The Best Edible Perennials For the Pacific Northwest

In this episode of The Evergreen Thumb, host Erin Hoover speaks with author and gardening educator Lisa Taylor about the joys and benefits of growing perennial edibles in the Pacific Northwest. They explore a variety of crops, from perennial vegetables like asparagus and rhubarb to fruit-bearing trees and shrubs well-suited to the region’s climate. Lisa goes over lesser-known edible perennials, herbs, and her favorite edible perennials in her garden. She not only lists what edible perennials work well in the Pacific Northwest, but she also shares practical tips for incorporating these resilient and sustainable plants into home gardens and landscapes.

Lisa Taylor is a freelance garden speaker, educator, consultant, and author of The Maritime Northwest Garden Guide, 2nd ed. and Your Farm in the City: An Urban Dweller’s Guide to Growing Food and Raising Animals. She is passionate about teaching people of all ages how to grow their own food. She offers programs in-person and virtually. Lisa’s online edible gardening courses for adults, children and educators can be found at www.gardenwithlisa.com. For Lisa, eating is the main reason for growing plants.

• Freebies on Lisa’s Website
• Minor and Uncommon Fruits for Maritime Climate Gardens
• Growing Rhubarb in Home Gardens (Home Garden Series)
• Blueberry Cultivars for the Pacific Northwest
• Snake River Seed Cooperative
• Uprising Seeds 100% Certified Organic Seed Farm

[00:00:00] Erin Hoover: Welcome to The Evergreen Thumb, your go-to podcast for up-to-date research-based horticulture and environmental stewardship knowledge to help you grow and manage your garden. Produced by Washington State University Extension Master Gardener Volunteers and brought to you by the Master Gardener Foundation of Washington State.

[00:00:16] I’m your host, Erin Hoover, a WSU Extension Master Gardener since 2015 and a certified permaculture designer and modern homesteader.

WSU Master Gardener volunteers are university-trained community educators who have been cultivating plants, people, and communities since 1973. Are you ready to grow? Let’s dig into today’s episode.

[00:00:44] Welcome to The Evergreen Thumb episode 40.

My guest today is Lisa Taylor. Lisa is a freelance garden speaker, educator, consultant, and author of The Maritime Northwest Garden Guide 2^nd edition and Your Farm in the City, An Urban Dweller’s Guide to Growing Food and Raising Animals. She’s passionate about teaching people of all ages how to grow their own food.

[00:01:05] She offers programs in person and virtually. Her online edible gardening courses for adults, children, and educators can be found at www.gardenwithlisa.com. For Lisa, eating is the main reason for growing plants. Lisa is here today to talk to us about growing edible perennials.

Lisa, thank you for joining me today.

[00:01:27] Welcome to the show.

Lisa Taylor: Oh, thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Erin Hoover: All right. To start off, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your gardening experience? Yeah,

[00:01:36] Lisa Taylor: Sure. I’m a garden speaker and educator, a freelance person. I speak all over the place to everyone. I’m at libraries and community centers and schools.

[00:01:48] So really, uh, I love teaching gardening because everybody can do it. My background is as a, um, actually classically trained teacher. I was a high school teacher for a while. Then I, uh, really developed my chops as a garden educator at, uh, Seattle TILTH, which is now TILTH Alliance. I was there for about 20 years in the children’s garden and in the plant sale and all over, I wrote a couple of books for them.

[00:02:16] And so it was a, a great training ground. For the last, about 10 years, I’ve been out on my own. As I said, I do a lot of speaking engagements all over. You might have seen me on a Zoom [call] through Cascade Gardener, uh, classes through Cascade Water Alliance, or you might’ve seen me at your local library or, uh, Master Gardener event.

[00:02:39] Erin Hoover: I know a lot of, uh, Master Gardeners have commented how much they enjoy your presentations at our annual conference. So that was what led me to track you down.

[00:02:50] Lisa Taylor: That was kind of crazy. Uh, that day, uh, we never lose power here and it was a perfectly sunny day. It was not a stormy day at all, but about an hour and a half before I was supposed to do my Zoom, we lost power.

[00:03:06] And so I was trying to figure out a plan B and I moved up to a bright window and I got a hotspot on my phone, and I was just about to like, you know, turn it on and test it out. And the lights came back. So really quickly, we moved everything back down to the studio and I was only a few minutes late.

The Benefits of Perennial vs. Annual Crops

[00:03:27] Erin Hoover: All right. So, you’re here today to talk to us about edible perennials for the Pacific Northwest, um, which is one of the things I’ve been really interested in.

So let’s start off by talking about how they compare to annual crops, as far as the benefits of perennials versus annuals.

[00:03:45] Lisa Taylor: Sure. Well, I think maybe the biggest benefit is you don’t have to replace them.

[00:03:49] You plant them once and they’re there for you forever or for as long as you want. Whereas annuals, you’re just kind of, they keep you running. So you’ve got to, you know, harvest them and replace them and that kind of thing. With perennials, they just have a different relationship with the soil and the microbes in the soil.

[00:04:09] So, um, they require fewer inputs as far as fertilizers and water once they’re established. You know, a little bit of mulch and they’re good to go. So, that, that’s nice. You can definitely save a lot of money because, again, you’re not replacing things, you’re not having to sow. You also end up with a longer growing season, so since they’re in place, as soon as the soil warms up to 40 degrees, they’ll start to grow.

[00:04:38] So some of the earliest things you can eat or see in your garden. The last things sometimes in the garden so you can really, um, expand your growing season and they tend to be a real multifunctional thing. So they’re not just edible but wildlife like them. They provide beauty. They provide shade. Maybe they’re medicinal as well.

[00:05:02] So just a real nice multifunction thing and then you know, you’re increasing, uh, diversity, but you’re also able to grow things you might not be able to buy, or, or find anywhere else, so I think that’s, uh, one of the benefits.

And then, uh, you know, some of the challenges might be for space, for your annual crops, because, you know, people still want to grow those, and you should.

[00:05:27] Some of these perennials, when they’re mature, can be quite large.

So, you know, then fitting them in an already kind of congested urban lot can be tricky. But there are lots of small plants that can do the trick. It can take a while sometimes before you get a harvest, you know, four to five years sometimes before you start to get any fruit or food off the plant.

[00:05:53] And then sometimes the yields are giant. I had some kiwi at the children’s garden. Like, when they were really producing, there’d be like 1,500 pounds of fruit that would come off of those vines. And they’re not ripe to eat when you pick them, they’re hard, and they have to ripen over a series of weeks or months.

[00:06:18] And so it was always pretty tricky to find cold storage for them and frankly, find people that were interested in, you know, sharing with us. So that’s one of those things where like, if you’re really lucky, you might have a really giant harvest. And then that’s the other, maybe challenge is the harvest, you know?

[00:06:38] Um, sometimes they come out on all at once and it might not be the most convenient time in your life. Uh, so I have some fruit that mature and ripen late August, and when I had school-aged children, man, that was the worst time to have to try to harvest and preserve that stuff because my schedule was just blown out, you know.

[00:07:01] So, those are some of the benefits and the challenges with edible perennials.

Non-Fruit Bearing Perennials for the Pacific Northwest

[00:07:06] Erin Hoover: Okay. So, I know a lot of gardeners think of fruit primarily when you’re talking perennials. So, what are some of the better fruits for the Pacific Northwest?

[00:07:15] Lisa Taylor: The other non-fruit bearing, well, how about artichokes or asparagus?

[00:07:22] All of your culinary herbs that you like, all those Mediterranean herbs. I am a big fan of chives. I think they, that chives are underrated, but they’re, uh, you know, they’re a member of the onion family. They are easy to grow and delicious and beautiful and I like their cousin garlic chives even better because I like to cut those and add those to my dumplings.

[00:07:45] So, there’s plenty of greens and other things that aren’t fruit, but sure, I think fruit and nuts tend to be a pretty big, um, section of edible perennials. And it’s, for me, I think that’s not a problem, because fruit is expensive to buy at the farmer’s market or at the regular market. And it doesn’t keep very long.

[00:08:05] So having something at your home where you can harvest as they ripen and process them as you go, I think that’s a great option.

[00:08:14] Erin Hoover: I forget about artichokes. I’ve never successfully grown artichokes as a perennial. They always die.

[00:08:20] Lisa Taylor: Yeah, sometimes they can be a little half hearty, but if they’re in the right well-drained, sunny location they can go again and again and they’ve got a cousin called the cardoon that’s maybe even a little bit heartier and it’s one where you don’t eat the flower bud, you eat the stalk. Yeah, so sometimes we have to look beyond our culture to find new things and, uh, see how they’re eaten.

Perennial Herbs

[00:08:48] Erin Hoover: Okay, so we talked about, you mentioned herbs, specifically chives. Um, yeah, let’s talk about more herbs. I love herbs.

[00:08:58] Lisa Taylor: Yeah, herbs are great. And, you know, um, we’re on the west side of the Cascades. So for us, it’s pretty easy to grow all those Mediterranean herbs that we love so much in the kitchen. So, um, anything that likes a wet winter and a dry summer will do great.

[00:09:14] And I hear over in Spokane, you can even grow, uh, like rosemary perennially, typically, but the others you might want to grow in pots and bring in. So, you know, let’s do it. Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, right? All of those. Parsley’s not a perennial, it’s a biennial, but it acts like a perennial if you just leave it alone because it seems to just continue to go and go.

[00:09:38] Sometimes I’ll cut down the flower stock the second year, and it just kind of keeps going and going. Super cold hardy, and boy, uh, some kids grew some parsley at one of my schools last year and we planted it and it is like the greenest, most bodacious parsley of all. So I’m, uh, having a lot of fun like, Oh, I can cook that. I’ve got parsley. That’s great. You know?

[00:10:00] So, um, all of those. I think the, the one I left off is, uh, lavender. So that’s, that’s also nice. And then, like, like oregano. So, so a lot of those, they just stand, um, evergreen through the winter, oregano, depending on where you have it. I’ve had it in a nice secluded little spot that was quite temperate.

[00:10:25] Stayed green all the time. Harvested it all winter. I’ve also had it in other, uh, more exposed places and it’ll die all the way back and then come back. And sometimes marjoram, marjoram is a little more tender. So that one, all of these can be really nice, uh, those, those culinary herbs like in the landscape.

[00:10:45] Because, uh, you know, a rosemary can be a small shrub. And if you put a sage in the right place, it could, it can be six feet wide and four feet tall, you know, so it could, they can grow quite large if they’re in, they’re in nice places. They grow and behave well in pots. So you can, you can really put them in lots of different places.

[00:11:06] I like to have some of those like right on the deck or right outside the kitchen door. So I can just pop out, cut a few things, and bring them right into the kitchen.

[00:11:15] Erin Hoover: Yeah. I planned it. I built an herb bed that’s right outside our back patio. So, and I’ve got, that’s a little bit of everything, but I made the mistake of letting my parsley go to seed.

[00:11:24] I didn’t cut enough of it down. And so now the whole bed has got a carpet of parsley seedlings.

[00:11:31] Lisa Taylor: Awesome. Well, you know, you can just thin as you harvest.

Erin Hoover: Yeah.

Lisa Taylor: Right? And if we get a, if we get a deep freeze, maybe you’ll lose some of that crop and you’ll have natural, uh, natural thinning will happen.

[00:11:46] Erin Hoover: I couldn’t believe how much of it all came up in like September. I’m like, oh no. Yeah. Yeah.

Lesser-Known Perennials that Thrive in the Pacific Northwest

[00:11:49] Okay. What are some lesser-known perennial foods that, uh, that would thrive in the Northwest?

[00:11:59] Lisa Taylor: You know, maybe they’re a little more known because they were, like, unknown 10 years ago, but I’ve got a few that you might like, or that are a little bit different, and you kind of have to search for.

[00:12:11] There’s one that I am just absolutely in love with and it’s a little hearty green. It’s from Europe, across Europe and I think even into Asia a little bit. It’s called Sculpit in English, but Stridolo in Italy, so it’s a bladder campion in Great Britain and they’ll grow it for the tender greens. So, they just grow it until they get some greens, cut it off and let it grow, and come again.

[00:12:41] I grow and usually get the first like nice succulent greens and those make a really interesting pesto. It’s hard to describe because it’s like a, an amalgam of a bunch of different herbs, but nothing too overpowering, just really unique and, and delicious. And then they flower into these beautiful little, like, balloon flowers that are beloved by pollinators and are great in like cut flower arrangements.

[00:13:10] So they’ll shake some seeds around. So, you know, some, sometimes these perennials, these wild greens, they, part of their, part of their benefit is they just go, they, they shake it around and multiply, you know, but, they’re pretty easy to deadhead, and they’re pretty easy to dig up, and you can grow them in a pot.

[00:13:34] So that’s one that I don’t think a lot of people [know about]. I, I read the description of it in the Uprising Seeds catalog, and it said, uh, not to be the next big thing. You know, and I was like, oh, I want that. So, great for cut flowers, great for, um, super hardy. You don’t have to worry about it. Um, and then I like those perennial collards or kales.

[00:13:56] So, tree collards are lovely. Those purple tree collards are beautiful and they’ll stand all year. There’s a, there’s a really interesting fruit. It’s maybe the most interesting fruit, uh, called the medlar. And it’s a weird, I, I ran into a medlar tree that was loaded with fruit at the Seattle center of all places.

[00:14:22] And I pulled on the fruit and it’s a public place, so you can do some picking on public land. So it was a Seattle park, so it was, I probably was okay, but I was careful. Um, and I’m confessing now, so hopefully the, the, the gleaning police won’t show up. But I pulled a few, like a dozen fruit, and they came off easy.

[00:14:45] So that’s one of the things to keep in mind when you’re picking fruit. Give it a little pull, give it a little sideways tug, and if it comes off easily, that’s typically a sign that it’s ready. So medlar, you have to let them kind of half rot on the counter and get all shrively before you eat them. And they taste kind of like applesauce with cinnamon?

[00:15:11] And way back in the day, back in the olden days, when meddler was a thing, uh, um, people would compress it and they would make a block out of that flesh. And it was kind of like a cheese, but it tastes like apple cinnamon. So Medlar, beautiful, small tree. Um, and I’ve seen them with a big old thorn, but the one that I was harvesting from didn’t have thorns.

[00:15:39] It just had the beautiful fruit. So I got a couple more. Do we have time?

Erin Hoover: Sure.

Lisa Taylor: So I like, um, I like this tree slash large shrub called Goumi. And it’s a Siberian plant. It fixes nitrogen. In the shade, it’ll be a small shrub, in the sun it’ll be a large shrub, small tree. Early pollinating, early flowering, tiny little yellow leaves.

[00:16:04] So great for early pollinators. Makes beautiful fruit that children love that have sort of like nutritious seeds inside. I have, I have grown to like them a lot. Especially when they’re really ripe, they’re very tasty. When they’re not quite ripe, they’re a little chalky for me, but the wildlife also loves them.

[00:16:24] And so, and this is a fairly dense kind of grow, growing shrub. So, and it’s got some thorns, not, not like hooked thorns, but you know, like hawthorn thorns. And so it would make a great, hedgerow because I don’t think a lot of, like, livestock or wildlife could really get through it. And, super hardy, easy to grow. You know, cold hardy beyond what we would ever consider.

[00:16:48] And then my last one, and this is an oh, so beautiful, so cute, so delicious, is a little border plant called Salad Burnet. It’s got these lovely little lacy leaves, and it tastes like cucumber. And it’s evergreen. And it has little scarlet pimpernel, uh, flowers, so it’s really a lovely, it’s only, you know, a foot tall, maybe up to 18 inches, so it’s lovely.

[00:17:25] It’s a mounding kind of habit, so it doesn’t spread, but it gets larger. And so it’s lovely. Once established, it doesn’t need a bunch of care, but it’s great when cucumbers aren’t really in season and you’d like to make some raita for your, you know, curry or whatever. You can go out and make a passable raita for your Indian dinner.

[00:17:49] Erin Hoover: It’s interesting you mentioned Goumi because we just planted two Goumi in our orchard, uh, in between some fruit trees, but they’ve been sitting in pots for probably like five years and, you know, went through the pots and into the ground, you know, so, I mean, they are, they are hardy.

[00:18:06] Lisa Taylor: They’re bulletproof almost.

[00:18:07] Erin Hoover: It was crazy.

[00:18:08] Lisa Taylor: Yeah. Um, what a wonderful choice. I think you know, it’s a really neat, super neat plant. We have it out on the edge by our gate and it just, it’s lovely. The birds love it. Children love it. When the children learn they could eat it then they love it. Yeah. It was a battle between the robins and the children.

[00:18:34] That was awesome.

[00:18:35] Erin Hoover: For me, the draw is that it’s a nitrogen fixer. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so putting it in my orchard where we are kind of lacking soil, I mean, we have very fast straining soil that, and where we live, it used to be a cattle ranch, like in the sixties and seventies.

[00:18:50] Lisa Taylor: Oh, okay.

[00:18:50] Erin Hoover: So it’s very compacted on the top.

[00:18:52] Lisa Taylor: Uhhuh

[00:18:52] Erin Hoover: Not a lot of topsoil. So yeah, so that’s putting in a lot of nitrogen-fixing plants to try to help.

[00:18:59] Lisa Taylor: Are you doing sort of like a white clover or anything like that? Like a um using clover as your groundcover?

[00:19:07] Erin Hoover: I’ve tried seeding clover in a few different places. It’s so dry here in the summer that it all just kind of kills everything.

[00:19:19] Lisa Taylor: Yeah, okay. Good luck. Add compost, and mulch.

[00:19:25] Erin Hoover: Yeah, I live on Prairie…

[00:19:26] Lisa Taylor: Got it.

[00:19:26] Erin Hoover: In the Chehalis Valley.  

[00:19:27] Lisa Taylor: And that’s a thing to talk about. It’s like I can talk about these things that I love because I have found spots for them, and I have moved them around and I’ve been sensitive to their needs and kind of how they express themselves.

[00:19:41] And so it’s good to do an assessment to make sure you’re putting the plant in the right place for sun and soil and water and wind, but also for you, uh, being able to care for them.

So, you know, things that are gonna need a lot of your care, like your annual vegetables, uh, they can be close by, you know, it’s going to feel more and more like work the further away from your outdoor living space they are.

[00:20:07] But with edible perennials, because really often we’ll just interact with the plant once or twice a year, you know, so those can be further out and you know, it’s like an adventure or it’s a ritual that we go and we pick the whatever, but we’re really not having to go out and do much care because they’re once established, they care for themselves.

[00:20:33] So it is good to, to make sure you’re putting things in the right place, both for the plant and for the gardener.

[00:20:43] Erin Hoover: Definitely. So, are you familiar with, um, Malabar spinach? Have you ever heard of that?

[00:20:47] Lisa Taylor: I am! I haven’t grown it, but it’s one of the perennial spinaches. They, they can look a little wild.

[00:20:54] Erin Hoover: They can.

[00:20:55] I tried to grow one, when I lived in Anacortes, I tried to grow one. Which is a really mild climate, so. But it didn’t work, I don’t know. It wasn’t the right spot for it or something. But it’s supposed to be, you’re supposed to be able to use it like, an annual spinach, um, but the leaves are bigger and tougher more like, you know an older spinach how they get a little tough and they’re not baby greens, right? But it’s a perennial vine.

[00:21:22] Lisa Taylor: Um, I’ve grown perpetual spinach, which is a similar sort of a similar kind may just be timing for you um and getting those established maybe a little earlier or fall, like grow them and then plant them in the fall and let them get established before they’re having to deal with all that dry, super drained soil.

[00:21:46] Erin Hoover: Oh yeah.

Lisa Taylor: Try and try again. The other thing is to check your seed catalog and make sure it’s one that, you know, is from around here. And so, uh, maybe a Malabar or a perpetual spinach grown by, you know, you know, Whidbey’s Deep Harvest or Bellingham’s Uprising or Cottage Grove’s Territorial Seeds might do a little better.

[00:22:10] There are a few other small seed companies that raise their own right there or work with small networks. There’s a seed cooperative in the Intermountain West in Idaho called Snake River Seed Cooperative or Collective. Uh, and, they work with 50 farmers in the Intermountain West. And so those are very exposed, short, cold season climates.

[00:22:38] So sometimes when things don’t quite do well for me, I look there to see what they’re growing. You know, what kind of, what kind of edible perennials can they grow there? There may be a good chance that they could do very well here. So I’m often looking for those, you know, frigid, harsh climates and seeing what they, what they have to offer.

[00:23:01] Erin Hoover: And that might be a good option too, for people who are further east and, you know, like in Spokane or, you know, in that, that part of the state too.

[00:23:09] Lisa Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. If, if you’re over in the other side, uh, on the east side, check them out. They are available sometimes in stores. Like I found them at the food coop Pilgrim’s Market in Coeur d’Alene.

[00:23:24] And I was like, oh, cause I’m always looking for, like when I’m speaking with groups, I’m always looking for local sources as local as I can. And I, uh, they’re really cool. They tell you who grew the seed and where their farm is and all of that. Um, and they, I’ve got a couple of annuals that I grow from them that I’ve saved seed from and grow sort of year in year out.

[00:23:49] So yeah, I always kind of try to look that, um, to those very, especially over in the eastern part. If you can look at places that only have 90 frost-free days, then that’s a great source for looking for plants that, and seeds that you might grow.

Native Edibles to Consider

[00:24:05] Erin Hoover: Right. Are there native edibles that, uh, we should consider?

[00:24:08] Lisa Taylor: Sure, sure, sure. And that’s one of the hardest ones. Here’s one that you’re going to love. Miner’s lettuce. Right? That’s a native. Nice little ground cover. Come again, again. Uh, high vitamin C. Crunchy. Delicious.

Um, one that I like, uh, that’s a native is, uh, Sea Kale or Crambe maritima. Um, it’s a big, big plant with deep green waxy leaves.

[00:24:39] It’s really great, especially as like an alternative to another shrub you might have in your garden. You could have Crambe maritima. It’s lovely.

Now salal has always been a mystery to me. I knew it was edible, but when I ate those fruits, yuck! But somebody told me sometimes you have to find the way to eat the edible perennials. And somebody told me, take the fruits and make syrup out of them. And they are delicious.

[00:25:05] So a deer fern are one of the ferns that, uh, you can eat the fiddleheads on. I haven’t eaten it, but it’s like the, you know, one of those indigenous plants. Camas is, uh, one that would grow down in your area.

[00:25:29] Erin Hoover: Definitely. We have a lot of camas.

Lisa Taylor: Have you eaten it?

Erin Hoover: I have not. Every year when they’re in bloom, because we’re really close to the Chehalis people, and they are always looking for places to harvest it. Because it’s always part of their native diet. But my understanding is that it has a lot of inulin in it.

[00:25:50] So you have to cook it very thoroughly, or it can give you a gut ache, kind of like sunchokes and, and some of those other that are really high in inulin. Um, and you have to be careful because there are look a likes as well that can be toxic. Like, um, Death Camas. Once it’s in bloom, it doesn’t look anything the same.

[00:26:09] I mean, they’re, it’s a similar growth habit, but the blossoms are very different. So, which is why they always harvest when it’s blooming, so that they don’t accidentally harvest the wrong plant.

[00:26:19] Lisa Taylor: And that may be why I’ve stayed away. I usually just try to really get things I can absolutely identify that don’t have a lot of lookalikes, but it is a native and people eat it, and can grow it.

[00:26:31] Evergreen Huckleberry is a lovely plant. That’s a, it stays small for a while and then suddenly it goes. So that, but that’s a lovely evergreen plant. It’d be great on, you know, as a, as an alternative to other sort of hedge materials. And you can eat the fruit.

Stinging Nettles. If you can get some going in your yard.

[00:26:53] Sometimes people have them and they’re not happy and I’ve tried to propagate them and I’m not successful. So.

Erin Hoover: I have the exact same problem.

Lisa Taylor: Yeah, I have a, I have a couple of places I can go and wildcraft them. And when you wildcraft, you, again, you need to absolutely 100% be sure what it is. And you need to be careful not to take it all and not to like wreck the landscape.

[00:27:18] Erin Hoover: Right. And you have to be careful picking on public lands. Some of the state lands have certain restrictions on where and how much you can take.

[00:27:26] Lisa Taylor: Right. And usually, parks are okay, but again, who wants to like be in a park where somebody you know, scoured the hillside and took all of it.

[00:27:36] Um, Osoberry or Indian Plum, Serviceberry, and then Blue Elderberry, which is actually gorgeous, just absolutely gorgeous. It has a tiny little region where it’s native and we happen to be in it. Um, so it looks a lot like the Laceleaf Black Elder, but it produces blue fruit. Mm-hmm.

Erin Hoover: Yeah. And they can get very large.

[00:28:02] Lisa Taylor: Yeah, they can. They can. And, and sometimes pruning increases their size. So you gotta be careful. Always good to, always good to know about the uniqueness of all your plants. There’s not, I mean there are some general things we can say but it’s always good to really learn each plant that you’re including in your landscape so you make sure you do right by that plant as far as what it needs as far as harvesting and pruning and all the rest.

[00:28:31] Erin Hoover: Serviceberry is another one that gets very large. We have one.

[00:28:35] Lisa Taylor: It could be, uh, a shrub in a shady spot, so you can play a little bit with their, with their needs, and you can keep them a little bit more, some, some things you can keep a little bit more contained or smaller, if you just give it a little less than what it likes.

[00:28:54] Beautiful fall color, delicious fruit. I had one at the um, there’s one at the Good Shepherd Center right on the corner. I would go by it daily and I would grab fruit and eat serviceberry daily. It was fantastic.

[00:29:10] Erin Hoover: Yeah, it was funny because my husband, when we first moved down here, he saw and it was in, you know, full fruit and it was just loaded and he’s like, “we have this huge Blueberry bush. What the heck is that?”.

[00:29:20] I said, no, that’s not a Blueberry. You taste them. It doesn’t taste quite, it doesn’t taste like it. It looks just like a Blueberry, but it doesn’t taste like it.

[00:29:30] Lisa Taylor: It’s pretty seedy like Blueberry, but yeah, I’m a big fan. Uh, been a fan of Serviceberry. Just beautiful, uh, right now. I mean, it had lovely fall color, right now it’s got really great bark.

[00:29:43] So I’m always looking for things that not only have all these functions, you know, for wildlife and for shade but also, will it give us some interest in the winter? When, when things are a little bit more bare out there. So, um, yeah, I, I do like that.

[00:30:01] Erin Hoover: Um, The Osoberry I found, they were, um, they’re pretty much all pit, the little plums, the Indian plums. We tried them.

[00:30:07] Lisa Taylor: And I’ve run, uh, run across that with some other fruits, too. And so, when I would run up against that, I might think, oh this one needs to be cooked. This one’s, this one’s for jelly or syrup. Yeah, that’s, that would be a good use for it.

[00:30:22] Erin Hoover: They’re, I mean, They’re totally edible fresh.

[00:30:24] There’s just more seed than flesh.

[00:30:27] Lisa Taylor: Yeah. So that might be one that I would try, try cooking, see if that’s easier, it’s easier to eat that way.

Ways to Incorporate Edible Perennials into Landscapes

[00:30:35] Erin Hoover: So, um, what are some ways that gardeners can incorporate perennial edibles into their landscapes?

[00:30:42] Lisa Taylor: Well, I think the first thing is just to be thinking about it, you know, and whenever you’re thinking about removing something, uh, ask yourself, can I put something I can eat here?

[00:30:55] Um, I, I shared an edible perennial list with you, and that’s a really good resource just to, cause it may, you know, there’s a bunch of stuff on there that you’ll be like, “Oh yeah! Oh yeah! Asparagus!”, you know?

So, thinking about that, you can expand beds and add, if you are removing Azaleas or rhodes, Blueberries would love to be in that spot. They’d also love to just kind of be next to those acid lovers.

[00:31:23] Mostly you want to be careful to match, we talked about this already, but matching the conditions with what the plant needs. You might want to put something in, like, right now I’m looking out the window at the garden a lot more than I’m actually out at the garden.

[00:31:45] And so thinking about what, what kind of perennial edible also has beautiful color or shape or a uniqueness, beauty that I can see from my house or from my outdoor living area. So thinking about like, “Oh, it’d be nice if we had something out there”, Well, let’s find something that we can eat, um, and adding that.

[00:32:07] Blueberries, uh, I just mentioned those, but those are really cool because they’re, you know, they have beautiful fall color, and you get the berries, and you get the flowers, and all the pollinators, so that’s awesome.

One of the things we talk about is, like, how gardens can sometimes run us ragged and just become too much of a maintenance issue.

[00:32:29] Like we’re always trying to keep up with the garden. And so one thing to think about is a balance of 80% perennial plants in your landscape and 20% that is a better balance because the 80% doesn’t need a lot from you. And the 20% needs a lot from you, and that’s plenty.

[00:32:50] You’ll keep yourself busy with 20%. So thinking like grass is a perennial. Anything that I can’t eat, that’s perennial. But really sort of thinking about that as you’re starting to look at your landscape and maybe think about adding new things like adding perennials. Rather than annual spaces are going to make your work life easier in the garden.

[00:33:12] And, and thinking about, you know, wildlife, construction materials, windbreaks, oh, fodder for livestock and generally habitat for, for all the creatures. So those are some of the things when we, when we started planting our yard. That was the main thing we thought of was what can we grow that we can eat?

[00:33:35] And then we wanted to follow all the principles, you know, we wanted to have ground covers and, and perennials and then shrubs and then trees and on up. So, we wanted all those layers so we could start to find some things that would fill those little niches so that we had that stair-step effect, mostly for wildlife, for us.

[00:33:57] But it ended up that we could pack a lot of different things into a small space, kind of like a food forest.

[00:34:04] Erin Hoover: Yeah, that’s what you were talking about, the layers. That’s where my mind went, was the food forest.

[00:34:05] Lisa Taylor: Yeah, well, we talked about layers before food forests, and we just talked about ornamental plants and how planting in layers provides safe harbor for all of our wildlife friends.

[00:34:18] But if we fill those layers with edibles, then we have a food forest, right? So cool.

[00:34:25] Erin Hoover: Yeah, I know, the salad burnet, I’m familiar with it. I’ve never grown it, but I think it would be a great low-growing plant to kind of fill in you know some of the niches to help with weed suppression and yeah, you know things like that and it’s edible.

[00:34:39] Lisa Taylor: So yeah, it’s great. Um the other one that I like as a border herb is Hyssop and I haven’t talked about that yet. And that’s lovely evergreen small kind of a nice border can act a little bit like a ground cover because it you know, it stays close to the ground, uh, blooms in blue, so it’s great for pollinators.

[00:35:00] So, the cool thing about, one of the other cool things about edible perennials, uh, is that you add diversity, right? And the more diverse your environment is the more you support wildlife of all natures.

You can’t really limit them when you create habitat for them, but by creating that habitat, you are growing your own homegrown pest control because the more diverse it is, the more creatures can use it, the more creatures using it. The more they take care of it themselves.

[00:35:31] So, yeah, yeah. It really cuts that pest control and worrying about disease and pests down uh, because we have such a diverse environment and so many different plants. It’s like nature out there.

Top 3 Choices of Edible Perennials for Small Spaces

[00:35:51] Erin Hoover: Imagine that. So what are your top two or three choices for small urban spaces?

[00:36:00] Lisa Taylor: Okay, uh, rhubarb. It can be like a mini Gunnera, if you think about it. Beautiful and delicious, and can grow just about anywhere.

We’ve got some in deep shade as well as a broad sun, so I always like versatility as far as sun is concerned.

There’s a little tree called the Cornus mas. It’s called Cornelian cherry.

[00:36:24] It’s native of Persia, but it produces the most delicious fruit. And those are fruit that also have a big pit. I mean, they’re, you know, they’re about the size of my thumb, right? They have a pretty large pit in there, and they’re very tart when you eat them off the plant. But when you cook them down and strain them, they make the most delicious syrup or jelly.

[00:36:51] They bloom early, so they’re good for early pollinators, and more importantly, they stay small for a long time. Great fall color as well. They’re a deciduous tree.

I think thyme would be great because it behaves in a pot, and a lot of things I cook like to have thyme in them. You know, can’t cook leek soup without thyme, you know? So you can kind of grow them as a little bonsai in pots. You know, in a pot.

[00:37:17] Speaking of bonsai, I actually love, um, I do a lot of Indian food cooking, and bay leaves are a big ingredient. And so I grow a bay leaf in a pot and I just keep it, I just prune it down. So, it’s not like your bay laurel, that California laurel, the, the one that eats neighborhoods, it’s not that, it’s the, the sweet laurel, the one that we would use as a, as an herb, but it, it doesn’t mind being in a pot for a really long time and you can kind of cut it back, uh, cut whole branches down and it’ll grow back, so I love that one as well.

[00:38:02] Erin Hoover: We tried that, or we tried one, but maybe I need to try it in a pot.

[00:38:08] Lisa Taylor: Try it in a pot. It’ll be a big tree if you grow it out to be a tree. It’ll be a 30-foot tree, but it won’t spread like the laurel, the invasive laurel hedges that people plant. But, it does great in a pot, and you can keep it pretty small.

[00:38:24] And if, if it gets too woody, you can cut a branch and root it and start a new one. Oh, nice. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s one that you can, you can keep going.

I was at a library the other day and a woman was like, “I think we should just all plant lingonberries”. And I was like, “Oh yeah. Lingonberries, yeah.

[00:38:45] They’re little tiny ground cover, uh, ish, little, little shrub, evergreen. Tart berries that, that squirrels don’t seem to like, birds don’t seem to like, rabbits haven’t found.

Erin Hoover: Rabbits, that’s a big one.

Lisa Taylor: Yeah, so those are, those are a couple, a couple of things that I think people could try.

[00:39:12] Erin Hoover: Okay, so what are your favorite edible perennials in your garden?

Lisa’s Favorite Edible Perennials

[00:39:15] Lisa Taylor: Yeah, well, it changes every year, uh, and I’ve already talked about a lot of my favorite ones, but right, for right now, Welsh onions. And they’re a perennial onion. So whenever, yeah, lovely. The neighbor’s blackberries, the neighbors stopped not doing anything to their yard. And so there’s like blackberries coming over like, like dragons.

[00:39:41] I mean, it’s, it’s epic. And I, I pruned it right along the fence line and I harvested 23 pints of blackberries off of their blackberry bushes. Yeah, so I, you have to find a way to appreciate these things. And so that was a way I could appreciate them.

Erin Hoover: Yeah, I appreciate ours are outside the fence too.

[00:40:02] Lisa Taylor: Never had to leave the house, saved hundreds of dollars going to the farmer’s market.

I am especially, and they’re not very good to eat, but you can eat them, but I’m especially enamored and just in awe of Snapdragons. They are the heartiest dang thing. Uh, every other flower, boo, the deep freeze that we had last year and the snapdragons are just like, “We’re still snappy”.

[00:40:29] They’re edible, but not very tasty. But, I count it. It counts. Uh, and I just love that it, you know, you can have them blooming year round. They’re the heartiest of the hearty flowers we’ll, we’ll experience. And, uh, they come in all kinds of sizes and colors, and you gotta love that.

Erin Hoover: All right, that’s great. Anything else that you’d like to add about edible perennials?

[00:40:51] Lisa Taylor: I think that I want to encourage folks to, to think outside the annual box of vegetables and be surprised by the kinds of things they could grow and, and harvest right from their yard. And I will say this, you know, that a well-established asparagus bed is priceless.

[00:41:18] Erin Hoover: I have asparagus, but I only get like one stock per plant because I’ve neglected them.

[00:41:23] Lisa Taylor: So, yeah, they, so you’re growing those for the greens. So think about them wanting a good, a good dose of nitrogen in the fall. And then they, they do appreciate some water, especially if they’re like ours are under a deep eve.

[00:41:38] And so it’s kind of dry where they are and you have very, very, uh, dry, well, well-drained soil. So, you know, adding the compost and then some drip irrigation so that you can maybe you’ll get a more Um, it takes it takes like three to four years before they really start to produce

[00:41:59] Erin Hoover: These have been in the ground for eight.

Lisa Taylor: Oh, yeah. Well, they’re ready.

Erin Hoover: We’re gonna transplant them into a raised bed that’s actually in our vegetable garden so they can get the attention they need because we’re out there more.

[00:42:09] Lisa Taylor: Yeah, and you can um tailor the soil a little bit better. Yeah, so that it holds a little more organic material.

[00:42:16] Um, yeah more organic material and so for folks that are looking at their landscape and they’re wondering what else they could do this year, see if you can find something that’s edible that you can put there. And use that list because I included vegetables, herbs, I also include self-sowing annuals on that list because they act like perennials but take a look because there’s a lot of things there both things from far away and things that are, that are native that, that could do very well in their gardens.

[00:42:49] Erin Hoover: Okay, well, and I will include a link to that list for listeners who want to check it out along, and that’s on your website, so they’ll have your website too, so they can check out the other things you have available.

[00:43:02] Lisa Taylor: Yeah. Hey, uh, I would encourage listeners to, um, sign up for my newsletter. It’s free, and it goes out every month, and it tells you what you can do in your garden, inside and outside, and kind of serves as a garden guide to keep you on track.

[00:43:19] And I always include, um, some interesting articles and a family craft.

Erin Hoover: Oh, nice.

Lisa Taylor: Great. Yeah, so you can sign up right on my, my website to be a, to get my newsletter. So I encourage you to do that. In fact, this month, because I was preparing for this, this interview, I thought, “Oh, I should just put an article about perennial edibles in here”.

[00:43:41] So that will be the main article. And then we’re making a wildlife journal, uh, with the KidsCraft. So, uh, great.

[00:43:52] Erin Hoover: Thank you so much.

Lisa Taylor: Thanks, Erin. This was really fun.

[00:44:00] Erin Hoover: Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Evergreen Thumb, brought to you by the WSU Extension Master Gardener Program volunteers and sponsored by the Master Gardener Foundation of Washington State.

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