10 Perennial Edible CLIMBING VINES for productive vertical gardens 🌿

By maximising our gardening space and growing vertically, we can almost double the amount of food we can grow in a single garden bed or container. Plus create shade, protection. On top of that, these edible climbers are also perennials, so they're going to produce more and more food each year without you having to replant them or do anything. Not only to be maximising space, but also to increase airflow, to prevent disease, to prevent rotting on the plant, and also to get them off the ground so they're not getting eaten by as many critters. Or like me, you want to hide ugly fences. That also helps cool down the property, it helps cool down your garden. If you have a lot of metals like fences, covering them with plants is going to help reduce some of that heat in your garden during summer. So there are a few different types of edible climbers and the main ones are annuals and perennials. So annuals are things you're going to plant each season, you're going to harvest, and then you're going to remove and you're going to replant that space. But perennials are things that are longer living and they're going to grow for multiple years and produce more and more food each year and you don't have to replant them. Alright, so first up we have passion fruit. Now this is one of my favourites at the moment. I love eating passion fruit, so of course it is something that I want to grow in my garden. I think it's really important that you make sure you're growing things you actually like to eat, otherwise it's not going to be as useful. So I love passion fruit, I'm growing two different varieties and I've also planted some from seeds from store-bought passion fruit. So that is something you can do as well, it's super easy to do. All you do is grab a passion fruit from the store, this one is left to go over ripe and I'm probably not going to eat this now, but I can probably turn this into hundreds of passion fruit plants and grow my own. So all you have to do is cut this open, get out the seeds, wash them through with a sieve so you can get off some of that extra flesh from the seeds and then plant them in some good quality compost and potting mix and keep them nice and moist so that they can sprout. Keep them somewhere warm, it's summer here at the moment so it is already nice and warm, but if you are not in a warm climate or in a warm season then you'd want to put them maybe on a windowsill or somewhere nice warm to sprout and then you can grow your own passion fruit from a store-bought passion fruit. Just make sure it is nice, these were the most delicious ones I've tasted so I'm happy to be regrowing these and passion fruit are one of those things that do grow really well from a seed. So lots of fruit trees don't grow very well from seed and they need to be grafted but passion fruit are one of those things that do grow really easily from seed and just another note on that, if you are purchasing a passion fruit plant to grow in your garden, to grow vertically, they can grow along fences, up trellises, over archways and they are evergreen but it is important to note if you are going to be purchasing passion fruit, try to purchase one that is not grafted which goes against lots of other tips for purchasing fruit trees. So the rootstock that they use for grafting passion fruit is really invasive and if it overtakes your passion fruit vine, it's going to be so hard to get out of your garden, it's not going to produce fruit and it is going to be more of a pest than anything. So if you are purchasing a passion fruit, choose one that is not grafted. Next up we have choco or I think it's also called chayote, correct me if I'm wrong, I call them chocos and they are a climbing plant that grows vigorously and they produce these green fruits that can be used as a substitute for potatoes, they're sort of like a broccoli stem, that's kind of how I would describe them and you can make jams and chutneys and relishes and also just use them to bulk up your soups and stews. So they can be a really good one to help get you more bulk food in the garden. They will die back but they are, unless you get really harsh winters, they will regrow each year so they are one of those perennials that do die back but pop back up again and regrow. Then we have a sweet potato and you guys know that I love my sweet potato, it's made pretty much all of the lists that I have here on my edible grow lists and you can grow passion fruit vertically. So I'll show you some in my garden I've got growing, it is an edible ground cover and it's really lush and thick, it is an incredible edible ground cover, you can also eat the leaves just like you would spinach but it also grows up and of course it's got an abundance of root crops that are an amazing staple base crop to have in the garden. They produce a lot of food, you can use them for sweet or savory and you can use them for so many things, making flour, making bread, making muffins, making stews, curries, soups, sweet potato slice, cakes, they have such a diverse range of uses in the kitchen and that is one of the reasons that I love growing sweet potato but let's go take a look at how I'm growing it vertically and how you could grow it in containers or in a small space to maximize the amount of food you can grow in a small area. So you can see it down here, this is it as a ground cover and I have it growing all along here, I've got a few different varieties but then over here you can see I'm not even training that one, it's just growing up by itself. It's found the fence line and it is starting to grow up by itself but over here I have some trellis, so this is one of my passion fruit plants here that I'm training along here to cover this fence line but I'm also growing the sweet potato up here vertically. So this is all the leaves and then down underneath on the ground is where the root crops will be forming but because the sweet potato is such a climbing viner you can grow it vertically and that way you can take up less space in your garden. So you can have all the leaves growing here which are producing fuel to grow the plant, to grow those delicious sweet potato tubers but also you can start harvesting some of the young leaves and stems and use them in your soups, in your cooking, you can make stir-fried sweet potato greens. They're also a really versatile crop so having them vertically gives you an easier access to harvest them and use them throughout the growing period so that way you get a lot more food from each crop. Another perennial green that you can grow vertically and it's one of those ones that you can grow during summer, during really hot weather like we're having at the moment, it absolutely thrives. So it's a, I think, a staple edible climber to have in the garden and that is Malabar spinach. So Malabar spinach has leaves that are a lot more like a succulent, they can withstand hot temperatures and dry weather, so they are really strong drought tolerant and they grow really quickly vertically. So you can grow them in a container as well, I have mine growing in a container and I actually was trying to train it the other day because it was getting a little bit wild and I accidentally snapped one of the branches that were stemming off and so I popped it in a jar of water and now we have a brand new plant here. It's got roots forming, if you can see, so it grows really well from cuttings as well so it's going to form roots from any of the spots where the leaves were, so these nodes along here where the leaves are popping out from, just remove the leaves and then have that sitting in the water and that's where you're going to get roots from and you can easily regrow new plants. So you can use Malabar spinach just like you would any other spinach, you can use it in soups and stir fries, all the things to have those greens available in some areas all year round. So a lot of these perennials are going to be dependent on where you live and how harsh your winters are, so if you get really cold winters, you get snow or really harsh frosts, then some of these perennials like your sweet potato, your Malabar spinach, they're going to die down over winter but most of them will regrow in spring. So some of these perennials will be determined on your area whether they will be able to grow all year round as a perennial or if they are something that needs to be replanted because everything dies over winter because it's snowing or something really harsh like that. But in my climate here in Perth in Australia, we have quite mild winters so most of the things that I can grow all year round and if not they may die down over winter and they'll regrow again come spring when our temperatures start to rise again. And some things are grown annually and so there's a whole lot of annuals that you can grow vertically to utilize all of your space all year round, so make sure you stick around to the end because I'm going to share a few annuals that you can replant each season to grow vertically as well. But the next one we have is grapes. So grapes are another edible climber that produce more and more food each year and the great thing about grapes is that they do lose their leaves in winter. So you can grow grapes in an area where you want to protect from harsh summer sun. So I'm going to be planting grapes in my front yard which is really hot, there's no shade out there and my annual raised garden beds really struggle in summer. They get too much sun, they get too hot and so I'm going to plant grapes as a shade cover that's going to give them a lot more protection from that midday hot sun during summer and then in winter they're going to lose their leaves because they are deciduous and they're going to let all of that winter sun in. So that is a great thing that you can do with grapes and you can use that to your advantage whether you have grapes growing along a fence line or you have them as an archway or you have them covering an undercover area or a pergola to provide shade for your delicate summer annuals and there's heaps, there's so much of the plant that are edible. Obviously you can eat the grapes, you can make wine, you can make jams and chutneys and all the delicious things with grapes or just eat them fresh but the leaves are also edible as well and they have a lot of uses in the kitchen. Another fun one to grow especially if you like colorful things like purple then the butterfly pea is something that's really fun to grow in the garden and it's going to grow up vertically and you can train it to climb along fences or over archways and it produces vibrant purple flowers that can be used as a natural food coloring. So butterfly pea is often used to color drinks and flavored gins. It also has a lot of medicinal qualities as well so in mild climates where we don't, where you don't get harsh winters it will grow all year round but if you do get those really cold cold winters then you may need to grow it as an annual or it could pop up come spring but here in Perth I'm pretty lucky that I can grow that all year round and I have that out the front garden. It is getting quite hot at the moment so I need to give it some extra protection while I'm waiting to get my grapevine set up and another great thing about the butterfly pea is that there is nitrogen fixing so it is great for our soil. It's going to help repair and feed our soil as it grows. Okay so what about kiwifruit? Kiwifruit are another vining plant that you can grow vertically and get delicious fruit from. So if you aren't familiar with kiwifruit, I am a kiwi so they're something that I love and I'm so used to eating. They have sort of like a spiky outer skin and they're delicious sweet tart inside and you can use kiwifruit fresh in a smoothie, so many jams, all the things. Dehydrated kiwifruit are also delicious. Another fun one to grow and has a very similar flavor to the kiwifruit is the kiwi berry. So this one also grows up and you can use that as a screen cover or grow it in a container or a pot and it has little grape-sized fruits on them and they have kiwifruit flavors. All right so another one that we have is nasturtium. Now this is another edible ground cover. It's more commonly known as a ground cover but you can train a lot of nasturtium varieties to grow vertically. So there are some that are really low-lying and they're probably not going to be able to grow vertically, so just check on the varieties that you are growing. But just the common ones will often, you'll see them overhanging fences. They grow wild, they do have a weird like invasiveness to them, so that is something to consider if you are growing in a small space. But if you grow them in a pot you'll be able to contain them and you can grow them up vertically to get this beautiful lush green screen cover that also produces edible flowers and edible seed pods. So you can eat the whole nasturtium plant. They've got a really peppery taste and I've got heaps of recipes for nasturtiums over on my blog. But I love growing nasturtiums. I use them a lot in this food forest style garden and my ones grow over winter and then when it's really hot like now in summer they die back and that allows my sweet potato to just pop up on its own. So my nasturtium and my sweet potato have this relationship in the garden and they just co-inhabit, so I don't have to do anything. I don't ever have to plant anything. The sweet potato pops up by itself every spring and the nasturtium dies back every spring and regrows in autumn when my sweet potato is starting to die down. So that's a really interesting one to keep an eye on your garden if you do see things that sort of work together in harmony like that to take note of them because it just makes such a low maintenance sustainable garden when you don't have to do anything. They just work together and they take up space in different times of the year. So you can grow your nasturtium vertically and get some really beautiful lush screen cover. And there also are a lot of perennial versions of our much-loved annuals and one of those is a scarlet runner bean. So a lot of beans are grown annually but in some climates you can grow at the scarlet runner bean as a perennial and it will regrow each year to produce more and more food. It will often die back in winter if you do get really cold winters it will die back but then it will regrow in spring by itself and you don't have to do anything. So that's one of the amazing things about having these perennials in your garden is that you're going to get to be growing more and more food without inputting more and more effort compared to annuals where you really do have to put in that effort every season, sow the seeds, babysit the seeds, plant the seeds out, make sure the bugs aren't eating the little delicate seedlings, watering them, caring for them and you just have to put a lot more manual labor in to annuals compared to perennials that just pop up like the scarlet runner bean, like the sweet potato, like the nasturtiums and you do nothing. And because they are such vigorous growers they grow on their own and you don't have to babysit them as much. All right so you know how much I love my perennials but annuals do have a place in the garden. Annuals are great for being able to regrow things every season and grow something new and interesting and not have that space taken up by something that is going to need that space. Just like fruit trees they sort of take up that space full time so that is where your annuals come in and if you do have some annual garden beds or space allocated for your annuals you can grow them each season, harvest them, eat them and then grow something else in that space which is really useful if you are in a small space and you don't have a lot of extra garden beds to work with. Having some containers that you can grow annuals in is going to help you be able to grow some interesting things each season. So they both have their places and there are some incredible edible annual climbers and vines that you can grow in containers or in the garden bed and these are things like tomatoes, melons, cucumbers, those are all vining or can be trained upright. Even pumpkins, I've got a pumpkin that is just trying to climb up all by itself and pumpkins will often climb through trees so they will naturally climb and vine their way through anyway. So those can be some really great ones that you can grow vertically and get a whole lot more food in a small space and what I like to do is if I have a confined space and I want to grow annuals and have some climbers is that I'll have the climbers at the back up a trellis and then in the whole front of the garden bed I utilize that to grow my bushier shrubbier things and that way I can also turn my garden beds to utilize that climbing plant to provide shade if I need to. Having these lists of edible climbers or plants that you can grow to maximize the space is a really good idea especially if you're wanting to grow more and more food each year. So make sure you check out my playlist I have on different types of grow lists. So I've got what you can grow in the shade, I've got edible ground covers, I've got some of my top perennials because I love perennials and I've got a few other lists so check that out I'll link that for you so you can maximize the amount of food you can grow in your garden.