Tropical Perennials Video with Eric Toensmeier

 
Want an education on growing a plethora of ever producing perennial crops?  Then set aside time and get ready to add some new varieties to your survival garden. Eric Toensmeier conducted this workshop on perennial vegetables @ ECHO-Florida highlighting some of the 4000+ plants grown on the ECHO Global Farm in North Fort Myers, FL. 

Why perennial vegetables?

Imagine growing vegetables that require just about the same amount of care as the flowers in your perennial beds and borders―no annual tilling and potting and planting.  They thrive and produce abundant and nutritious crops throughout the season and continue year after year.  It sounds too good to be true, but in this video, Eric Toensmeier, author of Perennial Vegetables and Edible Forest Gardens introduces gardeners to this world of little-known and wholly underappreciated plants.

We’ve grown most of the plants featured in this video here in Guanacaste, Costa Rica and had and abundance of repeat harvests.  It’s worth your time to grab a notebook, a cup of coffee, watch the video and plan your perennial garden.

Below are the time stamps in the video if you’d like to skip to perennial crops of interest. 

1:00 Aibika – Edible Leaf Hibiscus – related to okra

3:12 Cranberry Leaf Hibiscus

5:19 Sweet Potatoes

8:46 Nopales – Cactus

12:25 Bamboo

15:44 Taro

20:18 Chaya – Mayan Spinach

22:15 Perrenial Lima Beans

23:40 Haitian Basket Vine

25:55 Moringa

29:55 using Moringa seeds to purify water

30:52 Malabar Spinach

32:30 Pigeon Peas

33:30 Bananas/Plaintains

34:50 Lablab Beans

36:39 Greater Yam/Dioscorea Alata

39:10 Katuk

40:13 Winged Bean (as polyculture w/sweet potatoes)

41:51 Garlic Chives

43:45 Welsh Onion

45:15 Elephant Garlic

45:49 Papaya