It's easy to think of vegetable gardens as orderly rows of crops planted in spring and harvested in fall. But some vegetables are perennial, while others, such as potatoes or garlic, always leave tubers or cloves behind that sprout in unexpected spots the following year.
Many perennial vegetables are a pretty addition to a flower bed in space-short gardens. For instance, a White Rock hillside gardener planted rhubarb in a raised bed along the high back border of his steeply sloping lot. People entering the yard looked up to all those beautiful red stems topped with spectacular leaves.
Given a good feed of manure or compost every year, the edible stems fatten into great pie or preserve material. Rhubarb leaves, though, are very poisonous. Occasionally a rhubarb plant puzzles non gardeners by producing a thickly clustered head of tiny white flowers atop a one-metre stem.
Gardeners with little space will find asparagus co-exists well with flowers that also need manure or compost mulches and full sun. Once picking is over and the plant is allowed to produce its tall, delicate ferns, asparagus becomes a hedge-high cloud of deep green, which forms a pretty background to bright summer flowers.
Sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes) also look good once they begin producing long-stemmed yellow daisies in late summer. But they're so invasive they need solitary confinement where a mower can circumnavigate them. It's also almost impossible to eradicate sunchokes from their original planting place.
Despite those drawbacks, this sunflower relative produces knobby tubers that are a valuable food and especially tasty after frost. They're also easy to prepare if you scrub them instead of peeling them.
Also valuable is horse-radish, which often outlives everything else in B.C.'s ghost towns. Horseradish belongs on the borderline between vegetables and herbs. Its long, fat roots make a delicious, though pungent, pickle or spread. Its young leaves are reputed to be edible. Though anything that needs to be dug isn't too compatible with flower beds, there is a pretty whiteand-green variegated version of horseradish. It's not easy to get in this area, but anyone who runs across it needs to know it's desirable and said to be less invasive than the plain green form.
A perennial salad crop that won't take over the garden (unless you let it seed) is cultivated sorrel. It slowly enlarges its clump and produces soursweet green leaves for most of the growing year. Cooks can use it for salads, soups and sauces if they're quick -sorrel wilts rapidly.
One interesting perennial vegetable that withstands average winters is the Welsh onion (Allium fistulosum). This is a mild, non-bulbing onion that looks like a green onion but multiplies at the base like shallots. The seed stalks can be cut and eaten when young and the roots can be dug through the winter whenever the ground isn't frozen.
News item: The Alpine Garden Club of B.C. holds its plant sale and spring show at VanDusen Botanical Garden April 7 from 1 to 4 p.m. Admission is free. The sale will include alpines, ferns, perennials and shrubs, snowdrops, hellebores and woodland plants. Show categories include bonsai, ferns, dwarf conifers and miniature gardens.
