Pre-order Plants for Spring 2024 Shipping
Welcome to the Food Forest Farm plant shop! Here you’ll find many of the plants we’ve been growing in the nursery since 2010. These plants will come to you healthy and ready for their new home.
All of our plants are multi-functional, that is, some perennial vegetables can be eaten by a human, or livestock (leaf hay), or be grown as mulch for biomass, and more! You can look at “All” of the plants, or filter with the navigation bar.
Perennial Vegetables: edible roots, leaves, shoots, buds, seeds that come from perennial herbs, shrubs, and trees
Fruit: edible sweet goodness
Leaf Hay: plants to grow and feed to livestock like cattle, sheep, goats and rabbits
Biomass: herbs, grasses, shrubs and trees that grow fast and can be cut and used as mulch, grow soil, fuel stoves and compost piles
Sochan Cut-Leaf Coneflower
Sochan Cut-Leaf Coneflower
Rudbeckia laciniata
Well documented to be one of the hallmarks of wild plants the Cherokee use as food, Sochan is a delicious cooked spring vegetable, with parsley and aster overtones. Cook the first, young shoots of Spring. At this point in the plants life cycle, the entire thing can be thrown in the pan and cooked quickly like a small leafy green. Later in the year it grows very tall, more like a sunflower then a coneflower, with bright yellow flowers enjoyed by bees and flies. The plant prefers rich soil, on the moist end, but it can grow in well mulched home gardens too. Herbivores of all stripes love to eat this plant, including rodents, deer and snails so protect it in the early stages until it establishes.
According to the paper, “Testing the Nutrient Composition of Perennial Vegetables in Denmark, Sweden, and the United States” by Eric Toensmeier, this plant is high in the vitamins Iron and Zinc.
States https://perennialagricultureinstitute.files.wordpress.com/2022/09/nutrient-composition-of-perennial-vegetables.pdf