Click here to search commentonline

Brilliant Perennial Vegetables

Don’t you get tee-ed off digging up, chucking out and replanting your vegetables every year? These ones, once established, will provide you with food for less effort!

Jerusalem Artichokes

These tall relations to the sunflower get their name not from Jerusalem, but from girasole – the Italian for sunflower – after their habit of gyrating to follow the sun. In Perthshire they rarely flower but come up year after year from delicious white tubers, which you can lift as required in late autumn. Do not be greedy with them – not for nothing are they known as Fartichokes in our house!

Cardoon

This close relative to the Globe artichoke, with its edible flowers and spectacular spiny foliage, is a dramatic subject for the herbaceous border. You can blanch the young shoots and eat them like asparagus, steamed with butter. It’s easy to increase from offsets once established.

Corn Salad (Lamb’s Lettuce)

When we moved here 7 years ago I sowed this delectable salad plant in the only available space at the time, and have been trying to persuade it to move elsewhere ever since. But once established, it keeps spreading and seeding itself everywhere –on top of walls, in every nearby pot. It is a nutritious source of salad all year round and specially valued in winter.

Scots Lovage and Black Lovage

These native plants are very tasty additions to soups, stews and savouries, and provide lots of leaf from early spring to the frosts. Scots Lovage (Ligusticum scoticum) is a pretty plant, with white umbels of flowers. Tall Black Lovage, also known as Alexanders, is common in coastal areas, with dramatic yellow flowers.

Comfrey

No organic gardener would be without comfrey for compost and liquid-feed making, but it’s also a great vegetable, tiresomely guaranteed to thrive year after year! Research once suggested it was carcinogenic, but only the root, if ingested in vast quantities. Well, it’s the leaves you want; cooked like spinach, they have a buttery taste very welcome in springtime.

Good King Henry

All wild spinach beets are perennial, and this is a close relative. We use the triangular leaves, on their own or with other greens as a side vegetable, and as stuffing for pancakes, fish, whatever! In Lincolnshire, it is called “sparrow-grass” and the young shoots eaten like asparagus.

Welsh Onions, Tree Onions and Babington Leeks

Welsh onions can be used like giant chives and are lovely in salads and sandwiches. You can split the clumps and use the bulbs like shallots, too. Fascinating Tree Onions produce mini-onions from the flower stalks, which are brilliant for pickling, casseroles or stews. Babington leeks do a similar thing, and are strikingly tall, bunching leeks; all parts are edible.

There are many more perennial vegetables – as well as saving time and money with yearly sowings, they are nutritious and extra tasty. Try some!

© Margaret Lear Bankfoot