[Hawthorne]

So, I've been trying to work out what permanent (and therefore low(ish) maintenance) plants I can put into my plot.

Pretty much all fruit plants / bushes / trees are perennial, but what about the veg?

Afer having a good think, this is all that I've come up with - can anybody add more?

sea kale
artichokes
cardoons
perennial broccoli
asparagus
many (most) herbs
wild garlic
walking onions
horseradish

[gobs]

Welsh onions, jerusalem artichokes, horse radish, rhubarb spring to mind.

[mashauk]

What about perpetual spinach?  I've moved my plants a couple of times and still they keep growing, they're finally going to seed now but have been in 2 years!

[amberleaf]

This was a quiz question and the answer (it surprised me too)
There were only two true perennials vegetables.
Rhubarb
Asparagus.

It seems that they do not consider fruit which strictly speaking beans and artichokes probably are. Nor things that divide at the root like garlic or chives. Or grow from last years growth, potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes for example. Perennial vegetables.

Quite a lot of what we call vegetables and herbs will keep on growing (frost permitting) but the first year of growth from seeds are the tenderest and best for eating.

Fruit can be expensive in the supermarket and is probably the best for  long term growing but everything needs maintaining in some way, pruning cutting back, netting, weeding.

The things which you can keep cutting or picking and they grow more, like broccoli, and perpetual spinach. Cut and come again type salad  leaves  where you just keep taking the outer leaves, they do not form hearts.

Or things you can plant early but wont produce until the winter like sprouts, kale, leeks, purple sprouting broccoli, spring cabbage and savoy.      Swedes, parsnips, They make the vegetable garden look full for a long time.

[Johnny Norfolk]

Runner beans are actually a perennial. I have never tried to keep them but you can grow them on if you can keep them frost free. How they would crop would be interesting to know.?

[DD.]

I had one reappear a couple of years ago. I used it to fill a gap in that year's beans.

Can't say how it performed, just disappeared in the tangled mess of the rest of the beans.

[zucchiniqueen]

My parents keep their runner beans in for two years, and get as good a crop on the second year as the first. They live in Tasmania, which has similar light levels but doesn't get as cold as England, and they don't do anything special (just normal mulching, for example).