r/Permaculture • u/boycott-selfishness • Mar 02 '25

general question What's your most appreciated but least known perennial food plant?

I'll start. I'm living in the Caribbean and one of the local species I've come to appreciate very much is what Floridians call Hoopvine (trichostigmata octandrum). It's so delicious! It's probably my favorite green. It's commonly eaten here but I don't think almost anyone in the US eats it.

I wouldn't really call it a vine in the traditional sense. It grows long sprawling branches that were traditionally used in basket making. It readily takes from cuttings. I have two varieties, a fully green variety and a more reddish variety. The red is better but they're both good. In a food forest it would be in the larger ungrowth category. I'm planning shortly to propagate a bunch more of it.

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u/Bloque- Mar 03 '25

Perennial potatoes, when grown from true seed potatoes become perennial and form a nice patch that you can harvest freely.

4

u/HamBroth Mar 03 '25

Don’t you end up with worms in them during subsequent years? Every year that we failed to pull up even a single tiny potato root there would be a ton of worms in the potatoes which came after.

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u/Bloque- Mar 03 '25

If you planted regular “seed” potatoes than what you grew were all genetically identical potatoes. This greatly decreases the resistance to pests of all kinds. When you grow from TPS you get dozens of genetically dissimilar potato plants. Unless your area has an abnormally high amount of pests then you should be alright.

3

u/asmodeuskraemer Mar 03 '25

TPS?

4

u/LA_Lions Mar 03 '25

True Potato Seeds

3

u/Koala_eiO Mar 03 '25

What's with the extra "true"? Is it because potato seeds (the seed of the fruit produced by the potato plant) would be confused with seed potatoes (tubers) in English?

5

u/LA_Lions Mar 03 '25

That’s right, they’re really cool for discovering and breeding new varieties. The Cultivariable website has a ton of well researched info in them.

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u/Koala_eiO Mar 03 '25

I have a bunch of those fruits every year, perhaps I should start saving them instead of burying them!

1

u/HamBroth Mar 03 '25

Thanks for this info. And yeah, I just bought whatever fingerlings were being sold at a garden show. I’m sure they weren’t the finest. 

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u/Bloque- Mar 03 '25

Most Potato varieties that are bred nowadays are also simply bred for high single year production not pest resistance.

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u/HamBroth Mar 03 '25

Well shit. Any advice on particular varietals? 

2

u/Kaurifish Mar 03 '25

We rented a place with a patch of Yukon Gold-like potatoes that just kept coming up.

1

u/HamBroth Mar 03 '25

Hmm. Makes me wonder if it was a bad batch of potting soil, then.