Edible, highly drought tolerant groundcovers

General Discussions
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I want recommendations of edible, highly drought tolerant ground covers. Right now, I have loads of bindweed in unirrigated spaces, and I suspect this is because the dry-as-dust soil wants highly drought tolerant groundcovers covering it. So . . . what can I plant instead that I could eat?

I’ve considered hoary cress, but it’s just as aggressive as bindweed, and also allelopathic. It tastes pretty good, but I don’t want it getting into my garden beds.

Dandelions do just fine all summer, and they’re pretty and behave just fine in polycultures. I find them unbothersome, but I don’t like the taste.

Salsify does great, and I like the taste, but it tends to finish its life cycle around July, so then it’s just tall, brittle, dead stems.

Alfalfa does great, and it tastes fine, but it’s a bush. Not ideal for a ground cover.

Purslane would be nice because it tastes good, but isn’t nearly drought tolerant enough. It’s only a weed in irrigated spaces here.

Common mallow mostly only volunteers in irrigated spaces, too.

Black medick does fine, and I tend to find it unbothersome. The flavor’s just meh, though.

I’ve thought about creeping thyme, but man, I’ve tried it twice, and it keeps on dying! I’d gladly try it again, but I’m not enthused about the idea of buying it a third time.

Any other ideas? Ideally, I’d love to have something that can spread rapidly to cover the soil during my very dry summers, while also tasting good when I harvest it to eat.

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How about Mesembryanthemum cordifolium (formerly Aptenia cordifolia), known here as baby sunrose? There may well be others in this genus that might suit but this is the one I know. Not sure how frost hardy it is though it will easily cope with -2°C or -3°C.
it might be worth looking at other members of the same botanical family, Aizoaceae, as a number of them are edible, for example several members of the genus Carpobrotus.

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Hey, cool! That’s an interesting idea! It looks like Aptenia cordifolia is edible and tastes a little sour, so maybe it’s something like purslane or dock in flavor. The flowers are nice, too.

I’ve looked at iceplant before (which is in that family), and I seem to recall there was some reason I decided not to grow it. Stickiness, maybe? Or somebody saying it was highly invasive? Hmm, but “highly invasive” in wetter climates may what I want, now that I think about it, since I want a ground cover that can outcompete bindweed.

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It depends on where you do live.
Here, you can cover the ground with these edibles:
Rosmarinus officinales ‘postratus’.
Carpobrotus edulis (invasive, not for sale).

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I found my notes about ice plant! (Looks like it’s Carpobrotus edulis.) I must have found this emphatic review of it somewhere. (Maybe it was on the Baker Creek Seeds website?)

So yeah, I think it was the sticky seeds that put me off most. Concerns about them salting the soil around them may be important, though. That sounds like an allelopathic mechanism, and I’d rather have a groundcover that plays nice with other plants.

I also found this article about them:

Probably a flavor some people would greatly enjoy, but I consistently dislike astrigency, so that’s probably not a great fit for my palate.

Aptenia cordifolia looks potentially promising, though. Has anybody tried it as a groundcover, and if so, can you report what it’s like to use it in that niche?

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Following! I have come back to my Bulgarian garden after six weeks away, and there’s been no decent rain all that time. Apart from the established trees, the only green is the bindweed and even that is a bit crunchy! A few taller weeds, wild lettuce, a low growing hemp (THC free, but high in CBD, apparently), and the local weedy amaranth are struggling on. Everything else is crispy brown. Even the dandelions have died. I’m starting to feel I won’t get anything established here when I can’t be here to water it.

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even the driest garrigues of the Mediterranean landscape see plants grow without water all summer long…obviously no vegetables but maybe you could inspire to make a garden of aromatic and fruit plants
Thymus, Rosmarinus, Origanum, Satureja, Salvia, Pistacia, Punica, Myrtus…

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Unfortunately not all of those are cold-hardy enough for zone 7, though they could work in Emily’s Oregon garden , I think it’s zone 8.
Even those hardy plants don’t seem to establish without water. For those that are cold hardy enough, I might try autumn planting as there are usually rains then. Spring seeds haven’t established at all, or started to grow then succumb to weed pressure. In late spring or drought in summer.
My problem is that plants need to survive total neglect as for the next three years I am only here for a week a month. That’s probably a separate topic.

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Try some apple trees. They’ve been magnificently drought tolerant for me. I completely forgot to water my apple seedlings – which were only two months old at the time – for about six weeks in the early summer, and they looked fine. They hadn’t grown at all during that time, but they were amiably hanging on. I started watering them a little bit every two weeks or so after that. They’ve shown no signs of stress at all.

I’ve heard good things about pomegranate and fig drought tolerance, as well. My experience with figs so far is that they’re pretty good at surviving droughts, but they won’t fruit unless I water them well. I’m not sure yet if this is also true of apples; it may be. It’s probably true of peaches, but my peach trees keep giving me fruit anyway; they just happen to be half the size they should be. Absolutely delicious flavor, though.

Jerusalem artichokes are fantastic. I’m trying to remember to water mine once a week, because I’m pretty sure they’ll produce more of a harvest that way, but I’ll be honest – I keep forgetting. They’ve gone three weeks without water at least twice this summer now. They lost a few leaves at the bottom, which went brown and withered away, and they didn’t grow much, but the top three-quarters looked perfectly fine, and when I remembered to water them again, they happily put forth more leaves at the top and started growing again.

If you want ornamental that aren’t edible, daffodils and star of Bethlehem need no watering in a summer-dry, winter-wet climate. They flower in early spring and then completely disappear for the summer. Bearded irises also need no watering in summer, and they’re evergreen, with beautiful flowers in late spring and attractive leaves all year round.

Tulip (flowers in April) and hardneck garlic (flowers in June) need no water at all in my winter-wet, summer-dry climate. They’re ornamental and edible and taste good.

Sorghum sometimes grows wild here.

Rye often grows in wild spaces here. Like, a lot. It’s by a lot of the freeway, just growing merrily as a weed through the winter.

Echinecea’s super drought tolerant, and it’s a perennial. It might be just fine if you set it and forget it. It’s grown as an ornamental in a lot of unirrigated spaces here.

If you pull out all the prickly lettuce (which is a VERY common summer weed in my climate, and it needs no water), you might be able to start a landrace of domesticated lettuce. Pull out the prickly lettuce plants so they won’t be able to pollinate your tasty, thornless plants. I have four domesticated lettuce plants making seeds right now, two of which have had tiny bits of water when I got around to it, and two of which have gotten no water at all. There are a few more in my neighbor’s yard, where she let a lettuce go to seed last year. Since they’re the same species as prickly lettuce, which is an obnoxious drought-tolerant weed here, it’s not very surprising that they’re able to handle making seeds in midsummer without water here. (Obviously, they taste a whole lot better if you eat them in the winter.)

I live in Utah, zone 7b. If you’re in zone 7a, you may not be able to handle everything I can grow, but it may be close!

If you’re looking for survivors that can handle total neglect for the next three years, I’d probably stick with perennials: plant a bunch of fruit tree seeds (peaches and apple would probably be great; any other stonefruits or pomes that strike your fancy might work; juneberries and hackberries grow wild in the mountains here, so they may be drought tolerant, too), and any perennials that actively grow during the winter and go dormant for the summer, such as garlic and tulips. They should still be alive when you get back, and be in bigger clumps that you can start harvesting from if you want to.

If you’re looking for survivors that can handle only being watered once a month, that’s even easier. Anything I’ve mentioned here would probably be fine, especially if you mulch deeply in wood chips and water very deeply during that once a month watering.

Squashes, melons, and watermelons may, in theory, be able to handle it, too. I haven’t found one yet that will be that drought tolerant for me, but they can often handle one week without any water, and occasionally two. Zucchinis and Israeli melons can handle three, just barely, but expect diminished harvests.

My seeds from both my spaghetti zucchinis (the descendents of Black Beauty zucchinis and spaghetti squashes) and my Israeli melons (self-pollinated, as that variety was my one and only melon survivor in both 2022 and 20223) went into the Going to Seed mixes in 2022 and 2023, so if you have either of those, you may have some of my seeds.

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Thanks, Emily! All but one of my Jerusalem artichokes died, too. I’ve direct planted multiple peach and apple seeds the past and so far none have appeared.
Meanwhile despite the drought, the wild plums and bitter cherries are sprouting up everywhere. The garden already has three cherries and six plums, so I’m being mean and chopping those down. I’d considered letting them grow as nurse trees for other fruit and nut trees that can’t take the intense sun as babies, but they sucker like crazy and I’d end up living in a plum thicket!
I’m just having a down day, I’m not always this relentlessly negative! I think the problem is I assumed this was a winter wet/ summer dry climate, but winters are now drier too. I hope this is just an exceptionally bad year and not the way the weather is here now.
The plus side is, I have a mountain of plums. My neighbour and I made plum compote, so I now have 24 big bottles to keep me eating plums all winter!
And the quince seems remarkably drought tolerant, too. It has a huge crop.

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Sweet potatoes make a pretty decent ground cover and can handle drought. This may be contaversial but mint can also work if you don’t mind it gaining a mind of it’s own.

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Hmm. If your Jerusalem artichokes are anything like mine, they probably aren’t dead; they just went dormant for the year, and will be back next year. We can hope!

How much rain do you get over the course of a year? We get an average of 18 inches here where I live, most of it in the winter and early spring. If you get less, that would be a lot more challenging.

(Laugh) Maybe you should just try sticking apple cores in the ground and see if anything pops up. I get so many apple seedlings popping up out of cores from grocery store apples I didn’t think were good enough to save the seeds from. Maybe the secret, as David the Good once put it in a humorous video, is to not let the seeds know you’re planting them on purpose! :wink:

I haven’t had much luck with sweet potatoes and mint. Mint grows pretty well in the winter here, but if it’s not well-watered, it completely dies in summer. Like, it’ll even die all the way down to the roots, with no recovery. Sweet potatoes are quite drought tolerant, but only if you don’t want to get a harvest of roots out of them. When I didn’t bother to water mine last year, they stayed alive all summer, which I thought was great! But the roots were piddling and tiny. I later found out they need lots of water in order to produce those big roots I was hoping to eat. (Wry laugh.)

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Rainfall here is much the same, but spread through the year. Summer rains tend to be infrequent and not enough to soak in. We had what sounded like a wonderful storm with heavy rain last night, but my neighbour says their rain gauge only showed 7mm. Under the trees didn’t even get damp, and the intense sun has already dried out the top layers of soil.

I think here, the sun is the biggest issue. Plants getting
plenty of water might survive it fine. My neighbours have a superb, hugely productive garden, but they drip irrigate and have a complicated watering system set up that needs a lot of maintenance.

What I do notice in my garden is that the desirable plants that have survived get some shade for at least part of the day and/or also get the run off from roofs, so whatever rain does fall is concentrated at their roots.

The surviving Jerusalem artichoke is right at the roof drip line for my neighbours’ shed, the crispy ones though close by, aren’t. The hazelnut seedling that’s survived best gets both any water from the shed, and gets shade in the afternoon. The lemon balm and nettle also grow best at the bases of sheds where they’ll benefit from any rain run off. The mint, which is puny but surviving on getting the water from my dishwasher bowl while I’m here, is shaded by the walnut tree. So once it’s cool enough for shade loving me to be out there, I will put some improvised shade net over the other surviving hazel seedling which gets no shade, and hope that helps until I get back. I also need to consider what might enjoy it under the grapevines., because they’re right where the drainpipes from the guttering at the front of the house drain. I tried sweet potatoes there, last year, planting store bought ones. But they weren’t organic and I suspect they were treated in some way because they didn’t sprout at all. I’ll try pumpkins next year.

LOL on seeds! Yes, that seems to be the way mine work, too. I tried seeding alyssum in the spring and also ox-eye daisy because I read they’re drought tolerant and also somewhat edible, but it hasn’t grown yet. It’s just possible I will get a lovely surprise in spring when things could decide to germinate. Ox-eye daisy does grow wild nearer the coast, but I only see it as I whizz past on the bus, I haven’t been able to collect any seeds. Evening primrose is something else I want to try. It grows wild in fairly dry parts of Australia.

Sorry, I have hijacked your discussion, because your question was ground cover that will survive drought to give other plants shade.

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Yes, shade is definitely beneficial in my climate. I originally thought the side of my yard with the shade was low-value growing space. It turns out it’s high-value growing space! :wink: Everything that’s a “full sun” species seems to want shade for at least half the day here.

I think it’s really important to find highly drought tolerant trees that are willing to get tall and take all the brunt of full sun. I think, in a dry, hot climate, an open canopy layer is exactly what vegetables need to thrive. I’m hoping to use carob and moringa for that purpose in my greenhouse. (I’ve discovered the hard way that most subtropicals can’t survive my summer heat, even if they do all right in my greenhouse for the winter.) I’m thinking apple trees may serve that purpose as well, and I’m currently using several rows of well-spaced Jerusalem artichokes on the south side of my peach trees in order to give the peach trees some shade, which seems to be making both species happy, hurray!

You’re right, that’s exactly why a drought tolerant groundcover seems like a good idea here. Shading that soil should help other plants a great deal.

Oh, speaking of which, alfalfa is something you might consider trying, if you want an edible bush that can be used as chop-and-drop. It grows as a weed in my yard, so it definitely doesn’t need watering. The taste and texture aren’t amazing, but they’re fine, and I love how huge it gets with zero summer water whatsoever. Try hollyhocks, too. They can survive, flower, make seeds, and resow themselves every year without any irrigation in my summers.

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Does chicory grow in your area? It is a wild plant that is very hardy in my area that has edible uses, famously as substitute for coffee. It is closely related to cultivated varieties used for greens, so I imagine wild forms might be improved by crossing.

It’s a project I haven’t had time to pursue beyond successfully encouraging lots of chicory to grow along the gravel road leading to my house. It’s doing well on both sides of the road but interestingly is also a surviving in between the ruts.

Given our climates are so different I probably don’t have many other suggestions but I do appreciate this discussion

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Yeah, chicory grows in my area! I find the taste too bitter to be palatable, but I do know a lot of people like it. It reminds me a lot of the flavor of dandelion (which it’s closely related to). That’s a good suggestion for people who like the taste of dandelions! The flowers are very pretty and blue, so it’d make a great unirrigated ornamental edible for someone who likes to eat them.

It occurs to me that amaranth may be a decent solution. We have lots of wild amaranth weeds around here. They’re edible, and taste okay. Maybe they’re orach? Maybe lambsquarters? I usually don’t bother to either pull them out or save seeds from them; sometimes I bother to harvest a few leaves to eat. The texture is a little too dry for my taste, but that’s not a big deal. The flavor is okay. Nothing special, but it’s edible and a volunteer that doesn’t need watering, so why not eat it? Possibly that may be something to consider spreading on purpose. I don’t mind walking on it or chopping off the tops to eat if it gets too tall, so that seems like a good ground cover.

Of course, if I was going to do that, I may just want to use magentaspreen, which is much prettier (those pink centers of the leaves are delightful!) and has better flavor and texture. It’s not a weed here, but I wouldn’t mind it becoming one. I have two in my garden right now that I planted on purpose, and I’m actually – gasp! – watering them. I didn’t water them at all for the first two months, actually, and they did fine. But they tasted good, so I mulched them and started giving them a teensy bit of water once a week-ish, and they’re now four times as tall and look very happy. I plan to save seeds from them; maybe I should scatter those seeds throughout my grass.

I also have a few domesticated lettuce volunteers in my (dead) grass that are currently flowering and setting seeds. They haven’t been watered once, except for rain, and they don’t have any mulch except for the dead grass around them. I absolutely intend to sprinkle those seeds all over the rest of my lawn.

Maybe dill is a possibility? I’ve been told it can easily become a weed here. It’s tasty, so I don’t think I would mind having it volunteering everywhere.

Shepherd’s purse is a delightful winter groundcover, by the way. It’s a winter annual; it’s only around during late fall, winter, and early spring. So it’s not a drought tolerant summer groundcover, but for anyone with cool wet winters like mine, shepherd’s purse is an excellent winter annual that is no trouble at all and very tasty to eat.

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I’ll second chicory - - it’s fantastically robust. Though it might not meet your standards of edibility, there are ways of preparing it that reduce the bitterness.

The weedy “ditch chicory” around here will typically only get up to a few feet tall, though it won’t hug the ground. The culinary chicory we grew from wild garden seeds got to be as tall as many wild lettuces, the tallest ones probably six or seven feet tall or more, with copious leaves. The ones I harvested by cutting to the ground resprouted. Maybe even better than giant ragweed for chop and drop (more leafy surface area) and not a common allergen source

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Ahhh, they get bitter because of the full sun and heat. Yeah, that makes sense; dandelion’s the same way. (And a lot of other crops.) It may be more interesting in the shade, then. I wonder if it can handle dry shade? If so, that would be very interesting.

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Hmmm! How about American vetch? Has anyone used that as a groundcover? Samuel Thayer says it’s edible and very tasty, and he reports that it can often be found in dry places and can be pretty invasive. Would it be suitable or problematic to use in place of a lawn (and hope it can replace bindweed)?

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I like the idea and I’ve never heard of any stringent complaints about American vetch. In general it seems to me that native plants are better behaved, so unless it’s got a red notice on it I’ll usually give it a whirl. An example would be staghorn sumac, whose stunningly prolific suckering and running I have witnessed firsthand.

There was an “early spring vetch” on the seed train but I’m not sure what species it is or if it’s still available. It wasn’t hairy vetch though, a species I can’t recommend anyone in the Americas plant

Will defer to the voice of experience

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