Yes, there really are food beating plants in this pic. Jan Canty/Getty

This article was originally published last November so people would have the winter to think over their garden plans. Since then, inflation has gotten substantially worse than it already was, and the Ukraine invasion has reduced or stripped grain access to millions upon millions of people around the world. This is because such a massive percentage of grain is grown in Russia and Ukraine that it’s called the global bread basket. But it also means that grain prices are likely to be outrageously high for the foreseeable future.

Victory Gardens are starting to crop up again to help offset some of the ever-rising food costs, and I personally have received a lot of texts, emails, and social media messages asking how to get the garden going in the last couple of weeks. I really hadn’t thought I would republish this so soon, but too many people are saying they need a primer for me not to do so. I think it’s better to republish this article during the time you need to really get moving along with your garden preps than to assume anyone other than me knows I published this to begin with. This isn’t comprehensive, though it is long, and this article is designed to help you focus your research efforts in a fashion that properly applies to your personal, family, and/or community needs. It’s not meant to teach you how to garden or even to tell you what to grow. My focus here also was on making this work for people living in the most restrictive circumstances (apartments, condos, and homes living under extreme HOA restrictions), because if you can grow without getting in trouble in those situations, you can grow anywhere. And with that, let’s get to it:

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about how to grow one’s own food. Most people are not looking for 100% self-sufficiency, but rather to offset the amount of food they buy at the store in order to have extra food security. I’m not writing this as a complete guide to never needing a grocer, but rather as a sort of tutorial on how to grow some of the food you need so you don’t have to shop for it. Growing all of your food simply isn’t feasible for most people, and is a different skill set than we’re really talking about here.

Many of the plants I like to recommend will not be foods you see in the grocery store. That’s an important note because those of you who are not super into foods that are new to you may not be comfortable with trying out some of these. That’s okay if you aren’t: you just grow the usual stuff and don’t worry about the rest!

To make this simpler, and because I don’t want this to become a two-part deal (let’s see how well I do!), I’m going to break this up into beds, container gardening, and invisible foods. Sometimes, these categories will be intertwined instead of distinct, so just try to roll with that. This should get us pretty close to a broad overview all the categories of types of gardening people need to know about!

Because the internet is full of information on how to garden, and how to garden in a way that fits with your specific situation, I’m not going to go super in depth about any of this stuff. Think of this as a primer that allows you to more easily tailor your research to what you really need to know when you’re seeking more advanced info or info on specific crops.

Beds

Raised beds come in three main types. You have your standard raised bed, where you form a larger mound, generally about 8” high, of extra soil. You may or may not build a support structure here, but generally this category of bed says no to that. The main benefit to this style of bed is that you don’t have to build anything, so all you really need is a space you’ve picked out and a bunch more soil.

Some people (me!) like lasagna gardening as well, because it’s easier on the back and there’s no weeding involved. If you like books, this one is an excellent primer on this style of making beds. It assumes no prior knowledge and offers a lot of good insight and tips! Author, Pat Lanza, is friendly, too. I wrote to her once when I had a question in like, 2004, I think? Either way, super nice lady, exceptional book.

Next are containerized raised beds. These are basically really large and tall (at least 10”) structures filled up with a lot of dirt. A lot. There’s functionally very little difference between this type of bed and container gardening, and in fact many people do build these giant containers up off the ground with legs and such. These are the ideal option if you have accessibility issues.

Last are the supported raised beds. This is exactly what it sounds like, where you put some walls on your standard raised bed to keep the soil where it belongs. These also look nicer than mounded dirt like in unbordered raised beds, which is important if you’re a renter or have a restrictive HOA. If you are a renter, make sure you are verifying with your landlord that it’s okay to build beds or plant in ground at all. Many landlords are not thrilled to see permanent or even semi-permanent additions to their property, so do not modify the property with plants that aren’t in pots without permission. Without permission, this has the potential to be seen as damage to the property that affects your deposit and possibly can incur other fines, so get permission. Ideally, get it in writing.

Keep in mind that no matter the type of bed we’re talking about, it’s still just a space with a lot of extra dirt in it that needs some plants to go along with it all. I think in the vast majority of situations that involve raised beds, a combo approach can be most attractive and usually will utilize the space better than a one-size-fits-all approach.

Containers

Literally what it sounds like. You can use pots, or you can use other containers. Some people love old toilet tanks (these really can look cool if you do it right; trashy if you don’t), some people use tin cans leftover from the kitchen, others purchased pots. Most container gardeners I know have a hybrid approach here, where some stuff was obviously meant for gardening and some stuff is upcycled or whatever that’s called now.

For container gardening, you just need the container and the soil. So not hugely dissimilar from raised beds, except that your containers invariably will be smaller than a bed will. The other difference here is that you have to water more often. That is something I consider a downside, but typically a manageable one.

What should I grow?

I’m often asked this question, and I have a hard time answering it. My default answer is that you should grow what you like to eat, but that’s neither a complete nor reasonable answer. Why isn’t it reasonable or complete, you ask? Because most people forget about their caloric needs and only want to grow stuff that will ensure you reach your weight loss goals with a quickness. Or they only want to grow the super fun stuff that doesn’t offer much nutrition and/or calories.

You should put the majority of your efforts into high calorie foods if you’re growing for subsistence to any real degree. Because you need those to live and stuff. In general, this is going to include a lot of root vegetables, and also grains/seeds. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t grow the more common tomatoes and peppers, because growing those is also good! But if we are saying “sustenance,” we are talking about higher caloric growing goals.

Oh wait, actually? Hang on and let’s talk about one of my favorite food plants, that no one likes, really fast:

That’s right: one of my favorite food plants is crabgrass!

People who really love eating should consider revisiting their views on crabgrass. Y’all might not know this, but crabgrass is still grown as a grain crop in some nations, and used to be widely grown in the States! Maize is what happened to crabgrass’ popularity in this nation, but it really did used to be a grain Americans ate lots and lots of, in addition to having some lovely forage for their livestock. Crabgrass for all!

Crabgrass is a pretty amazing little grass (there are other finger-grasses of equal merit, and, frankly, a crazy number of grasses you can choose solely based on your desire to harvest their grain instead of how soft it is on your feet), requiring no good soil of any kind to thrive and producing incredible quantities of gluten-free grain. If you have a full acre you wanted to devote to grain, this is what I’d be most inclined toward. Crabgrass can produce about 7-8 times as much grain in the same space as wheat yields, which makes it a highly efficient use of your garden space! It also, depending on the climate you’re in, can continuously produce grain for most of the year.

What is particularly lovely about crabgrass, other than the above and also making beer or ale with it, is that you don’t need the plant to die in order to harvest its grain. The seed stalks can slide whole from the plant during harvest, allowing the plant itself to remain alive to make more seed! Woo hoo crabgrass! But for real, you will slide the seed stalk out of the grass to harvest, because it’s the easiest way to do it. It’s not the least time consumptive activity, and especially if you’re trying to gather a lot, but it is a lot of food for the low low cost of gathering some weed seeds!

Back to the Ranch (Invisible Foods)

You really do want to start by considering your annual caloric needs. If we estimate based on the standard 2000 calories/person/day, you are looking at around 730,500 calories/person/year that you need to acquire in some fashion. You get to decide how much of that comes from the garden and how much comes from the store! It’s a lot more calories than you thought you needed each year, huh? Remember: if you’re trying to grow all of your food, this is not the post for you. That requires a different style of land management than the average person wants to or can perform. We’re really talking about offsetting high food costs here. Food inflation is no joke and probably isn’t going anywhere for a while, so this is a simple way to get started offsetting some of your food costs.

Roots:

Roots are going to get a lot of that done for you. Beets, turnips, potatoes, sweet potatoes, sunchokes (these are sunflowers selected for root size, by the way), elephant ears (taro), and so forth are all really exceptional, relatively easy to grow foods. Looooooot of calories, and especially if you avoid food waste by properly storing your harvest!

Not all elephant ears are edible. Don’t just willy nilly grab some from Home Depot or wherever you buy your plants and assume you can eat them. Research is key. If you really want taro, I personally recommend that buy taro bulbs from a grocer and plant them. It’s very efficient, cheap, and I am sure I have an edible species without having to bother with research. I personally buy my taro starts from one of my local Asian markets.
Be aware that you don’t eat taro raw, and that’s a safety issue rather than a preference issue. Taro is high in calcium oxalate, and that’s not good news for your body until it’s been processed out.
Anything you’re considering planting should be fully researched by you to ensure both that you know how to grow it and that you know what to do with your raw produce.

Grains:

Grains are next up on the list for me. We already talked about crabgrass, but there are also obvious options like corn/maize and so forth. Sweet corn, so you know, is not an efficient use of your garden space. While it is delicious, and I do think you should grow some if you are into sweet corn, it doesn’t store as well and doesn’t give you the versatility you get from flour corns. The kind of corn you make cornmeal and such from will give you more options in your meals.

In terms of other grains, you really do have some beautiful, HOA-friendly, invisible food options!

Love Lies Bleeding, a popular amaranth among gardeners. Tell me that isn’t gorgeous; I dare you!

Yes. That love lies bleeding plant is food. And I mean all of it is food. Those beautiful seed heads? They look pretty easy to harvest, don’t they? Leaves? Yay veggies! Stems? Yep! Roots? Also yep! There are no parts of amaranth plants that humans can’t eat.

That pigweed some of you complain about popping up in sidewalks, in your garden, etc? Wild amaranth. Also food. If you’re not down with the wilds, any cultivated, purportedly ornamental amaranth is gonna be food, and will also produce a lot more food than the wild plants do. There are a number of popular amaranths grown by a variety of cultures, so I personally would pick either the one you find most attractive (HOA-friendly, y’all), or pick based on highest quantity of seed production. In general, so-called ornamental amaranths produce massive quantities of seed, because the plants are grown for the showy seed heads like in the picture above.

The seeds are a gluten-free grain. Growing glutinous grain without a ton of space is not worth your time or trouble, so when we’re talking about full scale gardening, we’re talking about gluten-free grains. Wheat is for farming, not gardening. Remember, this article is not about eliminating dependency on grocery stores; it’s about reducing it to the scale you’re both willing and capable of.

Goosefoots like quinoa are also part of the same family as amaranth, but produce different types of edible seeds. I have a friend who’s growing quinoa up in Pennsylvania, so I guess you can grow it basically anywhere if you’re managing your planting and harvest times properly. Go nuts on this! Popular options are quinoa, lamb’s quarters, spinach and chard (yes, chard, the beautiful, leafy cousin to beets!) are all great goosefoots/amaranths to grow!

Celosia

I’m dedicating a bit of extra space to this specific class of amaranths: celosias. Why? Because I spent years in gardening groups, and celosia (also called cockscomb) is ridiculously popular as an ornamental plant and evidently is approved of by HOAs. Really, really popular. I bet tons of you already grow it! Some of y’all like the feather types I personally prefer, some the brain-looking types. Grow whichever looks prettiest to you.

Celosia is also food, and it’s yet another invisible food. Invisible foods are important if you’re not meant to be growing food where you live, and there are a lot of plants you can grow that whomever is restricting you probably won’t know are food. We’ll get into more of them in a bit. It’s the leaves and flowers you eat on this plant, though you also can eat all the parts (some people do so, others not so much). Lot of seeds here, which is what matters most in my mind. That said, this is also an exceptional and nutritious vegetable crop!

In West Africa, Celosia argentea is the primary celosia grown for food. It’s also commonly eaten in some parts of Southest Asia. Check this video out! I’ve never had deep fried celosia, but it just made my list!

Roots

There are a number of plants that produce edible roots that also overlap with landscaping plants. Sweet potatoes are big on that list. Although you can eat the tubers of ornamental sweet potatoes, they are more likely to be a bitter and not as well flavored. You can also eat the greens of sweet potatoes, whether ornamental or meant for food. Ornamental sweet potatoes are an extremely popular landscaping plant, and are often called Ipomoea instead of “sweet potato.” Ipomoea is their scientific genus name. There are more than just sweet potatoes in the genus, but these are the ones we care about.

The main visual difference here if you plant food sweet potatoes over ornamental ones is that your HOA won’t think the foliage is as pretty as that of some of your neighbors. You will think your sweet potatoes taste better than the ones they’d eat if they were eating theirs, too, because that’s a fact.

If the Karens in your HOA will ooh and aah over the lime green and purple leafed varieties, they should love this too! Make sure you check out the link for this picture, because it teaches you how to grow these. That’s not what I’m trying to do here. I’m trying to help you figure out what your HOA won’t fine you for growing!

Those elephant ears/taro I was on about above? Y’all know this plant. You probably just didn’t know you could get food from it.

This is taro’s leaves. Y’all know this plant! HOAs love these plants! Here’s also a link for how to process them into food!

As much as it breaks my heart, we’re not talking about potatoes today. I personally think potato plants are stunning, but I find that most known nightshades grown for food are upsetting to the people who care about HOA compliance. Why am I talking so much about HOAs? Well, it’s because those of you living in them will have the largest number of restrictions on what your plants can look like without incurring fines. If you can get a plant by the HOA without fines, you can get it by pretty much anyone else who wants to fuss about what you’re growing. Plus, no one is going to ask for your weird foods. Lastly, because I get more invisible foods gardening questions from those living under draconian HOA rules than any other population.

In general, there are only two populations that care that the food they grow is invisible: hardcore preppers, and those living under the rule of HOAs or other heavily restrictive properties. This article isn’t for the preppers. I’m reminding y’all a lot that this article is about small scale food gardening because that’s really what’s needed, is some version of a scaled down tutorial on the victory gardens people’ve already started planning and implementing during the pandemic. This also happened during the Great Recession with gardening, and nearly every financial catastrophe I’ve been able to find those types of data on.

These are what sunchokes look like above ground.

Sunchokes, as you can see above, are beautiful. They’re sunflowers grown for the roots instead of the flowers! You also can pick the unopened flower buds and steam them like artichokes. They taste pretty much exactly like artichokes. This works on all sunflowers, including wild ones, where you can eat the unopened buds. Usually I wind up snagging some while I’m out foraging, since there are usually sunflowers about during the months I’m in the field the most.

Here’s what you need to know about sunchokes:

Place them carefully. If you’re brave, you can put them around a tree like in this picture. This will require active management, because sunchokes spread like wildfire if you don’t container them. In general, they need a bed that’s no less than 2 feet deep in order to be contained. If you aren’t doing a raised bed specifically for them, majorly active management so they don’t run through your whole space will be needed. Definitely read the link in the caption to the picture if you want to grow these, and maybe read some more besides. Again, these require active management for them to not get out of control.

Really quickly, these plants can get really tall. Like, 12-13 feet tall. If you have some giant windows you’d like to see benefit from passive cooling options for your home, sunchokes are an excellent choice for blocking a lot of summer heat from entering your home. That means you grew food and lowered your power bill all at the same time. Yay for saving money!

Warning: if you are not accustomed to eating these, please go slowly. Sunchokes are rich in a starch called inulin, which will make you uncomfortably gassy and may cause other digestive issues if your body doesn’t get a nice, slow, build up period to get used to eating them.

All y’all probably know this insanely popular landscaping plant. Except, it’s also a food plant. Related to banana (which is not a tree, by the way) and ginger, cannas are not really the lilies we often call them, but do produce edible rhizomes that can be prepared like potatoes. So there you go. Here’s your potato substitute!! You also can eat the young shoots, and some people use the leaves to wrap and cook foods per banana leaves. I promise, your HOA will have no idea you’re growing food, especially since a ton of them encourage putting this plant in for landscaping.

Quick Note for those in USDA Zones 1-6: some or all of you of you are looking at these plants and thinking, “well, that’d be great if I didn’t live in a zone colder than 7.” And you’re right. This would be easier if you didn’t live in a cold space, but you are not being excluded here. You can grow all of this stuff in containers or beds, and most of them can be overwintered in some manner. Cannas can be overwintered, ditto taro, and so on. What you have is a shorter growing season and some extra steps you need to take in order to overwinter yours from year to year. If it helps, you don’t have to deal, generally speaking, with the extraordinary heat and humidity most of us are dealing with in zones 7-11. There’s also stuff y’all can grow that we really wish we could, like… oh, I don’t know… cherries, but can’t. So it evens out I guess?

As a quick aside, y’all can also over-winter things like citrus trees in the house, as well as lots of other invisible food plants!

Turmeric! Tamanna/Rumee/Getty That isn’t a turmeric flower, though. Turmeric flowers are pinker and taller. I’ve only personally seen them in pictures, though, because all I get from my pot of turmeric is showy, beautiful foliage plus turmeric to eat!

Odds and Ends Roots

I want to remind y’all that some things we eat, like certain spices, are root-y type consumables. Ginger, galangal and turmeric are the first to come to mind. They offer beautiful foliage and yums at the same time! This can also include onions if you place them attractively. If you can squeak some celery in, that also has an edible root (or you can even pic celeriac, which is celery selected for large roots). Parsley has edible roots and pretty foliage, and ditto that on carrots and their foliage and parsnips, plus beets. Space those around the garden so they look like accent plants instead of food gardening. Not related to roots, but lemongrass has really pretty foliage, too, and you could stick that in your garden where you’d ordinarily add pampas grass. Pampas grass, if you didn’t know, makes excellent paper.

If you’ve never eaten burdock, it’s delicious. If you’ve never grown burdock, know that you need to actively manage the spread of this plant, as it is an incredibly aggressive spreader. Both the plant and the flowers are gorgeous, but the seed heads are purportedly part of how the idea for making Velcro came about.

Leafy Greens

Now that you’ve gotten a few options for roots, tubers, and rhizomes you can plant, let’s look at some of those HOA-friendly greens! Not tons of calories in this, of course, but definitely rounds out some meal options and tends to be easier with less land management required to grow yourself!

Cabbages:

Yes. Cabbages. You know all that flowering kale you see prominently displayed in front of businesses, some people’s homes, apartment complex garden beds, and elsewhere? Ditto other flowering cabbages yo'u’ve seen? Food. Note that ornamental cabbages are more bitter than cabbages specifically selected for food. Cabbages started out insanely bitter, so for the ornamentals, there was no need to select for reduced bitterness.

Red Orach: it’s red, it’s gorgeous, and it’s food.

Weird stuff:

Yes, weird stuff. Jewel of Opar is an amazing little food plant. The leaves taste like cucumbers but are slightly mucilaginous. I mostly eat this while I’m gardening, where I’ll grab a few leaves here and there and munch on them while I handle the needs of other plants. Opar doesn’t really need anything from you except a place to live. This plant is generally grown for its tiny little pink flowers, but it’s the extremely pretty leaves we want. Be aware that this Texas (and other places) native is an aggressive spreader with shatter type seed distribution, so you want to keep it contained if you’re in a zone where it can survive the winters (me!). Jewel of opar is in the same family as purslane, which is another delicious plant.

Hostas! Yes, those are also food. You can eat the leaves (young raw, large cooked), new shoots (like asparagus!), and flowers! I grow hostas, but it’s really difficult for me to do so because I’m in zone 9b. But they are yummy, and Flopsy, our rabbit, also enjoys some hostas every now and again.

Plantain: for any kind of plantain (the weed, not the cooking banana), you have to space these carefully in various parts of your yard. Many people will recognize them as “weeds,” but if you select a plantain type that has particularly showy foliage or seed heads, you can tuck it into various beds as an accent plant.

Beans. Yes, I said beans. You’re going to have to be very careful in how you do this, using either the side of your house like people do with various ivy plants or using a lattice. A lattice archway set over part of a pathway or whatever in your garden makes an excellent home for beans and cucumbers where the fruits will hang down inside your archway (ideally, out of sight) and the leaves (which are also edible, if you didn’t know, for both beans and cucumbers) produce lovely foliage that adds rather than takes away from the expected aesthetic in your neighborhood. Y’all expected I’d find a way to get beans in here, right?

This plant, called pumpkin-on-a-stick, is actually an eggplant. This is considered an ornamental plant, so enjoy your undercover eggplants!

Herbs! Y’all don’t forget your herbs, either. Grab a book on companion gardening from your library and see what herbs will be happiest in each space in your garden! No one should ever be paying $2 for a tiny clamshell with a quarter ounce of fresh herbs in them. Y’all go on ahead and grow your own! Space these around the garden so you get attractive bursts of foliage and flowers where you otherwise might not expect them! You also can grow stuff like yarrow, which I do sometimes eat and usually brew with, but is mainly a medicinal herb.

Flowers, too, can be grown in an edible way. Your pansies are edible. Ditto your violets (you can eat those greens, too, so go nuts on the violets!), nasturtiums, calendula, begonias (you can eat leaves and stems of these, too), the mums you bought at the grocery store for fall, marigolds, roses (also gives you fruit!) and lots of other edible flowers. Geraniums are my favorite of the edible flowers, and it’s incredibly difficult for me to walk by someone’s geraniums without tasting them!

Fruits!

Didn’t think I was gonna say to grow fruit, did you? But yes, grow fruit. Those of you in northern climates are going to need a garage or similar if you’re overwintering fruit trees like papaya or citrus. Don’t even let papaya think it’s going to see frost, or it’ll die. Be aware that some fruit trees will force flower when you bring them inside for the winter. There’s nothing wrong with that, but depending on how much you like the flowers, you may choose to put the trees in the house instead of the garage! If you do live up north, you also have so many options that aren’t hard to maintain, such as cherries, plums, apples, and lots of other yummy fruit trees! In the South, I highly recommend you add loquats to your yard. The tree itself is pretty, but you also get lovely fruits in April. Persimmons are another fantastic option!

Blueberry bushes are extremely attractive (also can live in containers) and offer some yummy fruits. You can also do blackberries and other bramble fruits, though I recommend you opt for thornless varieties for easier harvesting. Strawberries can sit neatly in flower beds or as ground cover for trees.

Don’t forget elderberry shrubs, too. Flower and ripe berries (black and shiny) are edible. I particularly enjoy making elderflower fritters and elderberry tarts and pies.

In the end, I decided y’all needed to see orach. It’s another amaranth, so all parts edible. Tell me your neighbors aren’t going to think this is the prettiest, most interesting plant they’ve seen in ages!

Wrapping Up

I think y’all can tell that I exercised an unusual amount of reserve by not trying to list every single plant I can think of that your landlord or HOA won’t notice is food. It was hard, y’all. Really hard. Difficulties in containing myself aside, I hope this gives y’all a good starting place for figuring out how to grow food in spaces where you aren’t allowed to. My last tip is to look up “invisible food plants in zone [whatever your zone is]” and see what kinds of interesting plants you like that you didn’t know were food before planning your undercover gardening efforts! Happy gardening, y’all, and happy eating!

Backyard Gardening for Sustenance