Heartsease - sometimes known as wild pansy - grows well alongside everything from cabbages to strawberries. Photo/Supplied
Adding flowers to the vegetable garden can deter pests - and attract beneficial insects. Claire Mummery picks her top three floral companions.
It's easy to grow your own food at home with a little know-how and the right mindset, and with increasing food shortages and rocketing prices, it's never been more important – but did you know that one of the most overlooked essentials for a food garden is flowers?
My top three flowers to grow this spring are calendula, heartsease and borage. These wonder-plants are a gardener's delight, as they are edible, medicinal, sacrificial and great for attracting bees and beneficial insects.
Cheerful Calendula
Calendula officinalis (orange petals with an orange centre) is a champion of flowers, with bright colours that beam like sunshine from the garden bed. You can add the pretty petals to a salad or use them to decorate a cake, but calendula is also renowned for its medicinal potency – the petals are rich in vitamins and minerals with anti-inflammatory and antiseptic properties. Simply collect and dry the flower heads in spring and autumn to make a balm from the petals, which can soothe many skin conditions, including dryness, scratches, burns and bites.
Calendula attracts the insect diversity you need in a thriving garden. These flowers make a great companion for vegetable plants by bringing beneficial insects such as lacewings and pollinators.
In the hotter summer months, calendula can become a sacrificial plant, attracting whitefly and aphids away from your growing food. These pests get stuck on the plant, eventually causing the calendula to die back, as nature intended. Green shield bugs also use calendula as a host plant, protecting your tomatoes and beans from their devastation.
Plant calendula on the border of your garden to keep pests away from the vegetable patch and at the end of the season, cut back to nearly ground level for future growth, or relocate by allowing the plant to go to seed, then collecting and scattering. Truly magic.
Happy Heartsease
Heartsease is one of my favourite "happy" flowers, as it is always smiling in the garden. A compact border plant, it's great to start growing at this time of year (but remember that it loves afternoon shade in the height of summer).
This plant attracts a variety of beneficial insects and grows well alongside cabbages, strawberries, and will happily peek its smiling head out from under the fruit trees. It will self-sow easily if allowed to go to seed, for fuss-free gardening.
Heartsease is another potent medicinal plant, with numerous applications. Known as a purifying herb, it's taken most commonly in the form of a tea for skin complaints, as an anti-inflammatory, diuretic and an expectorant. All-round, heartsease is an essential plant to have in the garden.
Beautiful Borage
My final spring planting pick is borage, with its stunning star-shaped blue and white flowers. These edible delights are best plucked in their prime, when they are full of sweet nectar, and added to salads or floated on top of a summer drink.
A long-flowering annual, if left to go to seed and die back on its own, borage will happily reproduce next autumn/winter.
Borage grows in full sun to semi shade, reaching a height of 30-40 cm. It has slightly prickly leaves, which deter unwanted pests, yet is highly attractive to bees and beneficial insects, who like to nestle in the foliage. Borage is a great companion for strawberries and tomatoes and is also extremely drought-tolerant and amenable to most soil conditions.
When buying a borage plant, smaller is better as it has a very delicate taproot which is easily damaged when transplanted or left in the pot too long.
At the end of its life, this incredible flower makes a great soil additive to boost potassium and calcium levels in your garden beds. Chop up the entire plant and use as a mulch around other plants, or add to the compost.
You can also use the stems and leaves to make a liquid fertiliser. Simply add them to a bucket of boiling water, stir and leave overnight, then strain off the plant material (use the discarded plants for mulch). Dilute two cups of tonic in a full watering can - what a perfect way to feed your plants from what you grow in your own garden.
For more gardening advice, visit growinspired.co.nz and discover Claire Mummery's online gardening course at www.growinspiredacademy.com