Perennial flowers offer a new and tasty option for the usual annual vegetable garden, and they keep coming back! Try adding some, and keep reaping the rewards.
Nothing beats homegrown food for freshness; there are also many varieties and cultivars to choose from that you can’t always find in the grocery store. Most of the vegetables we are used to consuming are annuals that require seed saving or purchasing, and replanting every year. We may be less familiar with perennial vegetables but there are many out there, and they’re less work in the garden. It doesn’t take too much creativity to incorporate them into your meals by substituting a half-serving of a vegetable you are familiar with for a perennial one. Once your palate has adjusted you can increase the amount of the new vegetable until you find it pleasant on its own.
If you have a sunny yard or a shady yard, clay soil or sandy soil, moist or dry conditions, there is a perennial vegetable perfect for you. And if you don’t get around to harvesting it there is no mess to deal with like with a fruit tree—it will continue to grace your garden with its beauty.
Can You Eat Daylilies?
Daylilies go by the moniker ‘ditch lily’ because they can often be found along rural roads and ditches. In their most common form, they bear a bright orange flower. They are found in many yards already so you may not even need to plant them—just start harvesting!
One of the great things about daylilies is that there is a different part of the plant ready for harvest at almost all times of the year. In the early spring or late fall when the above-ground plant isn’t doing much, you can harvest the tubers (roots). After a scrub, boil them without peeling and then just slip the skins off easily once they are cooked. This is especially great if you want to reign in a patch that’s spreading beyond its boundaries.
Once the shoots start to appear they can be harvested as a green vegetable until they are around 1.5 feet high. Be careful not to mix them up with other young emerging plants that can have a similar form at that stage—like the lily of the valley, which is toxic!
When the buds start emerging on the taller plants they can be harvested when still closed and eaten like beans or battered like tempura vegetables. In Asia, they are dried and used in soups over the winter. Once the flowers open you can add them to a salad for some pizazz. The flowers only last for a day—hence the name—so don’t worry about missing the colour in your yard. A new one will open tomorrow.
There are reports that some people are sensitive to Daylily, although I have never come across anyone with an issue digesting it. Always try a small amount of a new food before introducing larger quantities to see how you react to it.
There are many cultivars of Daylily in a huge variety of colours. They are all edible but again, do not confuse with tiger lilies or Asian lilies, which are also toxic. It doesn’t hurt to double-check with your nursery before purchasing them. Use the Latin name to make sure you have the correct plant.
Edible Violets
These precious little flowers may have introduced themselves into your lawn or you may have a patch in your garden bed already. The blooms come in a wide variety of colours from all shades of purple, white, and yellow.
Violets can grow in shady conditions but will also be happy in full sun in the middle of your yard. They make a nice low-growing border or edging plant, or you can let them pepper your lawn so as not to take up precious garden bed space.
All above-ground parts of the violet are edible, but not the below-ground portions. The leaves are slightly mucilaginous and so can be nice in soups and stews. If you are adding them to a salad, don’t make them too dominant in the mix. Different violet species have different flavours of leaves so sample a few to see what you like before deciding to plant them. The most commonly eaten ones are Common Blue Violet (V. sororia), Canada Violet (V. canadensis), and Bird Food Violet (V. pedata). Harvest the leaves and stems in the spring when they are young and tender. They get stronger tasting later in the season and won’t be as palatable.
Despite violets being candied and used to decorate cakes, most violet flowers have only a mildly sweet flavour. The exception to this is Viola odora, native to Europe. Dark purple violets also make the most delightful colour of jelly or syrup for making fancy summer drinks, or you can even just freeze the flowers in ice cubes to add some flair.
Perennial Hostas
This ubiquitous plant can be found in almost every household garden in North America and is edible. It can tolerate a wide variety of conditions and is quite easy to care for. It is cultivated commercially for markets and grocery stores in Japan but elsewhere isn’t widely known as a food source.
Hostas come in a wide variety of cultivars—literally hundreds—but they are all edible. The varieties most prized for their flavour and texture are Hosta fortunei, H. montana, H. fortunei, H. sieboldiana and H. sieboldii. The choice part of the plant is called the hoston and is harvested just before the leaves start to unfurl. The hoston looks like a fat green spear rising from the ground. The entire plant can be harvested with one cut and left to regrow, or you can thin the plant out by cutting every third or fourth hoston shoot.
The hoston can be eaten raw or cooked as a green. Smaller specimens often have more tender leaves so are a better option if you want to eat them raw. Meaty large-leaf varieties are best reserved for the stove. They are nice pan-fried and tossed with some sesame oil and soy sauce or garlic and butter. The flowers are also edible and are best used to top a salad to add a pop of colour.
Cut-leaf Coneflower
This North American native plant is widespread but not well-known as a source of food. It was a staple in the Cherokee diet and eaten by many other Indigenous peoples as well.
Cut-leaf coneflower is quite tall and can get a little floppy if there aren’t other substantial plants nearby to offer support. It can be cut in half in late May or early June (the “Chelsea Chop”) to produce a bushier, stockier plant. The flowers look like droopy-petaled sunflowers with a prominent central ‘cone’. The leaves are quite ornamental as well, with deep lobes.
The new basal leaves and shoots of spring are the first harvest. They can be picked until the leaves start to darken and lose their gloss. New leaves emerge throughout the summer and are tender and edible, though more strongly flavoured. After the summer flowering stalks have died back (late summer to early fall), a new crop of basal leaves emerges that are again tender and tasty.
The leaves can be eaten raw but are usually cooked. They can substitute for most greens through boiling, steaming, or pan-frying with some healthy fats and a bit of salt. Like other greens in this article, start by adding some into a more familiar green, like spinach, and increase the percentage of cut-leaf coneflower as you become more accustomed to it.
Once you start to convert your garden to perennial foods there can be something to harvest at almost any time of year. My kids have devoured my spanakopita, made with 18 different perennial greens from the backyard, and a Micheal Schimp, from Three Acre Permaculture has made birthday dumplings with 45 different perennial vegetables from his property!
