Edible ground covers are a crucial element in any permaculture or food forest garden. They serve as living mulch, protect and feed the soil, suppress weeds, and give you more food in less space. Whether you’re growing sweet potatoes for stir-fries or nasturtiums for a colorful salad, there are so many ways to make your ground layer both beautiful and functional.
Tired of weeding and bare soil? These low-growing edible plants cover the ground, feed your soil, and you!
By layering your garden with diversity in plant heights, root systems, and edible yields, you’ll create a more balanced, resilient system that supports you and the ecosystem around you. Let your mulch work to feed your soil and your family at the same time!
Welcome back to my garden! Today, we’re diving into edible ground covers that I use in my urban permaculture garden as living mulch. Creating layers in a food forest system helps you grow more diversity (and food) in a small space. Edible ground covers help suppress weeds to create a low-maintenance, sustainable garden that feeds us year-round and doesn’t demand daily upkeep.
We love to go camping, and that means I often leave my garden for days at a time. While I still love growing annuals like tomatoes and cucumbers, they require more hands-on care and come with a higher risk if I’m away. I’ll still grow them, but I want to shift the balance toward a more resilient garden using perennial plants and edible ground covers that do more of the heavy lifting while I’m off exploring.
Watch or read more below
Top 10 Edible Ground Covers for Living Mulch
So, what exactly are edible ground covers? These are low-growing plants that serve multiple functions: they protect the soil, retain moisture, reduce weeds, prevent erosion, and provide food for both humans and beneficial wildlife. In a food forest-style garden, ground covers are just one layer in a multi-tiered system that also includes tall trees, shrubs, flowers, and root crops.
Below are 10 of my favorite edible ground covers that are beautiful, functional, and delicious!
1. Sweet Potato
Sweet potato is hands-down my favorite edible ground cover. Its thick, lush vines protect the soil from the harsh sun and help retain moisture. The leaves are edible and can be used like spinach—sautéed with garlic, tossed in soups and curries, or even made into green wraps. And of course, the roots themselves are a delicious, substantial food source for both sweet and savory dishes. Sweet potatoes are also a haven for beneficial insects and frogs (yes, frogs!). I often find them nesting among the vines, even without a pond nearby. They’re super easy to propagate, making them perfect for sharing, selling, or expanding your patch.
2. Nasturtium
Nasturtiums are another edible ground cover that, once you plant them, you will have forever! Their bright flowers and peppery leaves are both edible and beautiful. I use the leaves in salads and as mini wraps, and the flowers as edible garnishes or pesto ingredients. They self-seed prolifically, meaning once you plant them, they often come back on their own every year. This means they can easily take over parts of your garden, so it’s important to keep them pruned if you want them to remain in one area.
Nasturtiums attract beneficial pollinators and act as a trap crop, luring pests like slugs and snails away from other plants. You can prune back areas to feed to your chickens as a natural pest management system. Even their seed pods are edible—you can pickle them to make homemade capers!
Naturtiums die off during the hot summer months, and so I pair these with sweet potato, which has an opposite growth pattern. Sweet potatoes thrive in summer and die back in the cooler months. These two work well to keep the soil covered all year round.
3. New Zealand Spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides)
New Zealand Spinach is one of my go-to ground covers, especially in warmer weather when traditional leafy greens struggle. It spreads beautifully and creates dense, weed-suppressing coverage. The leaves are succulent and can be eaten cooked, much like regular spinach. It’s drought-tolerant, hardy, and perfect for low-maintenance edible landscaping. Due to its ability to self-seed easily, it can be a good idea to keep it contained.
4. Sweet Violet
Sweet violets (Viola odorata) make a lovely ground cover for shady areas, which become more common as fruit trees mature and cast more shade. They have heart-shaped edible leaves and delicate purple flowers that make beautiful decorations for cakes and salads. While I usually use the flowers more than the leaves, the entire plant helps retain soil moisture and suppress weeds, making it an excellent living mulch.
5. Strawberries
Strawberries are a classic edible ground cover that needs little introduction. They spread easily, especially alpine varieties, and can handle partial shade. While their leaves and flowers are edible, the fruit is the real star. Just note they do better in sunnier patches of your garden.
6. Prostrate Rosemary
This low-trailing form of rosemary hugs the ground and is well-suited to hot, dry, sandy, or rocky soils. It’s evergreen, hardy, and incredibly useful in the kitchen. I love having rosemary nearby to flavor dishes, and the edible flowers are great for attracting bees. It also has a host of medicinal benefits—anti-inflammatory, digestive support, and calming properties.
7. Thyme & Oregano
Thyme and oregano are aromatic culinary herbs that make wonderful low-growing ground covers in sunny areas. Their spreading habit helps protect the soil, and both are drought-tolerant and resilient. These herbs can be used fresh or dried for flavoring food, making teas, and for natural remedies. Their tiny flowers also attract pollinators to your garden.
8. Yarrow
Yarrow is a powerhouse plant often overlooked as an edible. While the leaves can be used in teas or medicinally (always research before consuming), their greatest strengths in the garden are as a soil protector with dense fern-like leaves and a pollinator magnet. It has deep roots that help break up compacted soil and draw nutrients up to the surface, improving fertility over time. It sends runners underground, so it’s a good idea to treat this plant like you would mint and keep it contained to one area.
9. Chamomile
Chamomile creates a fragrant, low-growing cover that’s sometimes used as a lawn substitute. It’s most well-known for its daisy-like flowers, which are harvested for calming teas that support sleep and digestion. It thrives in sunny areas and adds a beautiful, soft texture to garden beds.
10. Red Clover
Red clover is one of those quiet achievers in the garden, it’s beautiful, useful, and so easy to grow. I love using it as a living mulch in my food forest because it grows low to the ground, helps suppress weeds, and is constantly feeding the soil with nitrogen through its roots. The bees absolutely adore the flowers, and if you’re into herbal teas, the blossoms are edible and can be harvested and dried too! It’s the kind of plant that gives so much without asking for much in return—perfect for filling in those bare spots while still being productive and pretty.
Many common weeds are edible and make great opportunistic ground covers. Purslane, for example, has succulent leaves rich in omega-3 fatty acids and grows rapidly to fill bare spots. Chickweed and dandelion also have edible and medicinal parts. While these can spread quickly, learning to identify and harvest them helps you turn a problem into a resource.
Living Mulch: Edible Ground Covers That Feed You and Your Garden
Start small by adding one or two edible ground covers to your garden beds or under fruit trees, and watch how quickly they transform the space. These hardworking plants not only fill gaps and reduce maintenance, but they also invite more life into your garden, as a wildlife habitat. Whether you’re building a full food forest or just looking to get more out of your patch, edible ground covers are one of the simplest ways to grow smarter, not harder.
Are you growing any edible plants as living mulch? Let us know below 👇
Links included in this post might be affiliate links. If you purchase a product or service with the links that I provide I may receive a small commission. There is no additional charge to you! Thank you for supporting my blog so that I can continue to provide you with free content.
Growing Sweet Potatoes / Kūmara (Ipomoea batatas) in your home garden is a great step toward self-sufficiency. Sweet Potatoes are my favourite permaculture plant and are an easy crop to grow for beginner gardeners. It is important to grow plants that support and encourage other plants and beneficial insects in your garden. Creating a cohesive ecosystem that promotes the growth and success of your garden’s health and supports abundant harvests.
Many people do not know that the leaves of the sweet potato plant are also edible. This is most likely because the leaves provide no economical value in the mainstream food system and so they are discarded. Our learnt behaviours tend to come from what is around us but the key is to question things more often. Can I eat this? How do I cook this? We are very lucky to have so much knowledge available to us at the click of a button.
If you want to learn more from outside “the box” subscribe to my blog and let’s get into all things, Sweet Potato!
WATCH my top 12 Reasons to start growing Sweet Potatoes or scroll down to read more.
12 Reasons to Grow Sweet Potatoes
1. The Whole Plant is Edible
Not only does the Sweet Potato plant produce delicious edible tubers underground but, you can also eat the leaves and stems of the plant too ( It rarely flowers but these are not edible). Sweet Potato is not actually part of the potato family but is part of the morning glory family. Unlike potatoes – the sweet potato leaves are edible and packed full of *vitamin A, C, K, B1, B2, B3 and B9. Sweet potato leaves also have minerals such as calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus and potassium. Sweet potato leaves are used in a similar way to spinach. The young leaves and shoots can be added fresh to salads and smoothies or to curries, stirfries and soups. They can also be sauteed to make a delicious side dish of greens. Sautee in butter and garlic or tamari, garlic, chilli and ginger is another delicious way to use sweet potato leaves.
2. Produces an Abundant Cropon each Plant
Sweet potatoes produce many large tubers underground from a single plant. These tubers are high in calories and carbohydrates which can form a great “base crop” on your journey to living more self-sufficiently. Growing base crops such as sweet potatoes or pumpkin can increase your ability to make wholesome meals entirely from the garden. You can store sweet potatoes by letting them harden off for half to a whole day in sunlight or diffused sunlight. Then store them somewhere dark and cool for a few weeks or up to a few months. They will keep until they start sprouting or start to go soft and spongy. It can be a good idea to make meals from them and freeze them to preserve your harvests that way. Curried sweet potato soup is one of my favourite ways to prepare and save my sweet potatoes.
3. Grows Quickly and Easily
Sweet potatoes like warm weather and once the soil warms up in spring and summer they will take off and grow vigorously. They are a very low-maintenance plant that can still produce well with neglect. They can handle low water or dry spells but will produce best when kept well watered. They require free-draining soil as wet, boggy or heavy clay soils may cause the tubers to rot. Promote healthy, free-draining soil with lots of compost. The leaves may get holes and be eaten by bugs but they are very hardy and it would take a lot to restrict their growth. Sweet potato is fairly pest resistant but as the tubers form they will get closer to the surface of the soil. If they are exposed to the surface, rodents such as rats and mice may find them. Check that you can’t see any above the soil and if so, rebury them.
4. Can be Grown all Year Round
In warm climates with mild winters like we have here (Perth, Australia), Sweet potatoes can be grown all year round. It slows down in winter but you can still harvest the leaves. I have found the purple varieties grow best during winter. In cooler climates, it’s best to harvest your sweet potato before the winter sets in and grow it annually. You can, however, take cuttings and grow them indoors in jars of water or pot them up and have lush house plants over winter. Once Spring arrives and the soil warms up you can replant them back out into the garden. To get the most out of your tuber harvests it is best to harvest annually and then replant your patch. You can leave some tubers in the ground and they will remain dormant until the soil warms up and they will just pop and regrow by themselves!
5. You can Harvest in Stages
If you have a large sweet potato patch and multiple plants you can harvest your sweet potatoes in stages to get the most out of your harvests. When veggies are ready all at once it can be hard to utilise them and not get overwhelmed. Towards the end of summer and autumn, I will also just go out and harvest one or two for dinner. Here in Australia, we call it “bandicooting”. Bandicoots are marsupials that look kind of rat/rabbit-like, that fossick around for food. Find where the main stem of your sweet potato goes into the ground and have a light dig around to see if you can find any sweet potatoes near the surface.
6. Easy to Propagate
Propagating and growing more sweet potatoes is very easy and there are multiple ways to do this. If you do not already have sweet potatoes growing at home then you can start a patch with a single tuber from the farmers market. You can bury the whole tuber in the garden or cut it into 3-4 pieces and start multiple plants. Another way to grow a plant from the tuber is to place the tuber in a jar of water until it sends off shoots. The shoots can then be cut and placed in water to grow roots. Let the shoots get above 10cm before cutting them off. You can keep doing this and using your tuber to farm multiple plants.
Once you have an established patch you can cut sections of the vines off ( known as “slips” ) and regrow more plants. Either plant the slips directly into the soil or place them in a jar of water to form roots first. If you plant them directly into the garden make sure to keep them well watered while they strike roots.
To learn more about growing food from cuttings, check out my ebook. It’s a great way to establish an edible garden for little to no cost.
There are a lot more varieties of sweet potatoes than the ones you commonly see in the shops. Growing your own food opens up so many more exciting options and varieties of vegetables. The varieties available at the supermarket have been bred to aid in mass production, pest resistance and shelf life. Rather than on the quality of nutrients, texture and flavour. I know which ones I would pick! I am growing the Orange, Red and White, Hawaiian (white skin with purple flesh) and Purple skin with Purple flesh variety. They all have unique qualities and cooking properties. The Purple and White are deliciously roasted, whereas, the all-purple variety is not great roasted but delicious mashed. Once you have established some plants you can then swap and trade with others who may be growing different varieties to you.
8. Amazing Living Mulch/ Ground Cover
The Sweet Potato naturally grows as a vine along the ground. It will send off side shoots and quickly become a thick and lush ground cover. This protects the soil from the harsh sun and creates a healthy habitat for beneficial insects. Having lots of beneficial insects is an essential part of growing a natural, thriving garden. This lush ground cover provides an excellent bottom layer of a food forest system. I have Sweet Potato vines growing all in between and underneath my fruit trees.
9. Grows in Sun or Shade
Sweet Potato prefers full sun but will grow in a wide range of locations from full sun to full shade. The plants that grow in shade will be slower to produce but will still grow well. This means you have more options in choosing a location to grow your Sweet Potato. I actually find that during our harsh summers in Perth, my Sweet Potato prefers some shade. Versatile plants are great for the garden because you have more flexibility and options for choosing a location to plant them. It also means they are a little more forgiving for beginner gardeners because they won’t up and die if the sunlight isn’t just right.
10. Grows in Containers or in the Garden
Urban gardens often mean utilising container gardens and selecting plants that grow in both is amazing! Ok, you can see why I love this plant! It is just so easygoing. The Sweet Potato plant can take off quickly and grow very vigorously. This means it can shade out smaller plants and take over the garden. If you are short on space or have small space, or urban gardens, then it may be best to grow it in containers. Don’t be afraid to cut off the edges if it starts to take over.
11. Can be Fed to Animals
Sweet Potato leaves can be feed to many animals including chickens, pigs and rabbits. When you are harvesting the patch or just trimming the edges, then this can be a great way to add feed to your animals. They are full of vitamins and nutrients to help boost your animal’s overall health. Plus, it promotes a sustainable cycle and the animal manure can then be composted to use on your gardens and grow more Sweet Potatoes!
12. Save Money!
Sweet Potatoes can be expensive! Especially if they are not the common variety. Recently the Red and White ones were over $9 p/k at my local store. With their ease of growth and abundant production, Sweet Potato is such an economical plant to grow in your home garden.
As you can see I could talk about growing sweet potatoes all day! They are my favourite permaculture plant because they are versatile and have so many benefits and interconnected relationships within the garden.
If you have any questions about growing, harvesting or propagating sweet potatoes please leave me a comment below. If you found this content helpful please share it with your friends. Sharing my articles will help me inspire and help more people to start growing their own food. Every little bit counts towards growing and inspiring a greener world.
DISCLAIMER: Links included on this page might be affiliate links. If you purchase a product or service with the links that I provide I may receive a small commission. There is no additional charge to you! Thank you for supporting my blog so I can continue to provide you with free content each week.
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