14 Best Flowers to Grow in a Vegetable Garden

Foreign. Welcome to the Grow youw Self podcast. My name is Nicole John C. Burke. I am the author of two gardening books, one coming very soon, Kitchen Garden Revival and Leaves, Roots and Fruit. My next one's coming up in a few months and I am all about getting you into the garden. Even though you're busy, even though you've never gardened before, even though you don't have any knowledge of gardening. Don't worry, I started the same way you did. So today I want to show you how flowers can make vegetable gardening so much easier, so much more beautiful, so much more productive, and so much more fun. Who doesn't love flowers? I mean, yes, we can buy ourselves flowers, right, and put them in our vegetable garden. Listen, flowers is an essential part of all of my raised bed kitchen gardens. Anytime you see a garden that I put in, you're going to see lots of flowers. Not in the middle of the bed, but, but on the outside edge of the bed. And I always have a flower list that I pull from. And today you're going to get my cheat sheet. You're going to get my flower list. Sound like a good plan? Okay, let's do it. So you're going to change your flowers based on the season. I teach you this in my book, Kitchen Garden Revival. How to understand the seasons of where you're gardening, no matter where you're gardening. And we've got cool season, warm season, hot season. So I'm going to give you the flowers for each season. If you want to dive into figuring out what season you're in right now, check out my book, Kitchen Garden Revival. So cool season is 35 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit around that. All right, so still a chance of frost. These are the flowers I put in right at the start of the season. So even though it's cold, even though it may snow, it may frost. Like temps are going to go way low. I still put in these flowers. So my favorites are pansies and violas. I think you call them violas. You might call them violas. Violas, I don't know. My daughter played viola in the orchestra. So I'm going with viola. V I O L A is how you spell it in the cold. I also love doing snapdragons and then also chamomile and calendula. Those are the herbs that are frost resistant, frost tolerant. So those are my go to flowers when it's cold outside. Now are there more flowers you can grow in the cool season? Yes, a couple of others that I tuck in here and there are bulbs. Things like daffodils and hyacinths and tulips are also fun to put into the raised beds. However, I find those are so short lived with their blooms that sometimes it's hard to know if they're really worth their spacing. Not so with pansies, violas and snapdragons. Those things will flower and flower and flower some more. They fill out the edges of the raised beds and make it so beautiful. I love the colors, I love the way they break up the space. And they also give early food to bees and butterflies, those pollinators we want to be supporting with our garden. So those are my cool season flower go to's, not for out in the wild, not for in my ornamental garden, but for inside my raised beds. So violas, pansies, snapdragons, those are my favorites. Chamomile and calendula for my herbs. And then I might throw in some bulbs, daffodils, hyacinths, or tulips. Now let's move on to the warm season. Warm and hot season, really. So this is when the temps are going to be over 65 degrees Fahrenheit. 65 to 85 degrees. No chance, and I say it again, no chance of frost. So these flowers are not going to be frost tolerant. They don't like getting cold. So first up, everybody's garden favorite is marigolds. I know people swear to you that marigolds will keep every animal out of your garden. They just have these magical powers, apparently. Well, you know, here's just a little clue. I still get rabbits and squirrels and all kinds of animals in my garden and I have lots of marigolds there. But marigolds do have a very strong smell and they do help with pest control. So I love all different shapes and sizes of marigolds. My favorite is a gem marigold. It's a tiny little, little, little bitty flower. The smell is off the charts. And they're so perfect for being in a raised bed. So gem marigolds. But of course, you can use just your average big box store marigold. And then the bigger ones I've gotten, I think one's called Kilimanjaro marigold from Baker Creek. It's a white marigold. I love that one. So marigolds are a huge winner in the kitchen garden. Don't put them on the interior. We put them on the border of the bed so it gets plenty of space. And, and you always see those flowers shining through the next flower that I love to use in A raised bed in the warm and the hot season is salvia. So not a big salvia, not like a big bush perennial salvia, but a purple or red salvia that is an annual. Annual means it's going to go from seed to flower, finish its life cycle in one year, and it will not come back except from seed. So I love these reds and purple salvias. I put them all over the edges of my gardens. They create this spiky flower. And the bees and the butterflies absolutely love that shape of flower. Plus it just adds a little bit of different shape and feel to the garden. I love the deep colors of the purple and red as well. I think there's a white salvia too, but I mostly use the red and the purple. The next flower I love in my garden in the warm and hot season is angelonia. Man, this flower is a stunner. It is such a producer of gorgeous flowers. You can get yellow, you can get white, you can get pink, you can get purple. And when I was working in my gardens for my clients in Houston, you know, we have super hot, humid summers there. And I'm not exaggerating when I say we put this angelonia in in May, and it would go all the way until like, September, October. These flowers are a great cut flower, too. You can cut them off and put them in a vase, bring them inside, and they'll just keep giving you more flowers in the garden. They're great for bees and butterflies. They have like a conical shape, little cone like structure. Really, really pretty, all the different colors. I just planted a garden up with these yesterday. White, pink, and purple. They're gorgeous. You got to add these to your garden as well. Next up, nasturtium. Oh, my goodness. This plant is a stunner. It's full of flowers. You can eat the whole thing. You can eat the leaves, you can eat the flowers, you can eat the seeds. Make little capers with the seeds, and you can get a vining variety of a nasturtium or a bush variety. These are going to grow great from seed. And we actually sell these in the gardenary seed store. And you get just this amazing bush on the side of your bed. It's so beautiful. And here's the incredible thing. They're not just edible. They don't just grow from seeds so quickly, but they also are a pest protectant. So. So they're what we call a trap crop. They're going to attract the bees, not the bees, the bad guys, to their flowers so that they'll be less interested in Your, you know, your kale, your cabbage, your tomatoes. So they are what we call a trap crop. They literally like trap the bugs there rather than letting them come to your garden. So nasturtium, all different kinds of colors. You can grow them over a trellis. You can grow them flowering over the edge of the bed into your pathways. They are a must, must. Grow flowers in your kitchen garden. Next up are zinnias. Be careful here. You want to be sure you're getting a smaller variety of a zinnia. I think they have like Thumbelina zinnias. You want to get the ones that are a little bit more compact because zinnias can go wild and big. Those I would want to put outside my raised beds, you know, in the, the planting area, the in ground area. But the smaller zinnias, man, oh man. Put these along the borders. My first year in Chicago, I put them right on the border. I had a coral zinnia. It was a stunner. It was so gorgeous. And again, it's also a pest deterrent and a pest control. Oftentimes, like Japanese beetles will go to zinnias before they'll go to your eggplant or your tomatoes. So zinnias are so great in the garden. They're a huge attractor for pollinators. And they're just gorgeous. You can grow them from seed right in your beds. Next up would be sunflowers. Again, same rule applies that we have for zinnias. Whereas I don't want to have the big, big zinnias in my raised beds. Same with sunflowers. Put the small sunflowers in your raised beds and then the big tall ones, the ones that are 5ft 8ft tall. Put those in your in ground beds. You really don't want an 8 foot tall sunflower in a raised bed. Maybe you do. I don't. It would crowd and shade the things that really need that. Real estate and sunflowers aren't very fussy. But a little teddy bear sunflower, now that, that's going to look so beautiful and great inside your raised beds. All right, so those are my favorite flowers to put into raised beds. Flowers that I would not put into raised beds are going to be perennial flowers. Perennial means that the plant comes back year after year after year from the root stock. So it might die down in winter. But. But as soon as the earth warms up, as soon as the soil warms, there's no chance of frost or things are just getting more spring, like they're going to come back from the root and they'll be like doubling in size each and every year. So I don't put those kind of plants in my raised beds. One, because they don't need the raised bed to grow plants like echinacea and rudbeckia. These are perennial flowers. They are not fussy plants. They are not super needy plants. And so to me, it's wasting the real estate of my raised beds, which is way more expensive. The soil is more. The beds are more. I don't really want to waste that prime real estate on a plant that doesn't need it. So any of those perennial flowers, I'm going to keep them in perennial beds outside of my raised beds. So redbeckia, echinacea, anise, hyssop, all of those, those big, like any kind of salvia, a sage, a Texas sage, things like that, they go outside the raised beds. Milkweed would be another example. I love growing milkweed, but I would never put milkweed in my raised beds. So all those perennials, they need to stay out natives as well. Any kind of native plant, native grass, native flower that's going to stay out of a raised bed. Again, because it doesn't need the raised bed. These raised beds, they're for fussier plants, okay? They're for plants that need special soil, special tending, more root growth. Native plants are the exact opposite of that. They need nothing extra. That's why they're native, right? They know how to grow in your town, your city, your climate. So no native flowers, no perennial flowers, and then no super big flowers. So like I said earlier, I wouldn't grow a really large sunflower or really large zinnia, coreopsis and cosmos. Those two flowers, I love those. They're beautiful. They grow from seed very easily. But I generally don't put them in my raised beds because they get so, so wild and big. They'll grow 3 to 5ft wide and 5 to 8ft tall. And I just don't want to waste my precious real estate of my raised beds on a cosmos or coreopsis that's going to be just as happy, even probably more happy, growing right in the dirt. So that's the rules, okay? Flowers have to go with vegetables. Vegetables love flowers. You'll have to check out my friend's book, Vegetables Love Flowers. I'll put a link for that below this video. She's amazing and she talks about the different flowers that go great with vegetables. They really do. But these are my short list. This is the list that you want to follow. So when you're growing in the cool season violas, violas, however you want to call it, pansies and snapdragons, chamomile and calendula. Those are my go tos for the cool season when there's still a chance of frost. As soon as frost has passed, we're going with warm season flowers like marigolds and zinnias and nasturtiums. We've got salvias, small sunflowers, and you cannot forget the angelonia. She is a stunner. So those are my favorite flowers. They make the raised bed so beautiful, so productive, protect it from pests and it's just more fun to grow flowers with your vegetables. So tell me if you've got anything to add to the list right below this video and then check out this video about how I plant the garden. You want to see how I lay out all these plants, especially the flowers. And you're going to love this recent project we did, planting up a Flower and Vegetable garden inside a raised bed. Check that out to see how I put all these things into practice. And then check out the Gardenary calendar. It's completely for free. You can get it@gardenary.com calendar we'll also put the link right below this video. You give me two dates, I'll give you all the rest so you know what to plant and when to plant it, including your flowers. Thanks so much for listening and watching the Grow youw Self Podcast. Tell a friend, tell a neighbor, tell you know, I don't know your dog. Tell them to listen to the Grow youw Self podcast so they know what to do in their own garden this season. Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you next time. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. You can keep listening anywhere. You love getting your podcast delivered on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, iHeartRadio, you name it, we are there for you. And if you want to read the notes and get our free resources to help you grow more, you can go to gardenary.com podcast.