Excellent Perennial Vegetables You Can’t Buy in Stores

I’ve written before about my project to look to sourcing my food directly from my homestead first. Today I thought I’d share just a bit of what that practically means with a bit about two fantastic perennial vegetables that tend to get ignored by most despite how awesome they are. They both provide an abundant supply of highly edible produce over a wide range of the growing season. As perennials once established you don’t need to do much of anything to maintain them. I don’t even weed around them. They seem to grow in natural polycultures just fine, thus they promote the building of topsoil instead of its depletion. Pollinators love them so in growing these you support the insect populations so critical to our ecosystems. One is extremely beautiful, generally used as an ornamental. The other is super fragrant, in a good way I might add. Oh, and they both taste great too. To the best of my knowledge though, you can’t buy these in stores, or at the farmers market. There’s a decent chance however, that they are growing near you, if not in your own yard.

(Please note some of the links in this blog post are affiliate links. What this means is that should you click through them and make a qualifying purchase I will receive a commission which I’d certainly appreciate since it helps support this blog project. However, this shouldn’t increase your cost any, and certainly don’t ever feel like I’m pressuring you to buy things through the links I offer or anywhere else. I’m all about being frugal first!)

So what plants am I talking about? I’m speaking of daylilies and common milkweed. I’ve really been getting into both of them the past couple years, discovering what fabulous vegetable plants they are!

Let me start with daylilies. There are thousands of varieties. I read that not all are edible, but I’ve never heard of any specific variety that is poisonous or inedible. My suspicion is that people simply haven’t tested all the varieties for edibility and thus are being cautious with the unknown ones. Mind you these are not the same as the Asian lilies, at least some of which are known to be poisonous. The most common of the day lilies around here are the wild orange ones, Hemerocallis fulva. These definitely are safe to eat. Another common variety, Stella de Oro, is as well.

My relationship with daylilies began a couple years after I moved here. One day I noticed a bright orange “something” under a pine tree. I went to look closer and saw it was a solitary daylily! Where did that plant come from? I didn’t plant it. It had never been there in previous years. “How cool,” I thought. In researching it I learned it was edible, in fact commonly used in authentic Asian cooking. I let mine grow and multiply, while harvesting some from the large wild patches growing in the area.

I had a good patch started when I began to build my earth bermed metals studio many years ago. Unfortunately they were growing where the studio was to be. So I dug them up and moved them off to the side where I thought they’d be safe. However, when the bulldozer came along they ended up being right in the way. Ah well I thought as they got bulldozed over. They are a hearty perennial though, and didn’t want to quit. It took a couple years but then I saw them reemerging from the soil one spring! As a side note let me point out these early shoots are one of the first edibles to arrive in spring, as I noted in a previous post.

These early volunteers have since multiplied and spread, with some encouragement from me to the point I now have a healthy patch to harvest from. I’ve also since planted quite a few more of several other varieties. As an unexpected bonus I’ve found that the various types I planted flower at different times effectively giving me a steady, daily supply of flowers all summer long.

At first I felt bad about picking the flowers. Then I realized the reason they are known as day lilies is because the flowers only last for a day. So I can leave them blooming for the pollinators all day and then go harvest them as evening approaches. They can also be picked as unopened flower buds, or the next day as wilted flowers. Now that I have an abundance of them I need to try harvesting some of the buds sometime to try. I always hated to do it before and thus deny myself the beauty of the opened flowers. With a large colony I could just pick some of the buds, leaving others to bloom. The problem I’ve found with the wilted flowers though is that they tend to harbor various bugs at this stage. The opened flowers can too, but there at least I can look in and see if it’s occupied.

I understand the underground tubers they form are edible as well. At this point I haven’t tried them, again because I was trying to encourage growth and spreading of my colonies. This fall I think I will see about sampling some. How awesome would it be if the plant could provide a hearty crop of delicious tubers as well! One word of caution. I’ve read that if you eat large quantities of daylilies they can have a laxative effect.

How about common milkweed, Asclepius syriaca? This wonderful plant seems to be relatively unknown as an edible, and a perennial one at that! Like the daylily it provides a steady, abundant supply of vegetables over a long range of the growing season. In the spring you can harvest the early shoots. Then around now as I’m posting this there is a huge supply of flower buds and flowers. Later on in the season will be the immature pods while they are still actively growing, before they turn tough.

I suspect one reason milkweed isn’t more commonly eaten is because most of the early foraging/wild edible books kept copying and repeating an error that the plant is bitter, requiring a very complex sort of boiling technique with multiple changes of water to remove this bitterness. It is the stellar Samuel Thayer, who I’ve mentioned before, that finally dispelled this myth and explained its likely origin in his book “The Forager’s Harvest”. I know I never really considered trying it until after I’d read his book. Now that I’ve eaten it I encourage the plant to grow all over my property, even letting it have free reign in some of the garden beds. It’s way more productive than anything else I’ve grown there after all!

With the milkweed you do need to cook it though. This is one you don’t really want to eat raw due to the sticky, milky sap. My preference with this plant has been to harvest the flower buds just prior to them opening. At this stage I get the most food. If I wait until the flowers are open, and super fragrant I might add, I find they are attracting tons of insects of all sorts. I can still harvest them, and do, but I just find I’m working harder to avoid collecting a bunch of insects as well. While insects might be a good source of protein I’ll pass on that for now, thank you very much.

Knowing that plants are edible is one thing, actually knowing what to cook with them is another. This is the problem I’ve come up against with all my years of research into wild edibles. I’m not a chef by any means so I’m often at a loss as to just what to do with the bounty I see growing around me because the modern western food culture I grew up with doesn’t use or acknowledge these plants as food. I’m further hampered by the fact that I want to shift my diet to a whole foods plant based one, so slathering these vegetables in butter, salt, and wrapping them in bacon isn’t an option I want to take, though I admit it sounds good. I suspect these are similar reasons why any of you reading this might not run out and go looking for daylilies or milkweed.

So with this in mind I’m going to share some of the things I’ve been trying with these vegetables. These aren’t going to be fancy recipes with perfect images to make your mouth water, and precise measurements of ingredients and cooking times. I don’t really work that way. Rather here are some ideas and thoughts to help you fly by the seat of your pants in the kitchen like I do.

The first question you might ask is what do they taste like? It’s a great question. I’m sorry to say I really don’t know how to go about describing tastes. In general I find them both to be fairly neutral in flavor, nothing too strong. As such they seem to work well in many things, and I’ve never had anyone I’ve fed these to object to the flavors. The milkweed is perhaps a bit sweet. If you do find your milkweed bitter as so many foraging books suggest I’d take Samuel Thayer’s suggestion and spit it out. The type of milkweed you want to eat is NOT bitter!

I’ll state the obvious with daylily flowers first. You can eat these raw or cooked. If you are eating them raw then simply added to salads is a great use. They add beauty and a touch of delicacy mixed in among the greens. I often use them this way, going out to the yard and picking a few to add directly to my lunch time salads.

I find daylilies are easy to add into the mix of many of the glop surprise dishes I make. These dishes don’t really get names so I don’t know what else to call them. Here’s an example. I harvested a bunch of different types of snow peas from the garden, along with some garlic and onion scapes, added in the daylilies, and chopped them all up.

I cooked them up in my cast iron frying pan, adding in a can of beans, some black rice, and an assortment of spices. I wish I could remember what spices I used as it seemed like this turned out quite good. I suspect it was some turmeric, cumin, miso paste, and a bit of soy sauce. If we can ignore the salt content in the dash of soy sauce it was a pretty healthy meal. The soy sauce made it much tastier, for me anyway.

Next let me move to some milkweed. I went out and harvest a big colander full of buds and flowers. At that point it seems I failed to keep taking photos, though I could swear I did. Hmm… They just aren’t around. Sorry.

Anyway, the downside to milkweed is that harvesting it is a sticky job as it’s pretty much impossible to pick without getting the latex like sap all over your fingers. As I mentioned earlier, milkweed is a vegetable you need to cook to eat. The cooking process deals with the sticky sap issue thankfully. Generally it is boiled with the water drained off. This is what I did, yielding me a large pot of vegetables. It doesn’t cook down much like leafy greens will, so you get a large volume of food with milkweed.

I used this pot of milkweed for a couple dishes. The first was a vegan lasagna. Again I’m sorry I don’t have more images of the process. I really meant to take them. I guess I got too caught up in the cooking. Anyway I’m sure you can find many vegan lasagna recipes out there to which milkweed can simply be added in, or substituted for another vegetable. I made mine with whole wheat lasagna noodles, a couple jars of organic vegan pasta sauce, some onion, and a tofu ricotta “cheese” recipe that I found in Lindsay Nixon’s “Happy Herbivore Abroad” cookbook. I topped it with nutritional yeast and some pine nuts. Oh, I seem to recall I used some pokeweed harvested from my homestead too. This does need more careful harvest and preparation. It’s not at all hard to do or learn, but I’m not going to go into that here today. Again the best, most through description of the harvest and preparation process for pokeweed I know of is by Samuel Thayer. This one is in his “Incredible Wild Edibles” book.

I cooked all the vegetables and noodles up ahead of time, then layered them together with the pasta sauce, topped with the nutritional yeast and pine nuts and baked the whole thing in the oven for a bit too long. I ended up blackening the top layer a wee bit. I ate it anyway and still found it to be many a healthy and delicious meal!

Next up we have vegan potstickers. For this I begin with what I think of as my “meat” base, consisting of an 8 ounce package of fresh mushroom chopped up rather fine along with one large onion chopped fine as well. Then I add in some flax seed meal to help bind it together, while adding a ton of nutrition. To me it’s not potstickers without a healthy dose of fresh ginger, generally about 2 inches or so pealed and minced. From here I tend to vary the mix each time with regards to the remaining vegetables. This time I wanted to use the remainder of that pot of boiled milkweed buds, a colander full of daylilies, some arugula (so I can get a cruciferous vegetable in there), and a bunch of garlic scapes. All of this got chopped up in to smaller bits.

I cook up the filling ahead of time in my cast iron pan, generally adding in some rice vinegar and miso paste. This mix I transfer to another bowl so I can use the cast iron pan for the actual potstickers. It would probably be a good idea to let the filling mix cool a bit before trying to fill the wrappers, but I don’t always do that. The unhealthy portion of this meal is the wrappers, a refined grain product, along with the oil I use for the final cooking.

When I first started making these I had a hard time getting them to not end up in a stuck, torn, ugly mess by the time I was done. There may be a better way, or even the “proper” way, but this is how I’ve found it works well in my kitchen. After the wrappers are filled I’ll add a bit of oil, say a tablespoon or two, to my cast iron skillet, and spread it all around. Then over medium heat I’ll place the potstickers, trying to keep them separate from each other. As they cook I’ll start turning them gently with a fork, since they shouldn’t be sticking to the pan, until I can brown all sides.

Once that is done there are still parts of the wrapper that haven’t cooked which I want to steam. Whenever I try to steam them first I end up with a mess of torn wrappers sticking together where I don’t want them too. So I do the steaming afterward. However, it seems that if I use too much water in the pan steaming/boiling everything again sticks to the pan ending up torn as I try to remove it. When I just use a little water, like what you see in the measuring cup, it all works out fine… most of the time.

When I add the water in to the hot pan there is lots of splatter and steam right away. I will put a lid on it to better contain this and steam the whole pan. This stage usually only takes a couple minutes.

Then using my stainless steel spatula I will lift the potstickers out of the pan ready to eat with whatever dipping sauce you might like, or no sauce at all if you prefer.

What if you are gluten free, or want a healthier substitute for the wrappers and cooking oil? Well, I have an option there too. Sometimes I’ll use the same potsticker filling, or what is left over after I’ve used all the wrappers, and make spring rolls, also sometimes called fresh rolls.

For this I use the spring roll skins, a type of rice paper I believe. It’s kinda weird stuff. When dry it’s thin and brittle. I get a plate of water I can dip this into briefly, getting it wet all over. Then before the skin has fully absorbed the water I lay it out on another plate. For these I will usually add in some fresh greens. In this case some lettuces and arugula from the garden. I usually place some of the potsticker filling in one of the large lettuce leaves, wrapping it a bit, adding more leaves. Then wrap the whole thing in the now pliable spring roll skin. The skin will easily stick to itself so you need to take some care when doing this. Once rolled I’ll place it on a third plate and repeat the process until I have a plate of delicious spring rolls ready to eat, again with your favorite dipping sauce or by themselves.

So those are a few ideas of how I’ve been using both milkweed and daylilies. There are tons more ways you could use these abundant and wonderful perennial vegetables. If we want to fix our food system, our soils, and our health then I think we need to be shifting our food cultures back to meals prepared at home using plants grown locally, if not right in our yards, by methods that build topsoil rather than deplete it. I think these two plants could play major roles in this approach. I recommend you give them a try sometime!

Studio Snippet

So the studio is in a mess right now as I’m preparing to head off and teach a workshop. I’ve got to try and mentally run through everything I’m going to do in class and think what tools I’ll need. I’ve got a lot of it gathered together now which will need to be packed up into as small a bag as possible. Hopefully it doesn’t exceed the weight limit for airline baggage! I should be ok, I shipped a lot of materials out last week for the class already.

I wish I could share nice studio photo of the finished piece I’ve shared bits of making here on the blog, but instead of taking time to do that today, I wrote this entry. So here’s a crappy snapshot instead. If it returns from the workshop I’ll take good photos of it to share.

I’m happy to have a site where I can again allow comments. (I had to shut them off on my main website because the spam was simply uncontrollable!) So please I encourage you to share thoughts of your own. My general rule about comments though is just to play nice. Differing views are fine, but I’m not interested in engaging in or moderating verbal fights. If I feel things get out of hand, by whatever criteria I decide, I’ll just start blocking or deleting things.