Year round fruit?

[Togath]

So after some successful experiments with basil, ginger root, and tomatoes, which, I've got to admit, does sound rather random when listed like that(though it is in alphabetical order), where I tried to greatly extend the growing season by keeping them in a more controlled climate than normal, producing tomatoes in the dead of winter and a two year old basil plant still pumping out fresh leaves, I've gotten curious: are there any other edible plants that seem like potentially good candidates?
Members of the mint family are obviously in my sights, given the success of the basil experiment, but I'm also curious about year-round fruits and veggies.
Potatoes are one that seem like they might work, given their relation to tomatoes, and the sturdy Himalayan blackberry was another I considered. Berry bushes in general seem like another to potentially try this with(as they tend to be small enough to enclose easily), though I'd need to devise a good way to pollinate them.

[Fri]

Do you have greenhouse? If I remember correctly, honestly almost all fruit can be produced year long that way.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Tomatoes and cucumbers are popular greenhouse plants, so they're possibly the most suitable for just keeping in your room as well. Try to not get raided by cops thinking they're, you know, a different kind of plant. Grain can in many places be grown outside in two cycles per year, and potatoes can at least be left in the ground from where you can harvest them one by one during winter or leave them to sprout again come spring.

[snowblizz]

Almost the only reason fruit and veg isn't year round is that the people eating them live in places that has a limited natural growing season.

Basically if you give the plants the growing conditions needed, like say greenhouse, pretty much anything can be grown indefinitely.

I would say it's a short list and easier to do of the stuff you couldn't grow, for which I'm sure there are things, but I don't know them. Even annual (or shorter cycled) plants you just harvest and replant as needed, like say radishes. Obv some of the stuff needs more work, like plants that need to have seeds frozen once, but that's what the fridge is for.

Oh, wikipedia has a list of perennial plants. That's what you'll want to start from I'd say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_plant

[Togath]

All very cool info~ I don't currently have a greenhouse, but I do have a lot of wide windowsills and shelves indoors. Maybe in the future I could look into assembling a small greenhouse(which might be nice for stuff like peppers anyway).
I wonder if it's too late in the year to find anyone selling more tomato plants? Maybe I could find some discounted end-of-season ones.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Strawberries might work pretty well too now that I think of it. Takes up little space and grows relatively quickly, I think.

[Vinyadan]

Try to not get raided by cops thinking they're, you know, a different kind of plant.

Tomato leaves have a characteristic odour which, while pleasant (more pleasant imho than the fruits themselves), I don't think can be easily mistook for hemp. But never underestimate The Man!

You probably can do a lot of this with rosemary and similar. Rosemary in particular is perennial and evergreen, but, depending on your geographic location, you may need to protect it.

[halfeye]

The tropics don't do summer or winter, so most tropical produce could be year round.

[Dodom]

I haven't kept this up around a full year, but I had to take my growing boxes indoors (repairs to the balcony coming) and so far, the plants look happy with it. I'm hoping for a good harvest of arugula in particular, some of the plants I allowed to go to seeds resowed themselves on the spot (they have explosive seed pods, can't collect all the seeds without some falling) and while young, the current third generation looks healthy and plentiful. What I don't know yet is how the indoors condition will affect the aphid population in the long run. For now there seems to be fewer than when outdoors, but I don't know how well they'll adapt. I'll be getting a spray bottle to use bug soap on them, but since I have a pet I don't want to use real poison indoors.

tl;dr: Arugula looks promising.

[Xuc Xac]

The tropics don't do summer or winter, so most tropical produce could be year round.

Some tropical fruits have to be tropical. It takes two years to grow a pineapple, so you need year round warmth.

[halfeye]

Some tropical fruits have to be tropical. It takes two years to grow a pineapple, so you need year round warmth.

Maybe; that's kind of my point. Thanks for the info on pineapples.

[Yora]

The limiting factor is light. The lifecycle of many plants is regulated by light. Temperature is something you can regulate relatively easily indoors, but to increase or decrease the exposure to sunlight you need to have special lamps that are relatively expensive and power hungy. Lot's of people have high hopes for LED lamps, though we hardly use them in commercial greenhouses because they are still not as good as old fashioned sodium lamps. For hobby use this might be a different story though. You don't need to have maximum efficiency and maximum growth speed, so maybe they could still be doing the job for you. This does of course mean that you have to research the optimal lighting conditions for whatever plants you want to grow.
Since you probably don't want to have 6 lamps in 6 separate rooms, the best solution is to select plants that all benefit from the same light conditions so they can share one lamp.

Selecting the right plants is perhaps one of the biggest factor when planning to get extended growing and harvest periods. You always want plants where you have to do the least amount of additional effort. Growing poinsettia for christmas (it's a thing here in Germany) is a huge pain in the ass and we're only able to do it because otherwise our greenhouses would stand completely empty right now. Before we stand around fiddling our thumbs we can use the spare time to micro regulate the growing conditions for these plants.
But generally, always try to select plants that don't fight you to grow at the time you want them to grow. You can have cherries 12 months a year, but for that you need to have 12 greeenhouses with heating and growing lights in a staggered rotation so that you have one greenhouse ready for harvest each month. If you have plants that normally would be ready for harvest in october those would make good candidates for trying to get a harvest in november or december, instead of something that would usually grow in june.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

As a crossover with the vac suit plants topic: growing mushrooms in a basement might work.

[Kaytara]

Yara is right on the money. To get even more specific, the switch from a vegetative state to the reproductive state in higher plants (producing flowers and thus fruit) is regulated by environmental cues that cause a switch in the plant's developmental processes. Cues such as temperature and day length - or rather, uninterrupted NIGHT length. The internal clock in plants is regulated by molecular mechanisms, such as a molecule that accumulates during darkness and "degrades" upon light. E.g. if the night becomes sufficiently short, the peak of the accumulated molecule overlaps with a peak in some other regulatory proteins, which would not overlap otherwise.

Temperature can also play a role. Plenty of plants may theoretically be kept thriving year-round if you keep them warm, but whether they will flower and produce fruit is another matter entirely. As said above, you potentially need a lot more resources spent on replicating the light and temperature conditions that induce flowering to make that happen.

An equally important issue is that of pollinators. While some plants can self-pollinate, most of what we eat requires pollination by insects, usually bees, in order to produce fruit. (Fun fact: greenhouses growing strawberries and such use bumblebees instead, as they're better with living in greenhouse conditions.) This is why, incidentally, Germany has had such a poor harvest of cherries this year. Our local beekeper predicted this back in April when the weather was so cold that the bees stayed inside, leaving most of the blooming cherry trees unpollinated.

So for many fruit plants, you basically need an entire small ecosystem for them to produce fruit, again making it dependent on so much more than the time of year.

As a crossover with the vac suit plants topic: growing mushrooms in a basement might work.

As long as they are not symbiotic fungi, yes.

Example: chanterelles. They grow in mycorrhiza with trees, so are difficult to cultivate.