Man what a great and educational post! Can’t wait to see winged beans.
Great ideas. I’m another fan of the malabar spinach. My chayote died before it fruited but I never thought to try the greens. This year I’m trying chufa and tree collards. Egyptian onions are easy perennials here. Things I’ve been growing but haven’t harvested yet are green smoothy cactus for nopales, hopniss, and a couple kinds of sunchokes. Daylily flower buds are tasty stir fried. I tried steamed yucca flowers but they were too bitter for my taste.
I like purslane so much I wiped out the weed variety that grows here in my yard and then went online to find seeds. Surprised to find it available in German and French vatieties…
It’s easy to grow too and very rich in omega 3 fatty acids, evidently.
Not exactly a vegetable, but lovage is great stuff. I use it when making chicken stock. I make stock using it all summer and freeze for easy fall chicken soup. Easiest thing I’ve ever grown. I dry stems and use them to start fires in my fireplace. Best Bloody Mary straw ever, or even just tomato juice.
Scott
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Mache (aka Feldsalat, corn salad). Leafy green that you plant it in the fall and pick it all winter. Mine just bolted three weeks ago after a September planting. Probably picked them 6 times. Mild, nutty greens that are dead easy to grow and winter hardy in Z7. I’ve picked them through the snow!
My Mom’s family in Germany always grew them, mostly along the side of the road because they didn’t want to waste garden space on something so easy to grow. Used to get the seeds from Germany, but now they can be found if you look. Give them a try, they are really delicious!
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Do ground cherries count? I only discovered them a few years ago, but my kids like them better than tomatoes (a close relative).
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I tried to grow mache several times, bought seeds online, none has come out. I was told it is cold weather veggie.
Maybe I should sow the seeds in fall, not in spring?
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This, has fishy smell, but the roots make every good salad.the leaves have antiinflammatories property.
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New Zealand spinach. Grows in hot weather. Seeds itself so grows every year.
I think I have that growing as a ground cover around here. I wouldn’t call the smell fishy, but it is distinctive, and strangely familiar. Going to have a hard time not trying it now that I know it’s edible.
I’m not sure it’s mache, though. At least, the google images for that look different.
The name is houttunya. I never got to the point of liking it. It is also ready when there are plenty of other greens in the garden. For a perennial that is green when little else is green, sorrel is excellent, but not as pretty as houttunya.
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I grow Mache every summer. it is wonderful!
I’m growing Babington leek, a nice perennial vegetable, good in cool weather. It has a similar growth habit to my Egyptian walking onion, but the leaves are flat like a leek, not round like an onion, and it dies back to the ground in summer. I’ll have lots of bulbils to distribute in a few weeks. Then again, I’m already behind on mailing out maypops I promised to a couple of people.
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I love my egyptian onions, chives, and garlic chives. We cut and roast armfuls of green onions in spring from the egyptians. Chop to fit on cookie sheets, coat with olive oil and some salt, then roast at 300F in the oven until crispy. You can easily eat a huge amount of delicious green onions that way. Plus the egyptians look so cool when they start sprouting their weird growth from the topset bulblets.
Chives are super easy to grow and look great all year. They make nice purple flowers, don’t get too tall, and are great to eat. I just made a jar of chive kimchi last month from a big pile of chives and it was excellent. A big pile on top of home made pizza or in an omlet is also good. Garlic chives are somewhat more succulent than chives, but I don’t think the flowers are as pretty and some people have trouble with them being weedy. They make good kimchi too either by themselves or with other veg.
Finally: Horseradish. Even if you don’t like the root, grow it for perennial greens. It is very hard to kill, even if you cut the leaves to the ground every couple weeks. Looks cool, easy to grow. And if you want some root, just pull some up; you can be sure more will grow up where you took it out from leftover root fragments. The greens get more mild when cooked. I cut out the center vein of the leaves, like with kale. All things being equal I’d probably rather eat kale, but it doesn’t grow itself like the horseradish does. In the pic below on the right behind my kids is a horseradish last fall, under my apple tree trellis. I cut it all the time so it doesn’t get too tall.
These perennial veggies are great because you can eat them so early in the season, before the annual stuff has got going.
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Houttuynia cordata is awesome. There really are 2 different types. The one I have smells exactly like fish. The one my neighbor has smells more citrusy. I really like them both. Search Zhe ergen or Yuxingcao for some interesting information about its use in China.
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I know many people here grow goji berry。 do you know its leaves are edible too。throw them in soup，or cook like spinach
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nice kids！
always nice to see young ones helping out in the garden 
I love Egyptian onions as well, but mostly just use them as one does green onions or even chives. Once established they just need to be weeded out a bit but keep coming.
Another favorite is perennial arugula. It is somewhat invasive, but if you love a strong flavored arugula it is the ticket- seems to be the Italian definition of the vegetable judging from Italian reactions I’ve gotten, the standard American instant bolting variety is too weak for them. Once established it keeps coming back with a vengeance, providing leaves from spring through fall.
Also, Pinetree garden seeds carries a summer lettuce that goes on and on, providing pretty good leaf lettuce through summer. It flowers but keeps on producing tender, not bitter leaves.
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I’m trying this for the first time this year.
Another summer “spinach” is New Zealand Spinach. It goes from spring to frost.
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If you can identify your weeds and know which are edible, you can eat them. I eat them every day. I’ve even imported weeds into my yard so I can harvest them regularly. It’s amazing! They grow like weeds! Much cheaper than organic vegies from the store.
Many, such as dandelion, were brought to this country as vegetables, and then people decided that another vegetable was more fashionable so they forgot about it.
The best book I’ve seen on this topic is “Edible Wild Plants” by John Kallas. Excellent ID photos and procedures.
My most common ones to eat are dandelion, false dandelion, nipplewort, goose grass, sow thistle, spiny sow thistle, shotweed/bitter cress, marsh mallow (there are many, many mallows), and ones that have gone feral like Earth chestnut, scorzonera, leeks, campanula, Alexander’s, and leaves of Oregon grape, Bay laurel, hawthorn, and goji.
JohN S
PDX OR
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