Perennial plants stay permanently in one fixed spot in the bed. Typical examples are asparagus or herbs such as thyme or lovage. You plant them once and they keep growing in the same place year after year. With some plants it takes a few years before you can bring in the first harvest. Asparagus, for example, needs around three years before it becomes productive.
Seasonal crop or Permanent crop (perennial)
Some plants can be grown either way. Spring onions, for instance, are usually grown as a seasonal crop and cleared after the harvest, but they can also stay in place for several years. Chives are mostly a permanent crop, yet they can be grown for a single season too.
For plants like these you find the field “Cultivation” with two options when you add them to the bed plan:
- Seasonal crop: The planting is cleared after the harvest. That also applies when the harvest only comes the following year, as with Brussels sprouts or kale over winter. The planting is then not a perennial plant, it follows the crop rotation at the year change like any other crop.
- Permanent crop (perennial): The planting stays in its place permanently and is treated as a perennial plant.
Grove suggests what is usual for the plant. You can also change the choice later when editing the planting, as long as it is still in its first vegetation year. From the second year on, the decision is fixed.
For plants that are only grown one way, this choice does not appear. Lettuce is always a seasonal crop, asparagus always a permanent crop.
Depending on the cultivation, grove uses different planting times. For the permanent crop, the planting times with a “Harvest from year” entry apply. You recognise them in the plant info by the note “starting from year 3” in the harvest bar. For the seasonal crop, the remaining planting times apply. This affects the possible planting months, the suggested harvest period and the tasks.
In the bed plan
When you add a perennial plant to the bed plan, it stays in the bed from the planting month until the end of the year. With the field “Vegetation year” you set whether the plant was already planted earlier, because there is of course a time before grove. With the field “Plant stays in the bed until” you specify in the following years when you clear the crop again, for example when its perennial lifespan comes to an end.
From the second vegetation year on, grove no longer creates tasks for sowing, pre-growing or transplanting, only the care tasks for the plant. In the harvest preview, a permanent crop appears only from the year given in the planting time under “Harvest from year”. From the second year on, grove no longer calculates with the growing period, only with the natural harvest window.
The garden fairy always plants as a seasonal crop. Plants that mostly or exclusively grow as a permanent crop are not among its suggestions. Those you set yourself.
At the year change
At the year change, grove recognises perennial plants automatically and treats them differently from annual ones:
They always stay in their own bed, no matter how you connect the other beds with each other. A perennial plant does not follow a connection to another bed, because it cannot move house in a real garden either.
In the year change view you see for each bed under “Perennial plants:” which perennial plants are already there. Grove also shows you which of the newly arriving plants are good or bad neighbours to the perennial plants. That way you see straight away while planning what fits together well and what does not.
If you entered a clearing month when adding a perennial plant, that is a month before December, it is no longer carried over at the year change. This is how you tell grove that this plant has been removed from the garden.
If the same plant stands in a bed once as a seasonal crop and once as a permanent crop, grove treats the two separately. The permanent crop stays put, the seasonal crop moves on with the crop rotation.
Limitations
With Gertrud Franck and the Langerhorst family, the plant always stays in the same row, but jiggles back and forth a little each year in the display, because the offset in centimetres is not taken into account here.
If you have already carried out a year change and then change the past of a perennial plant afterwards, those changes are not applied to the later years.