Perennial Plants: A Game Changer for Your Edible Kitchen Garden

I love gardening. It's one of those calm, simple and slightly old fashioned hobbies that bring such joy to life. And I know lots of other people who also love gardening. In fact, you might be one of those and that might be why you are here reading this.

Gardening is a really lovely and gentle way to slow down our lives. But when I was in my twenties, it wasn't quite so cool as it's become and certainly not for many of my peers. There were a few of us who'd bought our own houses early on when we were really young, at about 21 or 22 years old and we really wanted to create lovely spaces that were our own. So we were interested in gardening to a certain extent or at least as much as you can when it's your first home.

I was the geek who always germinating her own seeds (some pretty obscure!) and was weeding in her garden even though I had a really tiny garden, like so many starter homes in England, but I rarely grew anything edible apart from a few herbs. I always had small pots of herbs growing on windowsills and because I was a chef, I always wanted to be able to have something fresh, but it hadn't occurred to me to grow them outside.

It wasn't until I moved to Norway that I really started adding edible plants to my garden. The more Andre and I grew, the more we wanted to grow, and we loved the satisfaction of being able to pick things that we'd grown even if it was just a tomato. What started out as just a few pots of herbs grew into what is now a micro farm. Not only do we feed ourselves with fresh vegetables and fruit, but we also share it with our friends and family, and I sell it in our little "gårdsbutikk" or farm stand.

Beyond simply growing food for ourselves gardening is great for us. Even if we look beyond what it can produce (which is kind of obvious) it's going to feel great and you're going to know what goes in it and you're going to know what you're putting on it and in the soil for produce those plants. You can go organic if you want to but it's also the fact that it's good for us mentally. It gets us out into the fresh air, we connect with nature and we follow the seasons closely. In fact you don't have any choice but to follow the seasons! We might otherwise miss what is growing in that season or what it is at its best, but it's hard to avoid when you have a garden or terrace full of edible produce. You are not going to go out there and pick tomatoes in the middle of December unless you live in the tropics, in which case, wonderful; you could pick anything. For those of us in more temperate zones north and south of the equator, we know that we're not going to get those things but despite a harsher climate there are plants that thrive in the winter months.

However we do not need to have a vast amount of outdoor space to start our gardening journey or to grow edible produce. Small gardening is not only what you can grow in the garden, but also what grows in pots and on windowsills. You'd be surprised how much you can actually grow on a windowsill.

Cress is an easy and fast growing edible plant to grow on a windowsill or small space.

You can easily grow lettuces, herbs, even tomatoes and chilies, they like it because it's hot and you can take care of them as long as you've got the time to actually feed them and water them and prune them if they need it, then that's wonderful.

So let me share some inspiration to get you started on perennial gardening both big and small:

Aronia berries are the perfect perennial edible berry. They need very little care and produce kilos of berries year after year.

Let's take a look at perennial kitchen gardening. Perennial means that it goes on and on. It's something that lasts for a long time or even infinite time. So in terms of fruit and vegetables, these are plants that you don't need to plant over and over again year after year. They're something that you would plant once and then it keeps growing. They grow over time and take years to produce fruit and vegetables repeatedly without you ever having to replant.

Apple trees are perennial edibles that keep producing for generations.

So think apple trees or peach trees that might have been there for generations before you ever began taking care of it. That's perennial. I love perennial fruit and vegetables. I enjoy planting all the one-off stuff too, like lettuces and tomatoes, and it's good to have a percentage of the garden taken up with perennial fruits and vegetables because it cuts down on your workload. You might have a little bit of pruning to do and possibly some feeding but that's it, but there is no time taken with planting seeds and potting on seedlings and hardening them off.

So I want to give you some examples of my favorite perennial edibles. In my part of Norway, we're in climate zone four, and if you're not familiar with climate zones and you want to start gardening, you need to have a bit of a Google of it because it gives you an idea of what you can grow, what zone you are in, when you get the first and the last frost, and what kind of temperatures you can expect.

Part of my kitchen garden under several feet of snow and ice in the cold Norwegian winter.

My climate zone of zone four is quite a hard zone. The winter temperature drops to well below minus 25 degrees centigrade. The first frost is about September and the last frost is May, and we frequently get snow in May as well. So you need to consider all of these things. There are some plants that love a few weeks of frost (like lettuces) but not all will survive such long cold winters.

Perennials like it here as well because they get nicely established over the years and they produce abundantly in the short but warm growing season, so I don't really need to think about them. I give things a little bit of a prune and take a little bit of care but generally the perennial fruit and vegetables in my kitchen garden take care of themselves until harvest time.

My favourite perennial edible kitchen garden plants:

Scandinavia is famous for its love of berries, and these include raspberries, black and red currants and strawberries beside all the wild berries that grow in abundance.

Redcurrants are very rewarding to grow because you get so many berries on one bush.

One of my favourite and the easiest perennial to grow is red and black currants. They produce abundantly and are quite happy in a large pot or in the ground. The only bit of care they really need is some netting over the flowers in the spring to stop the little bird pecking at them. Occasionally you will need to prune, but other than that they will give you a lovely crop of jewel coloured berries. If you find that you are not getting as many berries as you want, don't fret because with currants you can use the leaves as well, and the leaves taste just as much of black and red current as the berries.

Blackcurrant leaves are one of my favourite ingredients and make a lovely drink

How amazing is that? You don't get the color, but they do taste very strongly. I use them for tea and a lovely lemon drink that is very traditional in Finland. It's slightly fermented, but the main ingredient is black current leaves. So I really look forward to the leaves coming out because I know that I can use them and they come out before a lot of other things as well.

And that's the beauty of perennial gardening with berries. You could try it with strawberries. I know that a lot of people replant them, but the last couple of years I have been trying to keep my strawberries going in my polytunnel and they're doing really, really well this year. So strawberries for me are another perennial and one you can happily neglect a little! You don't need to replant and they will reproduce. They send out little runners on a stalk with a baby strawberry plant at the end. Once that's got roots, you can replant that somewhere else. So you have this endless supply of strawberry plants. Raspberries, of course, grow wild here in Norway. We don't usually plant them, although they are raspberry farms and the raspberries are a little bit bigger but again, it's another perennial that would just get on with it and do it itself. And you will probably need to keep it a bit contained 'cause they can go crazy.

Jerusalem artichokes are a vegetable that not only tastes great, is easy to grow, but the plants and flowers are very pretty.

Jerusalem artichokes are a relatively new kitchen garden perennial for me. I know not everybody likes them and not everyone is familiar with them, but here in Norway, they're really popular. And if you've never eaten Jerusalem artichokes I recommend you go straight out and get some immediately. They are delicious! They look rather like a small lumpy potato, but they have the taste of a globe artichoke, those more familiar traditional green artichokes that look rather like a thistle.

With fresh Jerusalem artichokes there is no need to peel them and they can be baked, pureed, or made into soup. I have to say, I peel them. They're, they're a bit of a pain to peel because they're very knobbly but I peel them because I like to make them into a puree. The end product of whatever you cook with them is creamy and delicious and delicate fragranced. It's not starchy and so you don't get that stickiness that you get from mashed potato, but it does look like mashed potato. One of the things I love about them is that the plants are pretty as well. They grow tall and lush with beautiful elongated leaves and yellow flowers. So you have something pretty that's growing and tastes amazing as well.

To harvest them you simply pull them up the whole plant and pluck off the tubers, which are the Jerusalem artichokes. You can put a few back in the ground for next year and you're good to go. That's it. Simple as that. You don't have to do anything else, and they will go through the winter and start growing again in the spring. You'll inevitably leave some behind in the ground, however clever you are, unless you tip the pot out and sort through it but that then continues your supply year on year if you forget to replant them. How cool is that?

Thyme is a tough and resilient evergreen herb that loves growing in pots.

Herbs such as rosemary, thyme and sage and wonderful perennial additions to the kitchen garden. We can grow them either outside or on a windowsill. in fact all woody herbs are perennial. They are herbs that are fairly hard and you probably wouldn't want to eat the stem but they can also be used in teas, potpourri, flower arrangements, and of course in cooking. They also dry beautifully. All them of them are easy to grow and they're perennial.

Sage plants can live for many years and the same with rosemary, They're very good for having something that you know is going to be predictable next year. You don't have to endlessly replant seeds. You've always got them with a little bit of care and a bit of attention, and you can keep harvesting them because they're evergreen, a lot of them, and they will keep growing through the winter.

The final perennial I absolutely love is sorrel. You might call it a herb or a vegetable and it's used an awful lot in cookery here in Norway, but also in French cooking. It looks rather like spinach and it grows in a low lying bushy clump: It has a lovely flavor that is citrusy and sharp and tastes a little bit like green apples.

You don't need a huge amount of sorrel for cooking, but it's great for making into soups and sauces, especially to go with ingredients such as chicken and fish. If you don't pick it enough, it goes crazy so there's a wonderful incentive to keep picking and eating your never ending supply of fresh green sorrel!

In the ground, sorrel will keep growing and it will come back early in the spring, probably before you get anything else coming through. You might have a few lettuces if you've gone to the effort of planting those out, but nothing else that's coming through will be ready to be eaten. But your reliable sorrel plant will be there for you.

As you can imagine I always make sure my sorrel plants are happy and healthy in a corner of one of my raised beds. It seems to be happiest like that or contained in a pot. If you want to add some authentic Scandinavian or European flavours that are not so well know, then sorrel is just the thing and I would never be without it.

So there you go. Some ideas for a perennial kitchen garden and why you should go ahead and start planting edible perennials that will keep you kitchen garden producing year after year.