Orchard People

#047 Growing Perennial Vegetables with Ben Caesar
[00:00:00] Introduction and Episode Overview
Susan: Hi everyone. Did you know that this is the 47th episode of the Urban Forestry Radio Show and Podcast? The last 47 shows have been lots of fun, and each month I look forward to getting together with you all to explore topics related to fruit trees and food forests, permaculture, and arboriculture during the live shows.
So many of you email in questions and comments, and I really love that. It's lovely because we're developing a personal relationship and yet one of the best ways to get to know somebody is to share a meal with them. So that's what we're gonna do in the show today.
[00:00:43] Today's Menu: Perennial Vegetables
Susan: Now what's on the menu? I thought it would be fun to create a feast that includes a whole bunch of really easy to grow perennial vegetables.
And I'm hoping this episode will inspire us all to be more experimental in planting perennial vegetable crops. The great thing about perennial vegetables is that you don't have to plant those seeds each and every year because they just come back on their own. And many of these plants grow really well in that shady corner of your garden where berries and fruit trees and other plants just won't thrive.
[00:01:20] Guest Introduction: Ben Caesar
Susan: So my guest today is Ben Caesar of Fiddlehead Nursery in Kimberly, Ontario. Ben specializes in growing and selling rare edible perennials, and he's going to introduce us to some perennial edibles that we've never heard of before, and he will integrate them into today's feast. So I hope you guys are all hungry.
So now it's time to dig into our perennial vegetable feast. Ben Caesar, welcome to the show today.
Ben: Thanks very much for having me, Susan.
Susan: I'm so glad you're here. Now, Ben, I really wanna get to know you. I wanna know more about you and how you got into growing perennial vegetables. At all good dinner parties, people get to know each other while nibbling on some sort of appetizer.
Isn't that true?
Ben: It is generally, yeah.
Susan: Yeah.
[00:02:09] Appetizer: Pickled Perennial Vegetables
Susan: So what appetizer, perennial vegetable appetizer would you put on our menu today?
Ben: So I just recently have gotten into making pickles from some of the perennial edibles that I find here. And so I would have a few pickles laid out perhaps with a few cheese and crackers on the side.
I've got pickled wild leeks, pickled sweet cicely seeds, and pickled Chinese artichokes.
Susan: Sounds delicious. Can you tell me a little bit about those things?
Ben: Sure. Now most people are familiar with wild leeks. They're abundant where I live in the Beaver Valley, and they are one of the best wild edibles that you can grow, but you can also grow them in your garden.
So I have a small patch in my food forest here, and I don't harvest much from the patch in my garden, but I use it as an indicator patch to let me know when the wild ones are ready. So when mine are coming up under my apple tree, I will head for the hills where there are acres of wild leeks and harvest some of those and pickle them.
Now sweet cicely is a shade loving perennial. It looks like a fern, but it's actually not a fern. The whole plant tastes like licorice. And one of the best harvests you get from this plant are the unripe seeds. So the seeds are quite large, but when they're about three quarters of their mature size, they are still green and they're very tender and mild and they're like little licorice candies. So this year for the first time, I tried pickling them and they are delectable. It's very nice.
And then Chinese artichokes, that is a crop that is cultivated commonly in China and has been for thousands of years. And now it's cultivated in some parts of Europe as well. It's a member of the mint family and the plant grows little tubers underground.
They're about an inch and a half long and maybe three quarters of an inch in diameter, and they look like little grubs. They have little nodules on them, but they're pretty easy to clean. And then they make wonderful pickles. They're a lot like water chestnuts, so very mild in flavor, but a lot of crunch, so they go very nicely in salads. But the Chinese traditionally pickle them and they make fantastic pickles.
Susan: Oh, that sounds absolutely delectable. Okay.
[00:04:41] Ben's Journey into Perennial Vegetables
Susan: So as we nibble on our pickles with cheese on the side and crackers, tell me, how did you get involved with growing and experimenting with perennial vegetables?
Ben: Sure. I was living in Guelph when I met a guy named Aaron Hughes, who invited me to come and plant a field of nut trees with him. And he told me about permaculture. I, at that time, was not a gardener. I was interested in organic farming, but I didn't know anything about permaculture. And he told me about edible forest gardening and this idea that you can design an edible landscape that acts like a natural ecosystem.
So that really piqued my interest and I borrowed a few books from him. And then I started experimenting in my yard in Guelph and put an edible forest garden in there. So I planted some fruit trees and some berry bushes, and then planted as many perennial vegetables as I could find, but it was difficult to find a lot of these, so that sort of piqued my interest and made it seem like there might be a niche market for a perennial vegetable nursery.
So I was dreaming of that for quite a while before I started up Fiddlehead Nursery in 2012.
Susan: So 2012, you took the plunge. You were not even a gardener before that. What was it like in the early years?
Ben: I was a gardener in Guelph for many years before moving up to the Beaver Valley and starting the nursery. So I certainly had a bit of growing experience, but not a lot of propagation experience under my belt. So I learned from books mainly.
I also have a friend who has a nursery nearby and she took me under her wing.
Her name is Anastasia Sparling. She runs the Beaver Valley Flower Farm and she was really good to me and showed me the ropes in my early days. And so a lot of it was experimentation and I learned as in trial by fire, really. But I'm really passionate about it and I love experimenting with new crops every year.
So it's a really wonderful way to make part of my living.
This isn't my entire living. I'm a carpenter, so I do carpentry in the winter, but during the growing season, the nursery is all I do, which is tremendously satisfying.
Susan: That sounds wonderful. And we have an email from Phil.
Phil writes, hi Susan, listening from Manitoba. Does your guest have a website? I wanna look more into perennial vegetables. Thank you very much, Phil.
Ben: Hi Phil. That's an excellent question. I do have a website. It's fiddleheadnursery.ca, and there's lots of information if you click on the plants button on the website. It'll bring up the selection of plants that we carry, and there's a lot of information on each of the plants that we carry in the greenhouse.
[00:07:41] Growing Perennial Vegetables: Tips and Tricks
Susan: So are all perennial vegetables easy to grow? I think that's what I like and what I'm looking for. If I'm going to have a perennial plant coming back, I want it to be delicious. I want it to be easy.
Ben: Yeah, for sure. perennial vegetables are easy to grow, in general. There are some that are a little trickier than others, but the easiest perennial vegetables to grow are those that form a good ground cover. So there are a lot of great perennial edibles that form a ground cover, which keeps the soil shaded, which means that the moisture doesn't evaporate from the soil, and also weeds have a harder time germinating.
A great example of that would be seedless sorrel. Seedless sorrel is one of my top 10 perennial vegetables. It gets to be about a foot wide and a foot tall. So if you plant a patch of seedless sorrel about eight inches apart, a whole bunch of plants altogether, then the leaves will overlap and they will form a ground cover that doesn't let any weeds through and the whole thing is edible.
All perennials are easier than annuals, I would say to grow, once they get established. But you need to establish ground covers to make your garden truly low maintenance.
Susan: Interesting. And you talk about seedless sorrel. So we used to grow sorrel and it was great. We used the leaves, I can't even remember what we'd put them in, soups and stuff.
But then, it went to seed and it was not attractive.
Ben: Yes. Yeah. Seedless sorrel is great because sorrel generally gets bitter when it produces a seed stock like many crops do. But seedless sorrel never goes to seed. And so it stays productive and tender and mild in flavor throughout the growing season.
So you can eat it. It's one of the first greens to come up in the spring. It comes up in early April around here, and then you can eat it right through until the first frost.
Susan: And what do you do with the sorrel that you harvest?
Ben: I eat a lot of it raw. It's fantastic in salads. It's very sour. A lot of people liken it to lemon or sour apples.
So it has a really nice flavor, but it also has a marvelous texture. It's very crunchy. It just melts in the mouth. And having it raw is fantastic. I eat a lot of egg sandwiches and I always put sorrel in my egg sandwiches. I find it goes really nicely with eggs.
But I also cook it.
Susan: You know what? For our appetizer, let's have some little finger sandwiches. Egg sandwiches with sorrel. That sounds delicious. I could go for that.
Ben: Great idea.
Susan: So you said you do experiment every year. You've got your winter where you're doing carpentry, and then you're so excited when the growing season happens. You're experimenting with new things.
How do you get your ideas of new types of perennial vegetables to plant?
Ben: I have learned most of what I know from books. There are a number of fantastic books out there on perennial vegetables, but there are also some great websites on perennial edibles, and people from around the world join in.
There are a couple of Facebook groups that are really good and I'd highly recommend them. One is called the Edimentals Facebook group. So it's a conjunction of edible and ornamental. So this was started by Steven Barstow. He's a grower in Norway and he's experimented with more than 2,000 edible perennials in his garden.
So he's hugely knowledgeable about this stuff, and he's been experimenting for 30 or 40 years with these plants. So he's a wealth of knowledge. And then people pitch in from around the world on these pages and tell about their experiments.
There's another one called Propagating Edible Perennials on Facebook, which is also a fantastic resource for those people who are growing and propagating edible perennials.
Susan: Now, you live in a cooler climate here in Ontario, but we've got listeners in California and Florida. Are you aware of the perennial edibles that they can grow as well, that maybe we can't grow? And would those Facebook groups have discussions about all sorts of climates and what perennial vegetables would work there?
Ben: Yeah, generally there are people from all different climate zones on these Facebook groups, and I'm envious of the people listening in California and further south because there are a whole host of excellent perennial vegetables that I can't grow here because they just won't survive the winter. So I would love to experiment with some of the things. There are actually more perennial vegetables down south than there are up north.
And there's a great book. The first book actually written on perennial vegetables was called Perennial Vegetables by Eric Toensmeier, and it covers perennial vegetables from the northern boreal regions right down to the tropics. So it's a fantastic resource for those looking for information about perennial vegetables.
[00:13:18] Listener Questions and Expert Advice
Susan: So we have an email here from Ruth. Ruth says, hi, I would love to try perennial vegetable gardening. Two questions. To start off, what are the easiest plants to grow? And question number two, when to plant? Thank you. Listening in Toronto.
Ben: Ooh, the easiest perennial vegetables to grow, as I said before, are those that make a good ground cover.
I can list off a couple of the ones that are best for that.
There's hostas. Hostas are one of the easiest plants to grow, which is why they're so popular in ornamental gardens. Hostas are great because they're beautiful and they make a perfect ground cover. Nothing grows up through hostas.
In fact, you can plant hostas right into the grass, as long as there's some shade, and the hosta will take over and outcompete the grass. And it's the shoots of the hosta in the spring that are edible. Hardly anybody knows that hostas are edible, but in Japan, you can find them at the supermarket.
They're quite a commonly consumed vegetable in Japan. When they're first coming up, the leaves are tightly curled spears, and as long as they're tightly curled, you can cut them right down to the ground and then the hosta will respond by sending up new shoots and you let those live. So you just get one harvest off each plant.
And you take those shoots and you can steam them, you can cook them anyway you would asparagus. And they're very mild, very tender, a little butter, a little salt and pepper, and they're an excellent vegetable.
And another one is Solomon's Seal. This is another one that's grown quite often as an ornamental, and again, it's the shoots in the spring that make a very nice vegetable. So when Solomon's Seal comes up, the leaves are still tightly clasped to the stalk, and you can cut about a third of a patch at a time.
It won't grow from where you cut it, so you have to be careful about not denuding your patch too much. But Solomon's Seal slowly spreads to form a colony, so I harvest from around the outside of the colony and then you peel the leaves off and discard them because they're bitter. But the stalk itself, you can either eat raw or you can cook it lightly.
And, it's a very, easy vegetable to grow.
Susan: Does it matter if you go to the garden center, for instance, and get hostas, as they've got 10 million different cultivars? There's the ones that are variegated, there's the ones that are an interesting blue color. Are you telling me that all those cultivars will be edible, or is there a certain type of hosta that you would need to buy in order to make sure it's an edible one?
Ben: That's a great question and a question I get all the time. And the answer is they're all edible. Every hosta is edible. There are about eight different species of hosta, and they've all been hybridized to form the ornamental varieties that we find. Yeah. And there are thousands of varieties and they're all edible.
I generally plant the large leaf varieties just because you get more food off of them. The shoots are quite a bit bigger than the smaller leaf varieties in the spring, and they provide a really substantial meal. Yeah, any hosta's edible, and I encourage everybody out there who happens to have hostas in their yard, eat your hostas next spring. Try them.
You'll be shocked at how wonderful they are.
Susan: And to her question about when to plant them, you can plant them anytime. You can plant them in the spring?
Ben: You can plant them anytime. I do plant things throughout the growing season. The best time to plant, is spring and fall.
That's because the cooler weather and the more abundant rain in the spring and fall generally helps plants along. And so plants, generally when you plant them in the ground, they'll go through transplant shock. And so if it's not sweltering hot, then they'll do better than if you plant them in the heat of summer.
But if you do plant in the summer, you just have to be sure that you keep them really well watered, and then they do fine.
Susan: Now we have a question from Aaron. So Aaron says, hi Susan. I have two things I would like to share with the listeners. First, my favorite book about perennial veggies is called Around the World in 80 Plants by Steven Barstow.
Steven is an expert on perennial edibles and has grown around 8,000 species in his small garden in Norway with about 2,000 species surviving at any given time. The other thing I would like to share is my nursery. I have a very similar operation to your guest, but for listeners in the United States, it's probably easier to buy from me because of the limits on shipping plants across borders.
I'm not currently shipping plants, but I will start again in September. And he says my website is edgewood-nursery.com. Thanks for the great topic. That's cool. It's good to know because, often, half of our listeners are in the States and half in Canada, and they're like, hey, how do I get this in the States?
So that's really nice that Aaron wrote in.
Ben: For sure. For sure. It's great to hear about your nursery, Aaron, and I'll certainly look it up myself. I love to see what other people are growing. Unfortunately, I don't ship plants at all, even in Canada, so it's difficult for a lot of people to find the plants that I grow, unless they come to me.
So it's great that you manage to ship plants. It's tricky to ship plants. My operation is fairly small, so I haven't got there yet, but I plan to in the future. And I will say that Around the World in 80 Plants, the book by Steven Barstow, is just fantastic and I completely agree that he is a world expert.
He's the guy who runs the Edimentals Facebook group, and his book is just a wealth of knowledge, not only about how to grow perennial vegetables in your garden, but also how they're used. He's done extensive research on how these vegetables are used and cultivated in their native countries.
So he goes around the world and examines how these plants are either wild foraged or cultivated for the vegetable markets.
Susan: That sounds fantastic. Okay. So far you and I, we've shared an appetizer. I really like those pickles. They are absolutely delicious and we've gotten to know each other a little. Yes. I enjoy your cooking.
So we are gonna go to our next course. Are we not?
[00:20:03] Perennial Vegetable Salad: Next Course
Susan: I think we have a perennial vegetable salad coming up.
Ben: That's right.
Susan: Good. I'm looking forward to that. So Ben, what are we gonna have for our next course in our perennial vegetable feast?
Ben: I thought we'd have a perennial salad. The great thing about perennials is that they complement an annual vegetable garden perfectly, because the most tender and the most bountiful harvest is in the spring when there's really not much else coming outta the annual vegetable garden.
To make a salad, I usually bring two bowls out into the garden. One is for collecting the greens and one is for collecting flowers because there are a lot of edible flowers that come up that make a salad beautiful and even more flavorful. So, I'll go over some of the greens first.
Now, you can categorize the greens into two different categories.
One is the bulk salad ingredients. So these are things like iceberg lettuce that are not entirely very flavorful themselves, but they add bulk and they add texture to the salad. So in the perennial garden, this salad would be made around early June, so let's say around June 10th.
And at that time you've got lots of things coming outta the garden that are perfect for bulk salad. One would be Caucasian spinach. This is a climbing vine from the Caucasus region and it's a fantastic perennial vegetable. The shoots in the spring can be used like asparagus, but then the leaves can be used throughout the growing season.
They're very mild in flavor. They taste a lot like spinach actually. And and it can climb up into an apple tree if you plant it beneath an apple tree. So we'll collect some of those.
There's also basswood leaves at this time of year are wonderful salad greens. So when basswood leaves, basswood is a native tree.
They get to be 80 feet tall, but I coppice mine to keep them small, so I cut them down in the winter and allow them to regrow so that the leaves are within picking height. And when leaves are half size and still shiny, they're wonderful salad green, so we'll go with some of those.
There's also scorzonera, which is an herbaceous perennial that was formerly cultivated as a root vegetable in Europe and still is on a small scale, but the leaves make a nice lettuce substitute.
And what was the last plant called again? I didn't get that.
It's called scorzonera.
Susan: How do you spell that?
Ben: It's S-C-O-R-Z-O-N-E-R-A.
Susan: Okay.
Ben: Yeah.
Susan: So far we have three types of greens so far. That sounds amazing.
Ben: Yeah. And then stonecrop. Stonecrop is commonly planted in gardens. There's a really commonly planted variety called Autumn Joy.
There's another one called Matrona. These are the tall sedums that you'll often see blooming in the fall in people's gardens, and they have really thick succulent leaves that make an excellent salad green.
[00:23:23] Discovering Edible Sedums
Ben: A lot of people don't know that you can eat sedums, but they are one of my favorite salad greens, and you can eat them throughout the growing season.
So if you have these growing in your garden, try them. They're really nice.
Susan: Now, when you say about eating sedums, you can only eat stonecrop. You can't eat your Autumn Joy flowers and stuff like that. Not all sedums?
Ben: The flowers are bitter. All sedums are edible, technically, but the low growing ground cover sedums are pretty bitter.
So it's only the tall stonecrops that I consider edible, really. And they're very mild in flavor. And what they lend to a salad is a really nice juiciness and a nice texture. So they're pretty crunchy.
[00:24:04] Unique Salad Greens and Herbs
Susan: So we've got four types of greens. That sounds lovely. And then what?
Ben: And then there's seedless sorrel, which I always throw in a salad because it's really easy to harvest and it lends a wonderful lemony flavor to the salads.
And another one is sweet fennel, which is a perennial, it's related to the bald fennel that you'll find at farmer's markets. But sweet fennel is a perennial, whereas bald fennel is biennial. So sweet fennel. It's just the greens that you eat, but they're very sweet and they taste like licorice and so that's a wonderful one for the salad.
And then I flavor the salad with things like chocolate mint, which is a wonderful mint variety for salads.
Anise, which is another licorice flavored herb.
And then sweet cicely is also a fantastic, very sweet, wonderful salad green in the spring.
And then, mitsuba is a type of Japanese parsley. It's not actually related to parsley, but it tastes a little like parsley, but it's a wonderful flavored herb.
So these ones I just put a little bit into the salad to flavor them up.
[00:25:20] Adding Edible Flowers to Salads
Ben: And then, and then we can add some flowers. So in early June, the flowers coming outta the garden are Columbine. All Columbine flowers are edible.
Turkish rockets. It's a perennial brassica that is cultivated in the former USSR, for the unopened flower buds. But when the flower buds open, they're little yellow flowers and they're a bit spicy, but they taste a lot like broccoli and they're beautiful in a salad.
And then Sweet Pink, which is a type of Dianthus, have beautiful white and purple and pink frilly flowers.
And then I often use another stonecrop, Purple Emperor, which has dark purple leaves to decorate the top of a salad as well.
Susan: Sounds beautiful. Just beautiful. And I guess we eat with our eyes as well as with our mouth.
Ben: For sure. Yeah.
[00:26:17] Simple Salad Dressings
Susan: What kind of dressing would you put on all of this?
Ben: I would put a very simple dressing of say, four or five parts olive oil to one part apple cider vinegar, and then maybe some salt and pepper and maybe a little maple syrup to sweeten it up a little bit, but it's not even really necessary. So I would go as simple as possible, because you want the flavors of the herbs to really shine.
So I would dress it quite lightly as well, because at that time of year, with all the stonecrop and the juicy greens from the garden, you really don't need much dressing.
One product I sell through the nursery are mini salad sandwiches, which is just a little combination of about six or seven different herbs on a toothpick.
And I sell them for 25 cents. So it's really just a little sampler and there's no salad dressing at all on those. And they're perfectly juicy and crunchy and wonderful to eat just on their own.
Susan: It's amazing that when you start to take away, like so many of us have this diet with lots of processed foods, and when you take that away and you start to really taste the flavors of the food we eat, we realize how blessed we are to have such diversity in foods.
[00:27:33] Perennial Vegetables for Resilient Gardens
Susan: Especially if you're growing things like perennial vegetables.
Ben: For sure. And perennial vegetables really offer the opportunity of growing a huge diversity of different crops. A perennial vegetable garden can have 50 or 60 different species in it, quite easily, in a fairly small space. And so, that not only makes your diet more diverse, but it also makes your garden much more resilient.
The thing about perennials is that they are more resilient than annual crops because they develop deep extensive root systems that can access moisture and nutrients in the subsoils. And so they're much easier to grow and and it's healthier for the garden as well.
Susan: Fantastic. Now we have a question here from Sean.
Hello. What an interesting topic to say the least. Who knew, he says. Edible perennials? Love the show. Thank you. I live in Lexington, Kentucky.
Ben: Wow. That's great. Thanks for the encouragement, Sean.
Susan: Yeah, thank you so much for emailing in.
So folks, what do you guys think about this menu? I am just, wow, it sounds, it's delicious so far. I can't wait to hear about the main course and I am getting quite hungry.
Ben, I have my crisp white napkin tucked into my shirt, my knife and fork are ready to go. What's for the main course today?
[00:29:02] Main Course: Pan-Fried Trout and Roasted Blanched Vegetables (Hosta, Sea Kale, Asparagus)
Ben: I was fortunate enough to catch some trout in the Beaver River across the road from me. So I'm gonna pan fry a bit of trout and, along with that, have some roasted perennial vegetable shoots. So I've chosen hosta and sea kale's profile, but asparagus could also be included. So hostas, I've already described them a little bit, but one technique that I'll share with you that I use quite a bit here is blanching or forcing, which is simply covering the shoots just as they emerge from the ground with a black pot.
So I usually use just a plant pot, and I cover the holes with duct tape. And as soon as I see hosta shoots emerging from the soil, I'll cover them with the pot. I'll put a stone over the pot to stop it from blowing away, and then the pot will stay on there for two or three weeks and I'll keep monitoring it.
And what that does is it excludes light from the shoot. So those shoots are looking for light, and it causes the plant to go through etiolation, which is stretching out. So this is how they make white asparagus. They will either cover them with buckets or mound up the soil around the asparagus plants so that the asparagus turns white and it grows bigger and it'll be more tender and mild in flavor. And so I do this with hostas. I do this with sea kale.
Sea kale is a perennial vegetable that was popular in England 200 years ago. It's more like cabbage than kale, actually, in flavor and they used to blanch them using clay pots.
And so the shoots in the spring are just wonderful as a vegetable. So I would blanch my hostas and my sea kale and maybe my asparagus. And when those are ready, they fill the bucket and then you're ready to harvest them. So you just cut them right down to the ground and then all of those plants will send up more shoots and you let those live.
And then you coat them in a little oil and a little salt and pepper, and then roast them in the oven for 20 minutes at 375, turning occasionally. And that's your roasted side vegetables and they are fantastic. I'd put a little bit of butter on top and and then you just have those with the trout fillets with a little lemon and you're good to go.
Susan: That sounds absolutely mouth watering. It sounds really delicious and it's amazing that these spring vegetables can be so wonderful.
You probably wait all year for them, eat them, and then you let your plants grow and do their thing afterwards. And then you have attractive plants in the garden too.
Ben: Yes, exactly.
[00:32:01] Exploring Edible Perennials
Ben: Now there are certainly some perennials that come along later in the season as well. Daylilies are a fantastic edible perennial.
They're cultivated. There's thousands of acres in Taiwan dedicated to daylily cultivation for the unopened flower buds, which they call golden needles. And this is a really valuable crop to me because so many of the perennials are only really available and at their best in the spring. Then I value anything that's coming along right now, which is when the daylilies are coming along.
So you can eat the unopened flower buds, but you can also eat the flowers themselves. You eat them raw. You're not supposed to eat too many of them raw 'cause they can cause digestive upset, but if you cook them, you can eat them all day long and they're very nice as a vegetable and they're quite substantial.
Susan: Would you steam your daylily flowers? Is that what you would do?
Ben: Sure, yeah. I've actually battered and fried them to great effect. They make an excellent tempura. So that's one way of eating them. And you can stuff them like you would zucchini flowers.
And then you can have them in soups and stews. They often dry them in China to save them for the winter, and then they reconstitute them in soups and stews.
Susan: Does it matter if you've got the fanciest daylily cultivar that you got from your garden center? Fabulous colors? Or is every single daylily edible and safe to eat?
Ben: Every single daylily is edible, but some are nicer than others, especially fresh. So a lot of the yellow flowered varieties are the best for eating fresh. Some have a strange aftertaste that I'm not terribly fond of, but most of the yellow daylilies lack that completely.
So there's a very common variety, called Stella De Oro. It's a short daylily with big yellow flowers that blooms for nearly two months, and it's an excellent one for the edible forest garden.
Susan: I have an email here from Bev, very interesting email. She says, hi Susan. I love your show. I'm listening from Hornepayne in Northern Ontario. My question is, how many of these edible perennials will survive over the winter in zone 2b, and would they need winter protection to survive here? Thank you.
Ben: Zone 2b. That is a tricky climate zone. I am in zone 5a here, and I certainly do know that some things that I grow will work well in zone 2. In fact, I had a recent email from somebody who bought plants from me and brought them up to Timmins, and many of the plants that he bought are surviving up there, which is great to hear.
On my website, under the plant profiles, there are climate zone listings for the plants. So that's one resource to go to. Just look on my website and see what's appropriate for zone 2.
But I'm always experimenting with plants that aren't supposed to grow well in my climate zone. So I grow plants that are supposedly, will only survive in zone 6 or 7 and, quite often, they'll surprisingly survive here. It seems as though people just haven't experimented with these plants in colder zones enough to recommend them for those zones.
So if I were you, I would experiment with plants that are appropriate to zone 2 as well as zone 3 and even 4.
Susan: I think that's great advice. Try them. And it sounds like that's what you are doing. You are throwing things in the ground and seeing what sticks. Is that your approach, or?
Ben: That's exactly it. Yeah. I'm always trying to see what will survive, where. A lot of the plants that I grow haven't been grown before in Ontario, not to my knowledge anyway, and so a lot of them are from England or other parts of Europe or China or Korea.
And in those areas, a lot of the time they will say, oh, this plant loves full sun. But then if I grow it in full sun, it suffers in the heat of our summer because our summers are much warmer than, say, those of England, in general. And so those plants do better in the shade. So I'll plant some plants in the sun and some in the shade and see what does better.
So I'm always trying out different things in different locations. I'm working with heavy clay soil here too. So in a way it's challenging because in the spring, if it stays wet like it was this spring, then the soil just doesn't have a chance to dry out and it holds onto water. And so plants can drown in those conditions.
But clay is also high in nutrients. And so once plants do get established, then usually they do pretty well. But I'm always careful not the plant in lower zones, in pockets, that will hold the moisture.
Susan: We got an email here from Sue. So Sue writes my applause to your radio show today from Oklahoma City. This topic is so intriguing and the way that you presented it is so clever.
Great. Thanks.
Ben: Oh, that's wonderful.
Susan: Thank you, Sue. Thanks so much for writing in. That's great.
[00:37:21] Fiddlehead Nursery and Unique Edible Plants
Susan: Oh, we got another one that just popped in here from Pam. Oh, this is a good question. So Pam asks, how did you come up with the name Fiddlehead Nursery? So Pam's in New York City.
Ben: That's a good question.
Fiddlehead Nursery, the name came to me as fiddleheads are the spring shoot of the ostrich fern, which grows wild in the Beaver Valley where I live. And it's also one of those perennial vegetables that people are generally more familiar with. A lot of people have heard of fiddleheads so I thought that would indicate that I grow perennial vegetables, but it's also a whimsical name and I just like the sound of it rolls off the tongue.
Susan: Sounds pretty good. Actually, it's interesting. When we were talking earlier, you mentioned a plant called udo U-D-O.
Ben: Yes.
Susan: And what is that? I've never heard of that.
Ben: Yeah. Not many people outside of Japan have heard of udo.
It's a really commonly foraged wild edible, and it is probably one of the most productive perennial vegetables in the world. Udo can grow to be nine feet tall in a season, and then it'll die down to the ground. So it produces a lot of biomass. And it's the spring shoots that are relished in Japan. They're usually lightly cooked.
The scientific name is Aralia cordata and it's related to spikenard, which is a wild edible that you find around here, but it's much bigger than spikenard. It does really well in the shade, so I grow it in the shade of my apple tree and it is a delicious perennial vegetable.
When you cut the shoots, you have to peel them 'cause they're a little bit fuzzy, but it's pretty easy to peel. And then you just cook them for about three minutes. And I usually use a dressing with a little sesame oil with some sesame seeds and maybe some crushed peppers. And you can just have them as that. And although it's lightly cooked, it's known as udo salad in Japan.
Susan: The other one that you had mentioned before that I was intrigued by a little Google search I found interesting. Skirret, S-K-I-R-R-E-T. That's a historic one, right?
Ben: Skirret is a root vegetable that's related to carrots and parsnips, and yeah, it was used extensively in the Roman Empire.
They cultivated skirret for the roots and it was a cultivated vegetable in Europe up until around the middle Ages when it fell outta favor. Some people postulate that the introduction of the potato sort of pushed skirret out of popularity. But I grow it and it's really easy to grow and to cultivate it as a perennial vegetable.
You dig it up in the fall and then you can divide the plant and replant half of it and eat the other half, and each plant has a bunch of carrot-like roots. They're white. They're about the thickness of your finger, and they're about eight inches long. And you can clean them off and eat them raw or you can cook them.
They're delicious, roasted. They're very sweet and they taste a little like carrots, but they have their own unique flavor. And it was the emperor Tiberius' favorite vegetable, apparently.
Susan: If we have another dinner party in the fall, we could use that as a starchy side dish. Perhaps with Jerusalem artichokes or something like that.
Ben: Another great root vegetable that's native to North America is called ground nut, and I've just recently started growing ground nut with my skirret. Ground nut is a tuberous perennial, that has twining vines that will grow up the skirret. So they make a really nice companion plant combination. And ground nuts are about the size of a small chicken egg when they're full size, and you can dig them up and they come along strings. I cut them off the strings and then throw the little ones back so they get more coming up, and then you can just roast them like potatoes.
Susan: Oh, yummy.
Ben: They're very nice.
Susan: That sounds so delish. Okay, something we didn't think about before. We need to have a dessert.
Ben: Ooh.
Susan: Do you have any rhubarb crumble in the freezer from an earlier harvest or something like that?
Ben: That's a great idea. I love my rhubarb.
Rhubarb makes a fantastic ground cover. You can go to an old farmstead that's been abandoned for 50 years and you'll still have a thriving patch of rhubarb. So it really is one of the easiest vegetables to grow. And I'd say rhubarb crumble is a fantastic idea for a perennial dessert.
Susan: You know what, I'll bring it. You've provided everything else.
I'll bring the dessert. How's that? Because my rhubarb. Oh boy.
Ben: Perfect.
Susan: It produces a lot. Actually, I think I need to divide it. It's so big now.
Ben: Really?
Susan: Yeah. Yeah.
Ben: Yeah. A lot of these are very easy to propagate. The hostas, seedless sorrel, the rhubarb. You can just dig them up and cut them in half and then you've got more plants.
Susan: You can share them with friends, and you can just grow more and eat more and yummy and delicious.
Ben: Yeah.
Susan: Ben, thank you so much for coming on the show. What fun.
Ah, that was great. Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, exactly. We'll have to do this again sometime. Different season, different foods. But thank you so much for coming on the show.
We will talk again soon.
Ben: Sounds good.
Susan: Okay, you take care and goodbye for now.
Ben: Bye-bye.
[00:43:12] Conclusion and Farewell
Susan: That was Ben Caesar of Fiddlehead Nursery in Kimberley, Ontario, and that was so much fun. A virtual meal of perennial vegetables. It's just amazing to see what a variety of things you can grow so easily.
That's it for today's episode of the Urban Forestry Radio Show. I really hope you enjoyed the show.
Thank you so much for tuning in. It's been wonderful to have you as a listener, and I hope to see you again next time.