Food Security with Easily Self-seeding and Perennial Plants

Not everything grows well in our coastal soils and climate, but many delicious and nutritious plants do. Try growing these easy-care, easy to propagate vegetables, herbs and fruits that come year after year without much fuss in your garden or in pots. No annual sowing or buying of seedlings needed!

Perennial Brassica

Perenial Brassica is a hardy plant in the cabbage family. It is easy to propagate from pencil thick cuttings. Just stick them in the soil and keep them moist. It tolerates dry and wet spells and lasts for several years before flowering. Once it flowers, it dies back, and new plants can be enjoyed elsewhere. A great plant in the background of a border, on the edge of a bed or food forest. The young leaves (especially after frosts) and shoots are tasty. With it, one is never without nutritious greens for stir fries, curries, soups or salads.

Cape Gooseberry

The Cape gooseberry is a South American plant native to Peru and Colombia, in the night shade family. It is easy to grow from seed, like a tomato plant. Ripe berries are sweet and rich in Vitamin C. Unripe berries, leaves and flowers are poisonous. Picked in their casings the fruit continues to ripen and can be enjoyed raw in salads, dried or cooked into jams etc. It does not tolerate frosts and is best cut back in autumn but keeps producing through the winter under eaves or in sheltered spots in the garden. It is a very drought tolerant plant, thriving on sunny, dry banks.

This text was written by Sue Novell and was originally published in Dunedin Vegitable Growers Club newsletter.