The easiest, laziest edible plants (part 1)

If your veggie garden is a sad, empty sandpit, you need these

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• It’s the first part in a two-part guide to growing edible perennials - the plants that will make edible gardening sooo much easier and more rewarding.

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If you want a garden that provides you with food to eat all year round, you need to get on board with growing edible perennials.

Many beginner veggie growers miss a trick here. They fill their beds with edible annuals - corn, eggplants, broccoli, zucchinis, tomatoes - in short, plants that typically last only a single year. This is a tough way to garden if it’s the only way you garden. It means you are constantly replacing spent crops with new crops through every inch of your patch, and, unless you have impeccable planning and foresight capabilities, every few months you’re likely to find yourself out in the garden, surrounded by finished crops, sad, bare soil and nothing to harvest for dinner.

Growing edible perennials makes producing your own food a lot easier and adding them to your garden almost guarantees that you’ll always be able to head outside to find something to harvest.

But first, let’s back up and cover a few important definitions.

Jerusalem artichokes - one of my favourite perennial root crops (with gorgeous flowers!)

What are perennials?

Perennials are plants that last two or more years. So every tree you come across is a perennial, but so are things like blueberries, artichokes, rhubarb, goji berries, passionfruit vines, ginger, bananas, turmeric, sweet potatoes - the list goes on.

In contrast to perennials, we have annuals.

What are annuals?

Unlike perennials, annuals live no longer than a year (usually just a single season). These are the plants that are commonly grown from seed. You’ll plant the seed at the start of the season, the plant will grow big and leafy, it will flower, it will produce fruit, seed heads or seed pods, and then it will die.

Annuals are very well represented in most veggie patches. They include things like tomatoes, peas, beans, lettuces, cucumbers, zucchinis, sweetcorn, basil, pumpkins, etc. Annuals have a quick lifecycle, so they need to grow fast and take up as many nutrients as they need from the soil to fuel their growth. If you buy heirloom (or non-hybrid) seeds to grow your annuals, you’ll often find you can save the seeds to sow again next year. This is one of the things that makes growing annuals so fun.

The problem with growing exclusively annuals is that, well, basically it’s a lot of work! In between pulling old crops, sowing seeds for new crops, replenishing the soil in your beds and staying on top of everything as it grows, grows, grows, it can start to feel a bit relentless. It keeps things interesting, certainly - plenty of the most interesting veggies are annuals, and the feeling of saving your own seeds to re-sow time after time is fantastic. But growing only annuals means you can never really let your guard down. They require constant vigilance, and if you step out of the game for 6-10 weeks, if you throw your back out and need to take a pause from your garden, a garden full of annuals will not continue to be pretty, productive or thriving on its own for very long.

Annuals are a bit like dogs - they’re fantastically rewarding, but they need your time, attention and devotion every day. Perennials are the cats of the garden. They might not be quite as exciting as annuals (sorry cat owners), but they also don’t require the same levels of constant involvement. And once they’re growing happily you can leave them to their own devices for stretches of time without your whole garden falling into disrepair.

I have a friend with a cat and she can go away for the weekend whenever she wants (!!), just leaving out bowls of food and water, and her cat is totally fine. If we leave our house for TEN MINUTES our dogs flail around in anxious dejection, bark non-stop, chew through our baby’s wooden toys and turn our bed/couch/carpets into their own private, hairy nests.

Fortunately, when it comes to the garden, we don’t have to choose one or the other. We don’t have to grow only annuals or only perennials. And I find that the best and most satisfying gardens to grow usually contain a mixture of both.

Benefits of growing perennials

You’re probably already sold on the benefits of growing edible annuals (they’re interesting, delicious, they grow fast and can be grown from seed), but let’s take a look at the benefits of adding perennials to your patch in addition to your annuals.

Perennials need less feeding