Get ideas from my successes and failures in interplanting flowers with vegetables –
Last year I experimented with including many more flowers in with my vegetable garden. I wanted the color without giving up much space, so I tried to choose flower – vegetable combinations that shared space well. For instance, I planted zinnias to poke up through sprawling squash vines. Portulaca were tucked at the feet of pole beans. Calendula peaked out from the base of cornstalks.
Not every combination was equally successful. I thought my dahlia seeds were for the shorter, bedding plants. They weren’t. Fortunately, both the pepper plants and the dahlias prospered in spite of this, though it was harder to harvest the peppers. I am not sure if the cosmos around the cantaloupe was optimal.
Some flowers surprised me
Some successes were unplanned, such as the volunteer sweet peas with the potatoes. The trellis was definitely instrumental in making that work. The nasturtiums that popped up around the green peas stuck around nicely when my succession planting there kept getting eaten by something.
See the results in my video!
My video shows many of these flower – vegetable combinations at various stages. I hope it inspires you to add some color and cutting flowers to your vegetable garden this coming year –
To see some of the flowers I have grown from seed, click here, or search for the flower name in the search bar above.
To learn more about growing things from seed, read Seed Starting Basics for the Home Gardener. There is a video with it.