6 Beneficial Flowers to Plant in your Veggie Garden this Summer
With spring in full swing it’s the perfect time to plant out your summer veggies. However, don’t forget whilst browsing the nursery aisles to also pick up some beneficial flowers to plant in and around your veggie garden as well.
Planting flowers as companion plants around your veggie garden will help create an even healthier veggie garden. There are many beneficial flowers out there which can aid your veggie garden in numerous ways including:
deterring pests with their strong scent
attracting beneficial insect predators to help control pest populations
attracting pollinators to aid in veggie plant pollination
providing cut flowers for vases at home
providing edible flowers that can be used in cooking, if edible!
providing a living ground cover to prevent soils from drying out
providing beautiful colour in the garden
When planting flowers, you can choose to plant them in pots and scatter them around the garden beds so you can save your garden bed space for veggies. Or, you can plant them along the edges and footpaths of your garden beds, in their own separate garden bed near by or plant them directly in your garden bed interspersed with the veggies.
Previously, I’ve planted my flowers directly into our veggie garden beds but this year I’m planning to move some of them out of the our garden beds and scatter them around in pots. I’ll also plant some directly into soil in a different area for fruit trees.
CHOOSING CONTAINERS & POTS
When choosing containers and pots for your flowers, do make sure to choose ones with drainage holes or if not, ones which you can drill drainage holes into. Also keep in mind that when a pot is filled it’s going to be really heavy so if you’re wanting to be able to move them around, then consider choosing one that’s made out of a lighter fabrication especially if it’s a larger style.
When it comes to styles, I love the tin look of Northcote Pottery’s Irondale range - they’re absolutely gorgeous and give a rustic, country cottage feel to your outdoor decor. This range is also lightweight and easy to carry as whilst they look just like tin, they’re made of high density resin. The other kind of look I love are white egg shaped pots with subtle detailing such as the terrazzo pattern in the two I picked up here. These ones are also by Northcote Pottery and I just love how white pots like these can add a touch of resort-living feel to your garden. The two I have are the White Terrazzo Egg in medium and small.
CHOOSING YOUR SOIL FOR CONTAINERS
When planting in pots, choose a premium potting mix to ensure your plant has the best possible start. For this project I’m using Osmocote’s Premium Potting mix which you can also get in a 50L size for better value.
And of course, you’ll need your flowers! Below I’ll be sharing with you six of my favourite beneficial flowers to plant in your veggie garden for summer.
Alyssum (Sweet Alice)
I planted alyssum last year and loved how many bees it attracted! It grows teeny tiny flowers with small leaves but surprisingly grows and spreads out to quite a size. Alyssum is almost like a ground cover so you can use it accordingly. Here i’ve planted two little bunches in a pot and it’ll likely fill up the whole pot come summer and spread across the edges. I’m also planning to plant the remainder of the punnet as ground cover near my fruit trees and seeing how they like it there as well.
Borage
borage
Borage is so easy to grow and bees absolutely love their blue flowers. When planting borage, be sure to give it lots of space as it can grow up to 1x1 metres in size. And once you plant borage, it’s likely it’ll self seed and pop up around your garden every year on. After our first year of planting borage, we found so many borage seedlings scattered around the garden and more than plenty to share with friends that we didn’t have to plant anymore from seed again. I recently carefully transplanted a volunteer seedling into a pot to experiment and see if I can contain its size!
Borage flowers (as well as the rest of the plant actually) are edible and I love using them as decorations in ice cubes and drinks.
Calendula
calendula
Calendula is another easy to grow beneficial to have around the garden. Its flowers attract bees which help pollination & repel pests making it an excellent companion plant in the veggie garden. Calendula is also edible as well and has medicinal properties. You may have heard of this flower as it’s often used as an ingredient in skincare and other similar products!
Lavender
Lavender is another flower I love having around the veggie garden. Their blooms are so fragrant to have around the garden but did you know their strong scent can be used to mask the scent of nearby plants and confuse pests and deter them from going for them? Not to mention you can dry your own flowers to use around the house!
Marigold
marigold
Often confused with calendula, as they have very similar looking blooms. However, you can tell them apart by the shape of their leaves. Marigolds are great for attracting pollinators to your garden, beneficial predators that will eat aphids and other pests in your garden and also have edible blooms which can be used in salads or as food decoration.
Nasturtiums
Nasturtiums are another fabulous plant for your garden and are useful in deterring pests. They’ll easily grow in poor soils which help them produce more flowers. The plant is edible as well. The flowers making gorgeous decorations to your summer salads and dishes. The leaves can be made into pesto and the seeds can actually be used to make capers! The only thing is this plant grows prolifically so be sure to choose a spot it’ll have plenty of room. You can either let it creep across the ground as ground cover, train it vertically with a plant trainer (left pic: what I’m doing this season using this Whites Black Tuscan Plant Trainer) or train it up an arch (right pic: what I did last season when I grew it in our veggie garden).
