Welcome to my Blog about Perennial Vegetables


This was going to be the recipe page for my perennial vegetable website The Backyard Larder. Whilst some of the vegetables like perennial kale and perennial sea beet can simply be used as substitutes for their annual relatives, others such as skirret and chinese artichokes are less familiar and I thought people would be keen to find recipes for them.

But some of the vegetables take a few years to get to the stage where you can harvest them in quantity and, although I'd like them to become a large part of our diet, I've only cooked a few of them myself to date. I decided I didn't want to just link to recipes I haven't tried myself.

So here, as the various perennials come into season, you are going to get tales of my cooking attempts - both successes and failures, of course! And I also plan to give you photos of different stages of plant growth, and accounts of whatever I'm learning about growing these plants along the way - such as good combinations of plants to grow together and from which pests a plant might need special protection.

So to start off here is the green shoot of my Bath Asparagus (Ornithogalum pyrenacium) plant. It is a wildflower quite common in the some parts of S.W. England and Wales but much rarer elsewhere and was once sold in bunches in Bath markets for cooking just like asparagus. I bought the bulb last spring. Like my newly launched website it has been a long time in the growing. I hope to see it flower this year.



N.B. I sell a range of perennial vegetable plants on my website.