Hello, I'm Liz Zorab and this is Byther Farm and today I'm looking again at some perennial veg.
So I want to start off with this little plant here, which hopefully, over
time, will get much bigger. This is a Taunton Deane kale. I know it's really
popular and lots of people have got it. If you don't have it yet, it's certainly
one worth investigating. It's got a really nice taste to it,
it's cabbagey without being overly strong and there's a slight sweetness to it.
It's a really good one. So this can be grown really easily from
cuttings. The cuttings root super easily, so if you know anybody who's got any,
I've just asked them for a cutting. You can use rotting powder, but you don't
really need it. I'm getting tickled by the asparagus! But yeah, it's a really
good one to have. And it's in this bed with some asparagus and also
some Egyptian walking onions.
These are funny little fellas! So you use the leaves.
Again it's taste-wise they remind me of chives but it's got a bit more
heat behind it. It's a bit stronger like an onion is and they're called walking
onions because they produce bulbils on the top of them and they send up a
shoot, which will then bend over and lie down onto the ground and you'll get new
onions there. So they spread really easily.
Oh I'm being joined by Monty!
Hello boy, what do you think of these onions? Are they splendid? You've got bits of
fluff on you. Do you like them? Poo, it's to oniony for a cat, isn't it? Yes.
Now I'm super excited because I've just taken delivery of some more perennial
veg, some of which I haven't heard of before. But let's start with this one.
This little fella is a perennial broccoli, so it's a
another short-lived perennial, but perennial all the same and it will send
out a broccoli floret and you take that out and then it will send more around the side.
Very much like purple sprouting broccoli, but you just need to keep on,
keep on harvesting it and it will keep going. So we'll follow that as the year
goes on and see how that gets on.
And this one is a walking stick cabbage,
cow cabbage, it's got lots of different names. This grows at an incredible rate
of 10 feet or more a year, produces just a few leaves on the top
and you can harvest the leaves as they go.
It originates from the Channel Islands here in the UK and I'm really excited to grow this.
They look great, let's see what that tastes like.
Mind you, after eating that Egyptian walking onion I can't taste very much.
It's got a really, really strong cabbagey taste, so this would be really nice and
chopped into something like mashed potato or mashed swede, yeah that's nice.
And then here, this little clump is wild garlic and I can't wait to grow some of this.
I am also growing some from seed but I'm
going to plant this in the duck enclosure, underneath the fruit trees, I'm
just let it romp away there. How lovely, it smells great and the leaves
of wild garlic I'm really good to make a pesto from. So there we go,
there's another one, wild garlic.
And the last one I'm going to tell you about
today is skirret. It's got really pretty leaves. I'm really pleased with this,
I've wanted skirret for a couple of years now and haven't been able to get hold of any,
so here we go! This came to me as one block, I've divided it because there are
in fact two plants here. And skirret forms white roots, creamy-white roots and it's
the root that you eat. I'm really looking forward to trying this. Now I'm
probably not going to be harvesting this year, I think it's going to be two or
three years before I start harvesting the skirret, but sooner I get it into the
ground and sooner I could start trying it!
I'm out here in the annual vegetable garden and I'm hoping over time that
there will be fewer and fewer annual vegetables in here and more and more
perennials. So to that end I've been looking and learning and doing some research.
Because there just is no point in growing food that we're not
going to like the flavor of, so I've been sourcing a small number of perennial
plants to give them a try to see what we think of them and then we'll know which
ones we want to grow in here on a permanent basis.
If you'd like to see
some of the other perennial vegetables that we're trying, check out this video here
and if you haven't done so already, don't forget to subscribe to the channel!