its own.
Making sure you're actually harvesting YOUNG leaves, before the plant has gone to seed, goes a long way in ensuring it's actually palatable.

You can also pack greens into an otherwise fruity smoothie. The fruit's natural sugars and acids mute the bitterness.

I've also packed a bunch of edible greens into a soup pot along with with some oil, boiled it thoroughly, and then removed the solid leaves, using the broth left behind as a base to make another soup. It's a lot less bitter than eating the solids, and both water and fat-soluble vitamins/minerals get leeched out into the water.
You don't get the fiber content of eating the whole leaves, but you're definitely adding nutrients to your diet when you otherwise wouldn't find the whole leaves palatable.

I just can't enjoy most bitter leaves - annual or perennial. But I know they're super good for me, so I work around that flavor to make it palatable.

Toko Aakster wrote:Personally, I'm sensitive to the 'bitter' taste of most greens, and I'm rather particular about textures in general.  

OK, back to the Sunchokes. Every part of the plant is edible. The young sprouts, the leaves, even the flowers. I've simmered leaves. They don't taste all that great, not bad, but not great, however, the broth tastes exactly like squash. That might be worth taking a shot at for some of your broth projects.

Sochan is DELICIOUS and abundant.  If you like parsley flavor and spinach you will like it.  I can't wait until spring again;  I just learned to can and I will be putting up TONS of it for use during the year.   It's also super early, before a lot of other things are ready to harvest.   You can pick it all spring and early summer and it doesn't mind.  You'll still be tons of beautiful 8 foot tall flowers and seed if you want it.  Makes a BIG patch if it's happy.   It is really really good.   But I also love rhubarb lol.   Mixed with Strawberries or raspberries, it doesn't need other sweetener for me!    

I think that the "tastiness" test is the real challenge of perennials.

The majority of the perennials I enjoy are herbs or medicinal plants. I'm a little south of you (5b), but I like mint, oregano, thyme, chamomile, tarragon. I just planted some lovage, so not sure how much I'll like it yet. The majority of the "weedy" perennials growing on my site are used more for medicinal than food staples (dandelion comes to mind). And I have several things I've planted just for the medicinal value: echinacea, bee balm, stinging nettle.

That said, I have always loved rhubarb raw. I used to go out into the garden as a kid and just snack on it. I love asparagus, which I just planted.  I also planted garlic with the intention of "perennializing" it, or letting go a little wild.

Do you like sorrel? That should grow in zone 4.  

In your zone, I might concentrate on technically annual or biennial plants that will regrown in spring from seeds or tubers. Potatoes, though technically annual, can be semi-perennial if you intentionally or unintentionally leave some of the tubers in the ground.

Blaine Clark wrote: Sunchokes (...)the broth tastes exactly like squash. That might be worth taking a shot at for some of your broth projects.

I love squash! I planted some sunchoke seeds this past spring, but they were from a collection that got left in the shed overwinter, so I wasn't surprised when none of them sprouted.  Ah well~ I'll have to get some fresher seeds for next year. Thank you for the tip!

We had some tree collards here in zone 9b that were wonderful until the gopher gobbled them. They can live up to 5 years I think and get quite tall.

Trace Oswald wrote:I love the idea of growing and eating them, but the taste leaves a lot to be desired, in my opinion.  Look at the number of times you see Linden tree leaves being touted as a vegetable.  I have to believe no one that adds them to a list has ever eaten one.  If you try them, you'll quickly finding out they taste like, well, a tree leaf, and they aren't a good substitute for any vegetable I ever ate.  
So, here is my question.  What perennial vegetable actually taste good enough to be a substitute for the roughly equivalent annual vegetable?  I'm in zone 4b, so that rules out a lot of things I can grow.  I have dozens of fruit trees and berry bushes planted in my food forest, but I would really like to have some perennial vegetables growing, short of the few things I have.  Currently I have asparagus and horseradish, and that is about it.  Any ideas of great tasting, cold hardy veggies?
Thank for your time.

Well, Trace, I too share your love of the "idea" of planting perennial veggies, but in my zone 4b I'm a bit limited as well. I would add rhubarb, although it is used to make pies etc. and sunchokes.
When we say "perennial", we are referring to a plant whose roots go dormant during the cold season and comes back  from the same organism the following season. In this category, we are indeed limited if we want to really LIKE that veggie! [although I do love sunchokes!
I wish I could discover a love of Johnson grass, which is technically edible: I would have a much cleaner looking garden! Ha!
There is an inaccurate meaning of "perennial" if we only mean that it comes back year after year without the need to replant it: We can let lettuce, celtuce and a number of cold season crops go to seed and replant themselves. Although they are not strictly speaking perennial, I can't bring myself to kill those "volunteers" after their seeds braved our Wisconsin winters and all the rodents nesting in the piles of 'compost'. [I'm lazy and I don't do compost].
Volunteer tomatoes can rival the red lumps artificially ripened with the little tree in it [you know what I mean] that we can buy[ at a high price] from stores. If we count on these volunteers, the crop may be meager, but still very appreciated. My main problem with them is that they do not plant themselves where I want.
Volunteer squashes and pumpkins are OK but will rarely match the original since everything is 'modified or hybrid, these days.
Nasturtiums whose seeds I forgot to remove will occasionally sprout too. Hmmm... peppery salad! Yum!
Anise hyssop is not a perennial either, but they do self seed with abandon, and every year, a few plants come back from the same organism, but they are the exception. No, it is not a veggie, but with the leaves, I can make a delicious mock Galliano that will fool most! Once they are growing, chickens will leave them alone. So chickens can be counted on to keep the hyssop going nicely, cleaning all around it but never disturbing a leaf of it! I've had some growing almost to my belt with the chicken manure!
There is an honest to goodness perennial veggie I would very much like to have, and it is lovage. It must grow in a field of 'unobtanium' because I can't find any plants of it for sale. One year, they had some and I bought 2. One died the next year due to my neglect. The other one the following year. It grows and tastes like celery, looks like celery but is a true perennial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiURVYDEIXE
I didn't know it could grow that big!

Cécile Stelzer Johnson wrote:

Trace Oswald wrote:I love the idea of growing and eating them, but the taste leaves a lot to be desired, in my opinion.  Look at the number of times you see Linden tree leaves being touted as a vegetable.  I have to believe no one that adds them to a list has ever eaten one.  If you try them, you'll quickly finding out they taste like, well, a tree leaf, and they aren't a good substitute for any vegetable I ever ate.  
So, here is my question.  What perennial vegetable actually taste good enough to be a substitute for the roughly equivalent annual vegetable?  I'm in zone 4b, so that rules out a lot of things I can grow.  I have dozens of fruit trees and berry bushes planted in my food forest, but I would really like to have some perennial vegetables growing, short of the few things I have.  Currently I have asparagus and horseradish, and that is about it.  Any ideas of great tasting, cold hardy veggies?
Thank for your time.

Well, Trace, I too share your love of the "idea" of planting perennial veggies, but in my zone 4b I'm a bit limited as well. I would add rhubarb, although it is used to make pies etc. and sunchokes.
When we say "perennial", we are referring to a plant whose roots go dormant during the cold season and comes back  from the same organism the following season. In this category, we are indeed limited if we want to really LIKE that veggie! [although I do love sunchokes!
I wish I could discover a love of Johnson grass, which is technically edible: I would have a much cleaner looking garden! Ha!
There is an inaccurate meaning of "perennial" if we only mean that it comes back year after year without the need to replant it: We can let lettuce, celtuce and a number of cold season crops go to seed and replant themselves. Although they are not strictly speaking perennial, I can't bring myself to kill those "volunteers" after their seeds braved our Wisconsin winters and all the rodents nesting in the piles of 'compost'. [I'm lazy and I don't do compost].
Volunteer tomatoes can rival the red lumps artificially ripened with the little tree in it [you know what I mean] that we can buy[ at a high price] from stores. If we count on these volunteers, the crop may be meager, but still very appreciated. My main problem with them is that they do not plant themselves where I want.
Volunteer squashes and pumpkins are OK but will rarely match the original since everything is 'modified or hybrid, these days.
Nasturtiums whose seeds I forgot to remove will occasionally sprout too. Hmmm... peppery salad! Yum!
Anise hyssop is not a perennial either, but they do self seed with abandon, and every year, a few plants come back from the same organism, but they are the exception. No, it is not a veggie, but with the leaves, I can make a delicious mock Galliano that will fool most! Once they are growing, chickens will leave them alone. So chickens can be counted on to keep the hyssop going nicely, cleaning all around it but never disturbing a leaf of it! I've had some growing almost to my belt with the chicken manure!
There is an honest to goodness perennial veggie I would very much like to have, and it is lovage. It must grow in a field of 'unobtanium' because I can't find any plants of it for sale. One year, they had some and I bought 2. One died the next year due to my neglect. The other one the following year. It grows and tastes like celery, looks like celery but is a true perennial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiURVYDEIXE
I didn't know it could grow that big!

I growing a lot of sunchokes now.  We eat them, and they are okay, but I haven't really found a way to prepare them that I really like.  Roasted they are pretty good, but they won't be replacing potatoes anytime soon :)  I also started growing rhubarb last year and it survived the winter and is thriving, but I don't eat it.  I try not to eat sugar, and I haven't figured a different way to eat it.  I don't like it raw.

I'm leaning much more in the direction you stated and trying to grow more plants that self seed consistently.  I'll keep looking for perennials I like, but so far, I still far prefer annuals.

I have a single kale plant that survived the winter and is looking good. I'm excited to watch what it does this year.

Well, Trace, they call sunchokes "The potato of the diabetic" because the inulin works kinda like sugar:
"Inulin, although it is not a sugar, is often used as a sugar substitute in foods and beverages. This dietary fiber acts as a prebiotic in your body and provides several health benefits which makes it a sweet, nutritious alternative to sugar"
https://www.delacalle.mx/blogs/news/what-is-inulin#:~:text=Inulin%2C%20although%20it%20is%20not,sweet%2C%20nutritious%20alternative%20to%20sugar.
I like them raw too, thinking of them as a radish, but eaten raw, they seem to be more "farty". [Or did you mean raw rhubarb? I can't eat that raw either, no matter what. Maybe that is why folks mix rhubarb and strawberries... But nope. I won't
I do not roast sunchokes. I find it easier to boil them in their skins: when boiled just right, they will slip out of their skins under light pressure, even if they are quite contorted, as some can be. I dip them in mayonnaise. Yum! [That is also the way I fix asparagus] I think a quick béarnaise sauce would be good too, with hard boiled eggs.
Coffee can be made from dandelion roots too, and Oswego tea from Bergamot / Monarda Didyma, both of them plants that thrive easily and for free around here but even at the price of coffee, I won't go chasing dandelions which are more than welcome to my lawn. and I like my Earl Grey too, even though I have a whole big bed of bergamot trying to colonize the other  garden beds!
Suffering pangs of hunger, folks can survive on anything... for a while... but when the good stuff comes back... they will go back to the good stuff. I think we are just wired that way.
Another veggie  that is not exactly perennial but will last several years if the bed is tended is mushrooms. Wine caps is one I'm fond of, and we forage for pleurotus too. They grow like crazy on our poplars.

I got lovage started from seed last year, and it did survive the winter. It's pretty strong tasting and will be more of an herb than a vegetable, in terms of its role in my diet or kitchen.

Asparagus is the superstar of perennial vegetables, of course. I started it from seeds that were Jersey Knight, supposed to be mostly male. But it seemed like more than half of the plants were female and the seeds were becoming a weed problem so last summer I marked the plants that bore berries, and then in the early winter we dug them all out, discarded the females, and replanted the males.  I'm sure I missed a few but I hope it becomes more manageable.

I planted nettles from seed and put them along a canal at the back  of my land. It's only been 3 years, and this spring was the first time I really harvested them, and now they're being crowded over by other wild plants along the canal. But nettles are a genuinely useful vegetable. I mostly use them dried, since they come up when other leafy vegetables are volunteering in the garden, or needing to be harvested in the greenhouse.

Perennial scallions, Allium fistulosum, are a good one, though won't be a major part of one's diet. I started them from seed. A nice thing is they were one of the first green things to poke up in the spring. They are heartier than commercial scallions, and the lower stem can be kind of solid and white and can be used like a bulb onion.

This year I cooked garlic chives as a vegetable, and it came out good. They are perennial and come up thick and fast in spring. I'd been told that in my region they were collected as a wild veg, and you boil them, discard the water, and cook them as a green veg. Well I did that, but found they were so fibrous I was left chewing a chunk as if it were chewing gum or sinews. So I threw it in the blender with sauteed onions, and made palak paneer that was excellent. Next year I'll try them again before they get as tall as this year, or I'll just do this again the same way. A little patch about 1.5 x 4 feet, not yet filled in, a pretty big batch of palak paneer's green puree was made.

Hi Trace,  I'm also in 4B.  I have been doing the same thing- upping my edible perennial game.  I am hoping to make my little half acre easy for my special needs son to manage should he find himself alone.  I have actually 'allowed' these to grow in and outside of my greenhouses for backup food diversity:  dandelion, lamb's quarter, plantain, sorrel, dock, lovage, walking onions, edible flowers like lilac, rose, violets, etc.  I have yet to plant Jerusalem artichoke, however that is a good one as well if you don't mind the gas it supposedly creates.  I cannot get oregano to come back each year but I am swimming in thyme and a few enormous parsley plants. My fennel and tomatoes re-seed themselves in the greenhouses (poly tunnels) and are over-taking (in size) the ones I started in the house from seed.  Last year I overwintered swiss chard outside under white frost cloth then moved it into a large pot in the poly tunnel in spring and ate on it until it quit in June.  It was more bitter, like mustard, toward the end, but people plant bitter greens....  This year, I am letting spinach go to seed where it sits, as well as the other stuff I mentioned.  I will also allow some zucchini and winter squash to seed to see if that works.  Pumpkin should work too. As far as rhubarb goes, I plant a lot of berry bushes and grow stevia, which I will be adding to my rhubarb crisp to see if I can knock down the tartness without using my organic cane sugar.  Stevia grows well in the house in hanging pots or anywhere really.  It slows down over winter but stays alive, if you're into that.  I just dehydrate it and grind it up and put it in my mushroom coffee (Ryze). I do not have a sweet tooth - I love salt though, so not a fan of anything too sweet, except for the over ripe berries....all day long!  One last note, I study all of Nicole Apelian's books for meds and food, since Wyoming offers different types of foraging than coastal regions.  I've learned a lot.  The neighbor has a little swamp behind my place that is full of cattails.  Lots of uses for those as far as food goes, so when he says he will cut those down I protest and tell him I love to look at them. I have now planted 12 fruit and nut trees, as well.  American Hazelnut (filbert) is my favorite nut tree so I now have 4 started.  I hope to live long enough to partake in the bounty.  One other thing I have accidentally done is left potatoes in the ground.  They grew more the next year.  Good luck!

So many great perennial veggies to try. I have been having great success here in Aus with Okinawa spinach, surinam spinach, potato onions, chokos, and sunchokes. Though due to all the moving around and primarily being limited to pots that is all of them I really have so far. Though I also have tons of herbs and various fruit like pepinos. However, my yard is close to explosion due to have so many pots tucked in.

Fortunately, we are looking for a farm and I am back on the hunt for perennial vegetables here in Australia. I certainly hope to find many listed, including homesteader's kaleidoscopic perennial kale grex so if anyone knows of good sources in Australia please let me know!

Also as a note on the Okinawa and surinam spinach, being frost tender I have found they both grow really well in pots indoors through the winter in a sunny windowsill. I still bring some in every year just to get better growth out of them. You may have to watch for aphids though, as they have found my plants once or twice. I have also had both bounce back after a light freeze but not something I would purposefully leave to chance.

Happy growing everyone!