Perennial food crops are fantastic for improving soil, surviving periods of drought or flood, and producing large quantities of food year after year. They are the backbone of any permaculture design. Unfortunately, in a temperate climate, it feels like there are not many perennial options available to us. With the ground frozen and snow-covered for several months of the year, most plants simply don’t make it through to a second spring.
However, it’s not all doom and October frosts. People have been living here for tens of thousands of years, and for most of that period they were not importing their strawberries from California. The mix of native and imported crops below all do perfectly well here, and eating them will give you a diverse range of nutrients that most modern diets are lacking.
Quick links:
19 Perennial Crops to Grow in Ontario
- Sunchokes
- Rhubarb
- Asparagus
- Currants
- Chives
- Raspberries
- Strawberries
- Hostas
- Garden Sorrel
- Fruit Trees and Shrubs
- Culinary Herbs
- Goutweed
- Daylily
- Ostrich Fern
- Wild Ginger
- Dandelion
- Rose of Sharon
- Prickly Pear Cactus
- Parsley (self-seeding biennial)
Sunchokes
Also known as Jerusalem Artichokes, these tall sunflower-like plants are native to central North America but can be grown successfully well outside of their original range. Order them as tubers to be planted in early spring, but don’t expect to see much action that year or the next. When I mail-ordered sunchokes for the first time, I thought they had died because the tubers became moldy by the time the ground actually thawed. I planted them just in case, but nothing happened. Imagine my surprise when, two years later, a patch of stalks taller than I could reach shot out of the ground.
The yellow flowers bloom late in the fall, and harvest should happen after the blooms are finished, when the plants are concentrating their sugars in their roots for winter storage. That first successful year, we were busy in the fall and didn’t end up harvesting our sunchokes. That was how I learned what many gardeners already know: Sunchokes SPREAD. By the next year, my original five roots had become dozens of plants. We made sure to harvest the tubers that fall—all eleven kilograms of them. We thought we had found them all, but the next year they merrily grew back again for another big harvest.
Rhubarb
In a zone-three springtime, rhubarb is as exciting as the snowdrops and crocuses. When the snow pulls back from the vegetable garden it is already emerging: a prehistoric-looking knob of pink and green wrinkles that will soon elongate into a sour red stalk capped by a massive leaf. The leaves have toxic levels of oxalic acid, but they do make great mulch. The stalks are excellent in baking and pair particularly well with strawberries, which reach their peak at the same time. You can also occupy your kids by sending them out to the garden with a small container of sugar and permission to dip a stalk of rhubarb in it like a homegrown Lick-M-Aid.
Gardeners usually acquire rhubarb as a mature plant, and since clumps must be divided every so often to keep them healthy, mature plants are easy to find. However, spreading by seed is not out of the question. During my time at Garden@Kimbourne Community Permaculture Project in Toronto we once ignored advice to cut down a massive flower stalk put up by one of our rhubarb plants. True to the advice, the flower took up all the plant’s energy for the summer and its harvest was unimpressive. But it also went to seed magnificently, and the next year we were charmed to find miniature rhubarb plants all over that part of the garden.
Like many perennials, rhubarb needs a few years to establish itself before you harvest much, and you must always take care to leave a critical mass of stalks to keep it healthy. To encourage regrowth, harvest by holding the stalk near its base and twisting until it pops free just below the soil.
Asparagus
The first time I planted asparagus was during an early May downpour. The expert delivering our crowns had arrived, so that was when the planting had to happen—mud and cold and all. She had us dig trenches six inches wide and a foot deep, then handed out the crowns. They were bundles of roots that looked like dry, brownish octopuses the size of my hand. We each made a little mound in the bottom of the trench, spread the roots over it (making sure the tiny bumps that would become shoots were facing up) and added soil until the crowns were just buried.
After our expert left, we watched the trenches excitedly. Each time a thin spear of green emerged, we added more soil until it was just covered again. This went on for weeks until the trenches were filled in and rows of whisper-thin asparagus stalks were waving at us. We resisted the urge to pick any that year… and the next… and the next. Finally, the following spring, we had a thriving and well-established asparagus patch.
Something that never ceases to amaze first-time asparagus growers is what happens to the spears that are not harvested. The vegetable we are familiar with is only the early shoot of a plant that will bloom and grow into a tall frond over the course of the summer. Later in the season, female plants will set red berry-like seeds. Remember that you should leave plenty of spears unharvested (including all of the ones that develop after June is over) to reach this mature stage; otherwise you will no longer have a perennial on your hands. Furthermore, don’t cut the foliage off before it dies back and turns brown in the fall, or your plant’s ability to survive the winter will be impaired.
Currants
For complicated reasons having to do with the lumber industry and the attempted eradication of plants that can incubate a particular pine rust, currants are not a familiar fruit to many in the United States. In Europe, they have a long history of popularity. Canada, as usual, is in the middle. We don’t have many currant-flavoured commercial products, but we do have full freedom to grow them for ourselves. And we should!
Currants are round, jewel-like berries that grow on attractive shrubs. They like to be kept fairly cool and moist, and they don’t need full sun, so they are a great way of brightening up an area that gets shaded for part of the day. They do like lots of organic matter, so make sure your soil is nice and rich before you plant them and that you keep them well mulched. Currants can be pruned to maintain a productive shape and improve airflow, but I can promise from experience that forgetting to prune bushes for their first five years of life does not necessarily stop you from getting an impressive harvest.
The varieties I have grown are red, and pink, and black currants, but white ones are also available. Several species of currant are native to Ontario, but the cultivated varieties are usually bred to be resistant to the rust that got these plants banned from the United States. In either case the plants are self-pollinating, so you don’t need more than one to get berries.
A final word about aphids. At Garden@Kimbourne Community Permaculture Project we spent several years struggling with aphids on our currant shrubs. Eventually we gave in and trusted the research that told us the aphids wouldn’t hurt our harvest. It was true. The upper leaves were less attractive than before with aphid-inflicted bumps on them, but the berries were just fine. We planted flowers to attract ladybugs (voracious aphid predators) and forgot about it.
Chives
Few things are easier to grow than chives. In fact, if you let their pretty purple flowers go to seed unchecked, you may find them much too easy to grow. But it’s easy to dig up a clump and move them, and any unruliness will be forgiven in the early spring when they are one of the first edible plants to push up through the frigid soil. Unlike some perennials, they are easy to grow from seed on purpose as well. You can sow them directly in the soil or get a head start by planting indoors 8–10 weeks before your last frost date. Use plenty of organic matter in your soil and mulch it well to give them the rich, cool, moist, and well-drained conditions they prefer.
Chives are members of the onion family, and they taste like it! Harvest their tall, tubelike leaves an inch from the soil and use them the same way you would green onions. Or, if the state of your breath doesn’t matter just then, munch on a leaf in the garden for the sheer pleasure of eating something so fresh. The flowers are also edible. These plants benefit from being cut back, so harvest them monthly once they are established.
Raspberries
In the woods of Parry Sound where I spent most of my childhood summers, I frequently observed the raspberry’s preferred method of habitat creation: run a logging road through an upland forest, then abandon it. The sides of a maintained road or field are a close second. Raspberries are the kings of the margins. They are the first to colonize a recently disturbed area, getting their roots into the soil before there is any competition. Living on the edge gives them access to sunlight, while the forest’s protection keeps conditions cooler than an open field. They don’t mind sandy soil either, which is helpful since sand drains well and the one thing they really cannot stand is soggy ground around their roots.
The taste of a raspberry is like summer concentrated into a single mouthful. You can bake with them, preserve them as jam, or freeze them to enjoy later, but I always feel it’s a shame not to devour them raw. Most raspberries will ripen in July, but there are cultivars that offer an autumn harvest instead. In Toronto I have eaten berries chilled by October rain and I thrilled over the experience—but since the plants still had plenty of green berries when frost interrupted matters, I suspect they are intended for a longer growing season. That being said, these canes were planted in slightly heavier shade than raspberries prefer, so more light might have given them the boost they needed to fruit sooner.
Strawberries
Strawberries are short-lived perennials that spread so rapidly you might not even notice that each individual plant lives only a handful of years. They can grow from seed, but they mostly spread via runners (“stolons” to botanists), which are stems that grow horizontally at ground level and put out new sets of roots and leaves several inches from the parent plant. Because of this, they should be grown in an area where their spreading habit will not cause any problems.
Wild strawberries are, for me, inextricably linked with the beginning of summer. Blue skies, warm grass, and the sharp sweet-sour burst of a tiny berry on my tongue. Cultivated varieties, which have larger and less tangy berries, also produce at the end of spring or beginning of summer; They are often called “June-bearing strawberries” as a result. So-called “everbearing” strawberries can produce two or three crops in a single growing season, but they are less hardy and may not always survive the winter. All strawberries prefer full sun and good drainage.
Hostas
In this region, hostas are best known as sturdy ornamental plants that are useful for filling in a shady corner where nothing else will grow. But in the cuisines of Japan, Korea, and China, where hostas grow wild, they are also a tasty springtime vegetable. Pick the shoots early in the season when they are still tightly furled and slice them for use in salads, or cook with them. You can use these shoots in much the same way you would asparagus.
Hostas are easy to find at any nursery, or you may be lucky enough to know a gardener who is ready to divide a clump or two. They thrive in moist, rich soil and in partial to full shade. Leave lots of space between plants; over the next four to six years they will expand to a diameter of up to two feet.
Garden Sorrel
I didn’t encounter garden sorrel until adulthood, but I grew up eating the small, arrow-shaped, lemony-sour leaves of sheep sorrel that grew in a field near my house. That perennial weed, with its upright sprays of yellow or rusty-coloured flowers, looks very much like a miniature version of the cultivated plant.
Sorrel can be used as a salad herb or a thirst-quenching garden snack. If you find the taste of the raw leaves too strong, you can also cook them in a variety of dishes. The leaves wilt down to a startlingly small volume, but since the plants are prolific and robust it is no problem to harvest enough leaves at once. In fact, I have found that I need to cut back the plant a few times a season to keep it from bolting, so it’s nice to have a use for a whole armful of greens. While garden sorrel is the hardiest in our region, there are cultivars used around the world. Popular dishes include French sorrel soup, spanakopita in Greece, stews in Northern Africa, and a fermented drink in the Carribean.
Be aware that the tangy flavour of sorrel comes from oxalic acid, which is the same chemical that makes the stems of rhubarb sour and its leaves toxic. Anyone with kidney or liver problems should investigate whether eating sorrel is safe for them. On the other hand, this nutritious plant also comes with plenty of health benefits, so most of us can embrace it in moderation.
Fruit trees and shrubs
What scope is there for growing fruit in our climate? I have personally grown apples, pears, edible crabapples, elderberries, currants, and mulberries in southern Ontario, and both apples and edible crabapples up north in zone 3. The currants in my fledgling food forest in Zone 4b are thriving, though I reserve judgment on the pears. During my time in Toronto I walked past tiny yards containing peach and cherry trees, and I have a friend who grows plums outside the city. At Garden@Kimbourne Community Permaculture Project we have been raising young Saskatoon shrubs and pawpaw trees that have not yet fruited. Yes, pawpaws can grow in Canada.
Fruit trees can seem daunting to inexperienced growers, but a little preparatory information can go a long way. Decide whether you want to grow dwarf, semi dwarf, or standard varieties. Find out whether your chosen tree is self-pollinating, or whether you will need to plant two or three of the same variety to get fruit. Decide whether you will purchase your tree as a whip (a very young tree that arrives with bare roots and no branches) or an older (more expensive) sapling. Either way, plant it as soon as possible when it arrives. Research pruning techniques and make sure you prune vigorously in the early spring or late winter for several years to train your tree in a sturdy shape that allows healthy airflow. If you notice a pest or disease, type the symptoms into a search engine and take action as soon as possible.
Growing fruit trees from young saplings does take more research than most herbaceous plants, and it can take many years to start seeing a harvest. In the long run, though, you will be rewarded with an incredible bounty of produce and a deeply satisfying relationship with the tree you have nurtured.
Culinary Herbs
In rough terms, the question “Will this herb survive the winter?” can be answered with a second question: “Will this be destroyed if I add it to my cooking pot while it is still being heated?” Tender herbs that are used only raw or as a last-minute addition to a dish (think basil or dill) will blacken at the first touch of frost. But woody-stemmed herbs like sage, oregano, marjoram, and thyme might even stay green through a zone 5 winter, and can often survive in a colder region with good mulch or snow cover. Rosemary is in the same category, but I have found it more difficult to overwinter.
These culinary herbs all thrive on light, heat, and extremely well-drained soil. My most successful herb garden was tucked between a broad stone path and a stone border, both of which soaked up heat from the sun. I mixed sand and gravel into the soil and planted my thyme and oregano in the cracks of the path so that they could sprawl onto the stones. The yard sloped slightly downward from the herb garden, so water never pooled there. Within a single summer, the happy plants had spread to cover every inch of it.
It bears mentioning that chives and mint are both tender herbs in the kitchen, but they are as tough as nails in the garden. They are so good at growing, in fact, that they are often sequestered to keep from invading the rest of the garden. They are certainly not about to let a little something like forty-below winter weather stop them.
Goutweed
I really don’t advocate for planting goutweed, also known as bishop’s weed. It’s a bully that crowds out everything it encounters, and getting rid of it is nearly impossible. I know because when my family moved into a new house where a patch had been planted, my mom spent two summers going through the soil of that bed with a kitchen fork until every scrap of root had been removed. Only then did it stop coming back.
But people will persist in buying this plant, because it’s fast-growing and will thrive in deep shade where little else will. The only thing that ever softened my distaste for this garden invader was learning, from Ellen Zachos’ book Backyard Foraging, that goutweed is edible. In fact, it has quite a nice flavour. Mild, but pleasant. Like so many of our ornamental plants, it used to be a common food when everyone’s diet was home-grown. So if you find yourself in possession of a patch of goutweed, you can do what I now do: eat it right up.
Daylily
It took me until I was thirty-one to actually eat a daylily. I have been too in love with their deeply hued and short-lived blooms to pluck one in its prime. I love the way they thrive in dappled shade at a forest’s edge or in sunny ditches. But a commitment to broaden my home-grown menu led me to finally enjoy themraw, stuffed with cottage cheese that had been blended with minced lemon basil.
According to my research, there is a lot you can do with a daylily (which is not a lily at all, but a member of the Asphodelaceae family). You can harvest the buds before they open into flowers and eat them raw. Young spring shoots can be sautéed. Petals can be added to salads, and open flowers with the pistils removed can be stuffed as mine were, or battered and fried. In the fall, that year’s tubers (they will look white while the older ones look brown) can be cooked like potatoes.
It is important to note that the original species of daylily, the bright orange hemerocallis fulva, has been eaten in Asia for hundreds or thousands of years. That species has been naturalized in North America and can be found spreading from the foundations of old homesteads as well as in the gardens of current homes. But the hundreds of cultivars that have been bred from it since then have not all been tested to prove edibility. If you want to have your lilies and eat them too, it’s best to find out whether your variety has been eaten successfully, and to try just a little at first since some daylily allergies have been reported.
Ostrich Fern
Growing ostrich ferns is satisfying on a strictly visual level since their circular sprays of tall, arching fronds are deeply impressive. But these plants are also the source of fiddleheads, a much-coveted spring delicacy in parts of North America. They are not common in major grocery stores, but specialty markets and CSA programs can do a brisk trade in fiddleheads at the right time of year.
Ostrich ferns grow wild in hardwood forests throughout Canada and the northeastern United States. You can grow your own from spores, but it’s more common to order dormant plants from commercial sellers. Don’t worry if the ferns seem like they’re failing to thrive during their first year. Most of their energy will be focused on their root system, so keep watering them well and leave plenty of space for them to grow into once they get going.
Fiddleheads are a fern’s tightly coiled early spring shoots. They are only edible before they uncurl, so pay attention once they begin to emerge. Remember to wait for your fern to be well established, and take no more than half of its shoots. Look up proper preparation methods and enjoy this springtime treat in moderation.
Wild Ginger
I first purchased two wild ginger plants to fill in a shady corner of a vegetable garden that I planned to convert into a food forest. The plants took off with no care, multiplying to fill the corner over the next few years. When we cut down some invasive trees to make room for elderberry and Saskatoon shrubs, light poured into the space. The woman who had sold me the plants was aghast to see wild ginger growing in such brightly lit conditions, but the plants didn’t seem much bothered. Their heart-shaped leaves got a little pale in spots, but they continued to spread.
Wild ginger is not closely related to the ginger we purchase at the grocery store, but its aroma is similar and North Americans dried and ground it as a substitute for centuries. Today there is some controversy over the levels of Aristolochic acid found in plants closely related to wild ginger, leading to some recommendations to avoid eating it. However, this is a conflict that exists for most plants with health benefits, since any chemical that provides desirable results in one dosage can be dangerous when concentrated. Low-level use of wild ginger as a spice or therapeutic herb are considered safe by many experts. Drinking it as a tea is particularly advisable, since Aristolochic acid is not soluble in water.
Dandelion
Dandelions are probably the best known of our unconventional perennial food plants. While there may have been native North American varieties, Europeans imported the familiar lawn-invading perennials for use as medicine and food, which purposes they continued to serve until quite recently. They are extremely vitamin rich and have a host of therapeutic uses. Every part of the plant, in fact, can serve a purpose: young leaves as salad greens, petals as garnish, flower heads for dandelion wine and jelly, dried roots for a coffee substitute, and seeds for snacking on or (in quantity) to make dandelion seed milk. During World War II governments were even studying ways to use the latex-rich sap as a substitute for natural rubber. Today researchers are exploring this again, hoping to reduce dependence on tropical rubber trees.
I like having some dandelions in my garden. It isn’t just that I enjoy adding some dandelion leaves to my basket when I’m harvesting a salad blend. These plants are also excellent nutrient accumulators, sending their taproots much deeper than any of my annuals’ roots will venture and gathering minerals from down below. Each time the dandelion threatens to go to seed, I chop off the leaves and stems and leave them on top of the soil as mulch. They decompose back into the garden, leaving it richer instead of poorer.
Rose of Sharon
The question is not how to grow rose of Sharon, but how to stop growing it. These are tough shrubs about 8–10 feet tall, with a high tolerance for disturbance and even pollution, making them popular in city gardens. The cup-shaped flowers bloom in the late summer and produce viable seeds, which will merrily sprout into new shrubs the next spring if you let them get away with it. I learned to identify the seedlings from gardeners several generations older than me who would regard the tiny leaves sourly and say, “You don’t want that there.” They spoke from many years of experience grubbing out seedlings that had gotten too far along. That being said, I do want at least one of these shrubs around to bring me late-season colour and all-summer food.
Unlike many perennials which are only really palatable in the spring, rose of Sharon leaves can be eaten throughout the growing season. They are mild like lettuce, but are more robust and juicy with a pleasantly mucilaginous texture. Use them in salads, on sandwiches, and as thickening agents in soup. The flowers are also edible raw or deep fried, and I’m told the flower buds make a nice okra substitute. Just be careful that your furry friends don’t try to join you for a snack. What’s healthy for humans is, in this case, unwholesome for dogs and cats.
Prickly Pear Cactus
I confess, this one is a cheat. I have not grown prickly pear myself, but in my last home in Toronto there was a clump growing right across the street in my neighbour’s garden. A cactus in Ontario, stoically enduring every snowfall in its deflated-tire winter state and perking up again every spring. Admittedly, this cactus is limited to Southern Ontario, but a silver lining of climate change is that it’s possible to experiment with growing warm-climate plants in ever-more-northerly ranges.
The eastern prickly pear is endangered in its native habitat, and there has been a push in recent years to encourage gardeners to grow these plants at home. The advice given is to provide extremely well-drained, full-sun conditions, and to clear off any leaves that try to settle permanently on them in the fall. The clump in my neighbour’s garden had spread its pads entirely over a paving stone, obviously preferring the warmth and dryness of that position to contact with the soil. In 2008 when the Ontario Endangered Species Act went into effect, the Toronto Star encouraged residents to grow prickly pears alongside other drought-tolerant plants like sedums, creating a low-moisture section of the garden.
These plants earn a prize for being both a vegetable and a fruit. The pads, de-bristled and sliced for cooking, are the nopales of Mexican cuisine. The short-lived flowers set round fruits. These are seedy, but the seeds can be eaten along with the pulp. Successful plants can spread to form a small colony if conditions are right, so home growers may not need more than one.
Parsley
In truth parsley is a biennial, not a perennial (it lives for two years, going to seed in the second one), but I wanted to have one representative on this list of plants that reseed so prolifically they may as well be perennial. One summer, a single parsley plant in my garden bolted before I noticed. I let it bloom, planning to collect the seeds. Perhaps I missed the window of opportunity; perhaps there were simply more seeds than I expected. They sowed themselves across an entire four-foot-by-four-foot raised bed, and I had parsley forever after.
If you want to have your parsley grow itself year after year, here are a few tips. Sow from seed two years in a row, and don’t pull out or entirely use up your plants. They will bloom and go to seed in their second year, resulting in a lifetime supply of one- and two-year-old plants for you to enjoy. This won’t work if you turn over your garden or smother it with a new layer of soil, so embrace the no-till gardening life and let the plants do your work for you. You’ll also have to embrace less-than-tidy planting since the wind doesn’t think in straight lines, but you can always pull out (and eat!) seedlings that pop up in places you don’t want them. You will be able to tell the difference between your one-year-old and two-year-old plants since the older ones have darker leaves and a stronger flavour. They will also put up flower heads. Make sure to let a few flowers go to seed each year.
What have I missed? What other perennial food crops have you grown in this climate? I’d love to hear from you!