A Fresh Look At Perennial Vegetables

Perennial plants are a prepper’s best friend. You can put them in when you have the time, resources, and convenient shopping options. Then with minimal additional effort on your part, the food shows up year after year. Delivery trucks not running? Perennial plants Don’t Care.

The most well-known perennial food plants are fruits. We love our fruit trees and berry vines, absolutely. Perennial vegetables are less well known. For good reason: There aren’t many varieties of veggies that do well as perennials. There are a few though … and they’re really good. They are food that command premium prices in grocery stores, in fact. They’re also easy to grow. So let’s take a look at some of these perennial vegetables.

Asparagus is the Star of the Perennial Vegetables

Below is a pic of my asparagus bed. It looks a bit sparse — so why am I going on about it? Because it’s sparse only because I’ve been picking and eating, picking and eating, four times a week for the last two weeks. If we really were what we eat, I’d be taller, greener, and have little bitty triangles for arms.

I’d have a better picture of an asparagus crop if I hadn’t been eating asparagus four times a week…

You may also note the strawberry plants coming up around the asparagus. These two perennial species share beds nicely, as I described here. 

This asparagus bed is just three years old. I dug up a bed facing south, worked in a bunch of composted manure, and planted asparagus roots and strawberry plants. Some of the varieties of strawberries return very well; others have failed. The asparagus just keeps coming. The only other care they get is occasional watering; and I let the last spindly stalks at the end of the season go to seed to help fill in any empty spots in the bed.

Garlic is a perennial vegetable too

This one’s a two-fer. You get two big plusses from a garlic plot. Most obviously, it’s good food. Not for calories (because you don’t eat that much), but it’s really good for upping the flavor of many dishes. Prepper long-term storage foods can really use help in the flavor department. Garlic is also a very medicinal food, as described here. You can find more about growing it and ways to store it here. 

This is the same garlic patch I left by accident five years ago. I’ve been eating from it ever since.

The other main value of garlic is that it is a good companion plant for many other food species. Specifically, many insects tend to veer away from garlic, so it reduces insect predation on other species. Some interactions are less favorable though, so you might like to look through a list of what it pairs well with before planting. There are many out there; here’s one.

I found out garlic was a perennial by accident. Specifically, I didn’t get it all harvested at the end of one year, and saw green shoots coming out early the next year. I figured What the heck, why not let them go and see if it works? It still works. Every year I harvest as much as I want and leave the rest in the ground to repopulate. Zero additional work.

Onions are only halfway perennial vegetables

The garlic worked so well as a perennial I tried it with onions too. I left some in the ground in the fall and watched to see what would happen in the spring. I was rewarded by fresh green onion shoots the next March! So I let them grow until onion harvesting time.

The good news: The second-year onions make great tops that do work similar to garlic in discouraging insects.

The bad news: When I pulled the second-year onions to eat them, I discovered they didn’t really make edible bulbs. There was only a little edible onion bulb in the middle of a rotty mass of last year’s onion and a tangle of new roots. 

So the onions work as perennials under some of my apple trees to reduce pests, and the tops can be left to flower and seed collected. You just can’t get good eating onions off of them after the first year, in my experience.

Many herbs work as perennials, if not Exactly vegetables

I found perennial herbs much as I found perennial garlic — laggy clean-up.

It wasn’t even laziness. Sage especially, and to a lesser extent oregano, remains harvestable as fresh herbs well past the first frost. So I left my herb garden in when the rest of the old plants got composted. 

The next spring, by the time I got out to clean up the bed, new shoots were already coming up. Well of course I had no interest in digging them up just to replant, so I left them be to see what all would volunteer.  

One of my herb gardens. Only the basil on the far left is a new planting. The giant patch of rosemary has already been hacked back by about 1/3.

Herbs that return, and herbs that don’t

Chives are eternal. I bought one bundle about a decade ago; it’s still going. And the pollinators Love Love Love the flowers.

The only problem with rosemary is beating it back enough to leave room for anything but rosemary. I give rootings to anyone who’ll take them each spring and still have to dig up some just to compost it.

Mint can take over on you too … except when it doesn’t. I have multiple mint plantings because they thrive until suddenly a wilt hits and a patch dies out. I don’t bother fighting it; I have other patches and can replant the next year.

Oregano, sage, and chocolate mint return reliably. 

Basil, dill, and cilantro don’t return in the spring in my beds. In fact, the basil doesn’t even want to sprout from saved seed, either left in the bed or more pampered indoors. Those I’m buying as young plants every year … so far.

Ok, the herbs aren’t a big contribution to a diet. They can do a lot for palatability though. Rosemary potatoes instead of just plain boring boiled potatoes? Especially if you’re low on butter? Yeah, Totally worth doing for the minimal work these cost.

Herb gardens are also good pollinator attractants and mosquito repellents. Many of them make nice flowers, too. Put some in this year and they’ll repay you for years to come.