Growing Perennial Greens in Your Garden
I just love growing perennial vegetables - it is so awesome to be able to plant once and then harvest year after year without any additional planting. To me this is one of the best ways to have a resilient homestead.
But sometimes it can be challenging to get started with perennial vegetables. But there is an easy group of these vegetables to try growing - perennial greens.
This week's blog post - 11 Perennial Greens You Will Love to Grow is all about perennial greens. While there are way more than these 11 I hope this list will get you started.
To help make things a bit easier I broke up the 11 perennial greens into 2 groups.
- Spicy, Tangy, or Bitter Perennial Greens
- Mild Perennial Greens
Spicy, Tangy, or Bitter Perennial Greens
Perennial greens like this Turkish rocket are a great addition to your garden. Some do have a strong flavor but are great once cooked and can replace traditional greens like mustard greens.
A lot of perennial greens fall into this category. This also seems to be the group that most people have had experience with. Which is why I think a lot of people think perennial greens are not great in salads.
But these perennial greens can be great for cooking and can replace regular greens like mustard greens and arugula.
These are the spicy, tangy, or bitter perennial greens covered in the blog post:
- Dandelions
- Lovage
- Turkish Rocket
- Sylvetta Arugula (be careful you don’t get buy the annual version – Diplotaxis ericoides)
- Sorrel
Mild Perennial Greens
There are many mild perennial greens that are right at home in a salad. This salad includes several annuals but also miners lettuce which is a great perennial green.
These are my favorite perennial greens and the ones that to me can really save you the most time and energy. Imagine having your salad greens come back year after year without ever having to plant again!
This really is just a starting list but if you were able to grow all of these you would have all the salad greens you could want or need. Plus a lot of these can be used for cooking!
Here are the mild perennial greens covered in this week's blog post:
- Scorzonera / Black salsify
- Tree Collards
- Miner’s Lettuce
- Saltbush (Yes, it’s actually salty!)
- Sweet Potato
- Linden / Lime tree / Basswood
Getting Started with Perennial Greens
I love mixing in flowers, annual vegetables, perennial vegetables and even woody edible plants like berries and trees to create super productive (and beautiful!) hedgerows and gardens.
So are you interested in growing your own perennial greens? A great first step is to check out my blog post - 11 Perennial Greens You Will Love to Grow.
If you have any questions please leave a comment and I will be happy to try to help. Also, if you have other perennial greens you want to add to the list please share in the comments!
And if you want to go beyond these 11 perennial greens then please check out my first blog post on perennial vegetables.
Also, I highly recommend taking a look at the great book Perennial Vegetables by Eric Toensmeier. This book covers over 100 perennial vegetables - I reference it a fair bit. You can purchase it using my affiliate link (which helps my site a little bit at no extra cost to you!) or find it at your local library. Either way it is a great book to add to your bookshelf.
Thank you all and please leave a comment and upvote if you found this post helpful!