Why not some Food among the Flowers?

Our grandparents did it! Heck, my grandmother kept a yard of chickens in the city limits of Atlanta in the 40s.   They knew the value of growing your own food; they’d been through the depression.

                                                         Flowering kale is delicious!

Have you ever really looked at a cabbage in the garden?  A beautiful foliage plant, a delicious source of nutrients for the table and it will just sit there in your garden beds until you’re ready to eat it.  We’re not talking about edible flowers here although we grow pansies in abundance for salad and jelly making (pansies contain rutin, a valuable nutrient found in all purple vegetables and fruits and guess what…it doesn’t matter if your pansies are white, yellow or purple, they all contain rutin!) and love sautéed daylily buds that once cooked, taste like asparagus. 

                                                  Pansies make beautiful and nutritious jelly.

   Garlic flowers in the middle of the garden.

Think real food like eggplant, a beautiful plant in flower and fruit right in the middle of the zinnias and marigolds.  Think okra, a tall background plant that provides food all the hot summer (needs little water) along with its lovely hibiscus flowers.    Why not border the flower garden with cabbage plants, parsley, and lettuce of all colors.  There’s nothing prettier than kale and yes, it is one of the most nutritious and delicious greens available and would make a beautiful “filler” around flowering plants.  Leaves of kale can be picked as wanted and it will just grow more.

               Various shades of green...lettuce makes a lovely filler in the garden and the kitchen!

Do you know how many colors are found in chard leaves?  About as many as are found in foliage plants like Joseph’s Coat or some varieties of coleus. Chard has beautiful, edible leaves that can grow among the bedding plants.  Lots of people grow Alliums for that spectacular ball/bloom.  Garlic flowers are both edible (delicious in salad or infused in vinegar) and a beautiful lavender color as a background plant.  Plant in fall and dig in the spring or plant in spring and dig the bulbs in fall or just leave the bulbs in the ground (making more bubils) and enjoy the wonderful flower ball in the summer.

Egyptian Onion will bloom and form small onion sets on top.  A real conversation piece amongst the Echinacea.

                                                          Echinacea purpurea...Purple Coneflower

We’ll plant carrots in February and defy you to find more beautiful foliage!  They will be harvested in late spring, making room for seasonal herb plants like basil.  If you’ve got room for a small trellis in the back of your flower bed and it’s February…plant SUGAR PEAS!  They are easy to grow, will grow straight up, have beautiful white “sweet pea” flowers and then you’ll have those wonderful snow peas/sugar peas to sauté in butter, eat raw while digging in the garden or add to stir fry.  Bonus…they will be finished by late spring so you can use the arbor for something else like green beans or cucumber.

Think pollinators!  All these plants attract bees, hummingbirds and butterflies which will pollinate vegetables and flowers.  African Blue Basil wants to be a very large, sprawling plant with a multitude of flowering spires attracting both bees and butterflies.  (Don’t forget, bumblebees are valuable pollinators too.)  We don’t want Sweet basil plants to flower because it cuts down on oil/flavor production within the plant; all its energy is used to make the flowers attractive to pollinators but this is not true with African Blue Basil…a beautiful and edible addition to a flower bed.

                          African Blue basil in the garden.  Note the tomato plant on the far left.

We’ll be growing more tomatillos this year, right in the flower beds because of the lovely little “lanterns” formed after small white flowers.  The lanterns actually enclose the fruit, tomatillo, the main ingredient of Salsa Verde…green salsa…easy to grow among flowering bedding plants.

                                  Tomatillos are carefree and very interesting in flower and fruit.

All the plants we’ve mentioned are annuals but if you’re like us you welcome perennials that just keep on “being there”; think horseradish, chives, parsley (biennial), oregano, thyme, stevia (the sweet herb), planted among the Gerbera Daisies and Asiatic Lilies.

                                                           Curly Parsley and English Thyme

Blueberries…not a more beautiful spring, summer or fall landscape plant known!  As long as you’ve got two varieties you’ll have blueberries for the table or freezer every summer.  As delicious and nutritious as blueberries are, the fall foliage is breath-taking.

You’ll notice we didn’t mention adding rosemary or lavender to your flower beds.  Both plants would be very unhappy with the water and fertilizer needed to keep flowering plants looking good, preferring a hot and dry location instead.  Some rosemary varieties are very large, landscape-worthy plants that will flower in the winter with various shades of blue, pink or white edible flowers. 

Large pots, treasures in the garden for food and flower, can host a gorgeous yellow squash or a tomato plant surrounded by sweet basil-companions in the garden and the kitchen.  Smaller pots or garden bowls can keep the lettuce, arugula, cress or spinach coming until the weather gets hot.

Trim, prune and stake the vegetable/herb plants, they can be as beautiful as any “flower”.   Maybe you can’t get away with keeping chickens in the city limits but you can grow some food!

              What could be prettier than peppers smack dab in the middle of the flower garden?