10 UNSTOPPABLE Edible Plants That THRIVE in Harsh Conditions!

We've had a harsh summer. The heat, humidity, rain and flooding were relentless. Our normal summer crops like corn, eggplant, capsicum and even chilies found it difficult to survive the weather conditions. Weeds are out of control and we've had this inundation of terrible pests. I mean grasshoppers as thick as my thumb. But despite all of that carnage there were some crops that didn't just survive they thrived. G'day I'm Mark from Self Sufficient Me and in this video I'm going to give you 10 unstoppable edible plants that thrive in harsh conditions. Let's get into it. As you can see we have started weeding the patch and it's still very much a jungle in there but I have got a good excuse. I just didn't want to get into it. Farmers have droughts they have bad seasons so of course sometimes in the backyard you're going to have a bad season and this is one of those times when you've just got to say nature beat me or did it because the opposite is all the things that you can learn from a summer like we've just had. And one of the things I've learned is how resilient banana plants are. Wow look at this bunch. We've got probably about five or six really good sized bunches coming on these dwarf banana plants because despite bananas loving rain and really enjoying lots of water they still don't like wet feet. They will die and they will rot but ironically it's one of the main banana growing rules that I broke that has enabled these bananas to thrive in these really boggy conditions and that rule was growing them in big clumps like this. Banana plants do best and produce better bunches if they're given space. That's why commercial banana growers will usually only grow one banana plant about four feet or so apart that way the banana plant isn't suffering from competition it's not getting root bound and it's getting all the nutrients and water it needs to produce a good bunch of bananas. However this clumping has raised the root balls up out of the wet and you can see we're producing lots of good bananas. These ones here should be ripe in a few weeks and we've had a nice little supply of ripe bananas through this summer but yes my intention is to give these a good thin out and to take some of those suckers and replant them somewhere else give them some more space and grow them more typically how you should. However this does go to show that for a few seasons at least you can grow bananas in big clumps as long as you're giving them enough water which they're getting and also fertilizer and food well they will still produce good bunches for you. In this bed here we've got two crops that I wanted to talk about. First one is turmeric. I know people get into me when I pronounce it turmeric but that's the way I pronounce it. Check it out look at that look at that rhizome what a cluster. I'm sure I don't need to tell you how good turmeric is for you what I want to tell you is how easy it is to grow especially in harsh conditions. Now I know not everyone watching this channel lives in a hot humid climate but some of these plants that I'm showing you including turmeric still can be grown in cooler climates with a little bit of ingenuity maybe hothouse and in a climate like this over such a terrible summer it's really great to know that you can capitalize on the turmeric growing. It will outgrow other plants it will grow in with other plants it will grow in part shade it will grow in the hottest of hot in the most humid of humid producing this wonderful spice or whatever you want to call it some people eat it as a veggie and it's just amazing for you the health benefits you can freeze it you can freeze dry it you can turn it into powder whatever you do grow turmeric in your garden and right next to the turmeric is something else I want to show you growing kind of similar with a rhizome that comes apart like this but this here is Jerusalem artichoke it's got nothing to do with Jerusalem it's actually an Italian name or derived from an Italian name and over time I believe it got the name Jerusalem artichoke and the artichoke side of it is it does taste a little bit like globe artichoke it pickles beautifully probably one of the best things to preserve that I've ever done and it transforms the taste of it and it also transforms the fartiness of it some people can get a little bit gassy eating this it's tremendously good for you but if you are one of those get a bit gassy it's good to ferment this and then eat it fermented and you'll get less gas plus it I think it just tastes 100 better fermented leave one little piece in your garden and it will come up next summer that's the beauty of it it's a fantastic vegetable to grow I don't mind invasive crops like this invasive edible crops in fact that's what I want I want things to grow easy for me so that I can use when times are tough and speaking of tough on this side of the battered overgrown veggie garden is Egyptian spinach well the Egyptians would have had to been because it actually is very nice it tastes well I wouldn't say bland but it's not bitter it's probably not as great as normal English spinach but it's still very nice to eat it's a really good salad crop it has got a little bit of a pleasant aftertaste so it's not bland it just is a great substitute for spinach we've turned this into quiche and all sorts of things and put them in salads it has a bit of a spinach cross lettuce taste about it and you can see these pods here it produces thousands of seeds the good thing is it doesn't come up invasively through your garden it just comes up in clumps here and there however you accidentally distribute it and then you can transplant it to other places or I just leave it grow willy-nilly around I can just pick it when we need to as a substitute when lettuce and salad crops just absolutely cannot grow here through our summer and I've talked about Egyptian spinach so many times on my channel but the other thing that I haven't talked about much is sugarcane oh believe it or not behind me here I didn't intend to grow sugarcane I used our old sugar cane that I got from over there some of the spare stuff that we didn't use to make our own syrup and use for cooking I got some of these old stalks and I put them together in the shape of a tipi and we grew beans in this bed here the thing is that tipi turned into a living sugarcane bed once those beans were long gone and you can see now you've got sugarcane so it was a living trellis basically a living trellis and it worked really well I have to be honest with you though it tends to grow too well in a veggie garden and I'll be pulling all this out eventually and finding a spot somewhere around our property where I can grow it a bit like bamboo and have it in an area that it won't shade out other crops it was a fantastic experiment to try growing it in the veggie garden and it does grow terribly well in harsh conditions this is Rosella and it's another plant that you just must try it's from the hibiscus family and the whole plant is edible you particularly eat the leaves in salads and I've showcased this a few times already this year really beautiful taste to those leaves you probably wouldn't want to use it like lettuce you want to scatter it throughout a salad to give it a nice little tang I really do like it and then of course as it matures and starts to flower which are beautiful flowers it produces these calyxes which make fantastic teas they're good to eat on their own they're a little bit more sour than the leaves if you have never tried Rosella jam it really is something incredible it's very different to a lot of the other jams the sweeter jams like plum jam or mulberry jam those types of things this has a tartness about it that not only goes really well like a normal jam so they put it on some buttered bread but it goes really good with meats it's a bit like a cranberry it does absolutely love the heat the worse it gets the better it grows so yeah get into growing Rosella and just up from the Rosella is this crop here asparagus pea where'd you go there you are asparagus pea is growing here on this lean two trellis I've done a video on it earlier this year so you can have a look at that if you want to the whole plant again is edible including the leaves like a salad let me just try some it has a more brassica type taste more like raw broccoli not one of my favorites but we eat it for the we eat it we grow it we grow it to eat we grow it for these pods here they're a winged bean or a asparagus pea and these taste very much like asparagus and a pea cross I had some Lebanese cucumbers growing here through the more moderate time of the year what this plant did is it replaced the cucumber crop it comes up religiously every summer and again it's like Rosella and these other crops that I'm showing you the hotter it gets the more they seem to love the conditions and as you can see it's still thriving but now it's starting to brown off the pods are starting to die back and some of them have already fully died back and then these would break up and eventually go back into the garden or you can collect the seeds if you want you need to cook them though before you eat them you can't eat them raw like that so there's a number of things you can do with this plant here's a crop that I haven't grown for a few seasons it's a bit overgrown and it's entwined with some rubbish weeds but you might be able to notice it these beautiful flowers that one's not out yet well actually that one's starting to grow some fruit it's a passion fruit vine this particular variety is a giant passion fruit supposed to have really big fruit and I hadn't grown that one before in fact I hadn't grown much passion fruit in the last few years sort of got a bit over it and decided not to and now we feel like passion fruit again and so I'm starting to grow a few more plants and you forget sometimes what strong growers they are I half expected it to suffer through this summer the opposite happened it's actually growing crazy I'm looking forward to seeing how big the fruit do get and I'm going to of course tidy this up get rid of any competing vines and weeds that's growing around it but passion fruit is one of those plants that will produce fruit in full sun or part shade and sometimes I've seen them growing in jungle like areas where you wonder where it's getting its sunlight from and it's still fruiting it's just one of those really hardy plants that is actually a common plant as well so it's one of those supermarket varieties of fruit that people just love to eat and I'm sure I don't have to explain all the uses of passion fruit to you from drinks to desserts to savories but the point is it can be grown in so many different locations and conditions and survive a really awful hot summer and that says something about a plant like that scattered throughout this horrid mess is this pumpkin vine here that's just not any old pumpkin vine it's a Japanese pumpkin or a Kent pumpkin I haven't deliberately grown pumpkin for years pretty much everyone in the family including myself now has gotten a little bit sick of pumpkins this type of pumpkin has an uncanny way of meandering itself around other plants and starting to grow fruit in the most odd places it just always finds a way to survive and that's what I love about this type of pumpkin I have trialed lots of different types of pumpkins over the years I've found that the Kent pumpkin not only tastes great but it thrives in the harshest conditions whereas other pumpkins they tend to get powdery mildew diseases and they just take a lot more care and again this is the type of food crop that I really admire and that's the type that I don't have to put much effort into growing speaking of not much effort and also very similar to a pumpkin vine is this Italian gourd here this thing they sometimes they grow straight like a baseball bat they are really solid things but I suppose they do look a bit like a long pumpkin I mean they are a gourd it is not as resilient as that Kent pumpkin because the vine has already died back and it's left behind all these large fruits but that's because it doesn't like the cold much so even though it's still very hot here at the moment as we're coming out of our summer the nights are still quite cold so the vines die off pretty quickly however through summer again the hotter it gets the better it grows and this is probably one of our best seasons for growing this type of crop what does it taste like well the Italians do love it it's best eaten when they're small I could probably say they taste more like a zucchini crossed with a cucumber I suppose we could have a try we don't normally eat them this big but let's cut off the end here something that's smaller maybe there there we go see that let's get rid of the hard skin because that skin's really hard now like a pumpkin when they're smaller it's not as hard I'm not a very good whittler there we go let me dare yeah exactly it's a cucumber crossed with a zucchini I think they're best cooked but it tastes all right no worries these also grow really fast and like I said you don't usually wait for them to get that big if you leave them for a month or so out in the sun they dry out check this or you could use it as a marocca look at that in here are all the seeds throw them in the garden next summer as soon as it starts getting really hot they'll start coming up you don't really have to plan or do anything just transplant them if they're not in the right spot for you it couldn't be easier to grow something like this and that's why I recommend it for growing in really harsh conditions and that's the 10 that I want to talk about but to be honest there are several other crops that I didn't mention such as this purple yam here but I haven't been growing them long enough and some of the other ones like the sweet potato well you know me it always grows well here and I've probably talked enough about sweet potato and there are a few others that I'm working on that I need to get a little bit more information before I give them the thumbs up to you but anyway I hope you enjoyed the video if you did make sure you do give it an unstoppable thumbs up because those these 10 plants are pretty much unstoppable make sure you share the video around and subscribe if you haven't already thanks a lot for watching bye for now cheers