Goodbye sunshine! I'll garden without you.

One way to tackle growing food in a yard with very little sun is to stop growing food that needs it.  Anybody who knows anything about gardening knows you need full sun, but that is only true if you are limiting yourself to the basics: tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, carrots, squash exc.  If you are willing to get more creative there is a whole world of things you can eat that (apparently) need less sun.  Of course, I've missed the boat on most of these things for this season, but I'm developing an exciting list of things that will make it into the garden next year.

The ultimate in shade gardening is mushrooms.  I have a book on how to grow mushrooms that I inherited for free from the library, but I have yet to read it.  Eventually, though, I think I will have to learn how to grow mushrooms.  They grown in shade and we eat loads of mushrooms.  I've heard they are tricky, though, so I might wait a few years until I am better at the basics.

For now, we'll start off with some simpler stuff.  In spring we can eat lots of rhubarb and fiddleheads, followed shortly after by honey berries (actually these berries are better in full sun, but they apparently tolerate part-sun quite well).  Next will be a compliment of shade tolerant herbs for cooking and teas including stevia, sweet cicely (I'm told you can also eat the roots of this plant like parsnips)  and sweet woodruff (all apparently sugar substitutes).  In fact, the list of herbs that will tolerate part-shade is very long.  I'm already taking advantage of that this year by exploring the world of homegrown teas.  Growing your own teas is great fun because you get to do a lot of experimenting with different combinations.  My favorites are the lemon teas (from lemon grass, lemon balm and lemon verbana).

The front yard continues to progress (slowly).
Notice the lemon grass and lemon verbana  in the center of the garden.

Honey Berries (also known as haskap).  They taste similar to a cross between a blueberry
and a raspberry.  They are also, apparently, hard to kill, frost tolerant, and early producers.
For those of you from Saskatchewan, these plants are from a breeding program at U of S.

I've also managed to get by with a few more traditional veggies in part-sun.  Greens will generally tolerate a little less sun, in fact, it is often good for them.  I've also found peas manage in less sun, but they produce less.  I'm told beets and kohlrabi do all right.  I will try them next year.

But if I need to go with some full sun plants, at the very least I should get lots of bang for my buck.  It turns out there are a couple of plants you can grow that allow you to eat all parts of the plant.  This year I planted fennel, my new obsession.  I recently tried fennel bulb for the first time in a recipe and fell in love.  It tastes like licorice.  So do the seeds and leaves.  I won't be able to harvest the bulbs until the fall, but I've already snacked on a few leaves.  They are like eating candy (ok, the texture is a bit different), but much better for you.  Once the plant produces seeds I will be able to harvest them for licorice tea.

Harvest of spinach and herbs.

Next year I plan to try planting chenopodium (also known as goosefoot).  While it does require full sun, you can apparently eat the early spring shoots like asparagus, the leaves like spinach, the flower spikes like broccoli and the seeds can be ground to make a thin oatmeal.  Now THAT is production :)