Welcome back everyone to the Epic Gardening Podcast, Kevin Espiritu here. Liz Zorob is back on the podcast. She's a homesteader from the UK and she's the author of the book grounded, a gardener's journey to abundance and self-sufficiency.

I've heard a little bit of your story Liz and just sort of how you got to where you are. You're now growing and eating about 85% of the food straight from the homestead, which is fantastic.

And we were talking about just making a little bit of a headway into a particular family of crops, your favorite crops and really mastering that and then moving on.

And so in your world and in your climate, a cool weather perennials is our fantastic options and I'm curious if someone wants to get those started, what should they be thinking about?

So the cool weather crops, the particularly the perennial ones are absolutely marvelous. You know plant once and they're going to feed you for years and years.

And I'm absolutely completely actually approve of anything that allows me to plant it once and then basically just do a bit of chop and drop weeding around it and away it will go.

So we've actually put enough of these perennial vegetables in the garden now that we can even prevent perennial veg almost all year through.

And I don't know if it's been picked up with a microphone or not, we are in the middle of an amazing storm going on outside.

We've got 80 mile an hour winds literally blasting around us. It has been it's quite a rough old day.

And I raced out earlier on and picked some fresh kale and some cabbages and they have all been in the ground for three years.

And they will sit through a really cold, even a rough, windy winter and carry on producing veg.

So we start the year with things like a very early rhubarb, which I realize is not usually eaten as a veg, it's eaten as a fruit, but all the same.

It comes under perennial vegetables and those are followed by asparagus and globata chokes.

And then there are a whole raft of brassicas that can be grown as perennials and a whole load of different roots as well.

So the brassicas we will eat during the summer, as well with the globata chokes and a cardoon, which is also a beautifully snatch-u-esque plant in the garden.

And then various different plants will take us through the year and they really come into their own in late autumn and winter when everything else here is dying down.

And pretty much all the harvesting has been done for the tender vegetables.

And then we get this mass of perennial veg that are just sitting there waiting for us and will sit all winter.

And it's so nice to be able to go out into the garden and have something that you can harvest in the coldest point of the year.

We don't get three feet to snow, we don't get very, very cold frosts that freezes that last for any length of time.

We've got quite a temperate climate here and because we are so close to a river, a tidal river, we've actually almost got a coastal temperate climate.

So it's mild enough that we can still get food out of the ground all year.

...