CHAPTER
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How to Interplant Your Vegetable Patch Bringing your vegetable garden to life with flowers is easy. Designating two small spaces in a vegetable patch for flowers and then treating them as cutting gardens will produce a steady supply of flowers from early spring right up to the first fall frost. This little flower-garden island will provide more flowers than you might expect for both you and the beneficial creatures you want to invite into the garden. The most productive vegetable gardens are made up of annual plants, and the same is true for cut-flower gardens. Annual plants go from seed to producing blooms and fruit within 1 year. These plants produce the most per square foot. A bonus of growing annual plants in the garden is the clean-slate effect: you can try new and different plants each season. While there is a place in a cutting garden for perennial plants, such as the peony, I find perennials best suited to the surrounding landscape or other designated garden spaces, not in the annual bed or garden. The basic recipe I follow in the garden is 40 percent flowers to 60 percent vegetables. This ratio allows enough space even in a small garden to have a couple of different flowers blooming throughout the season and will not leave the garden bare of blooms. Following the suggested ratio in any size of garden will increase the potential for more pollinators, other beneficial insects, and plenty of blooms to harvest. The more blooming flowers are added throughout the seasons, the more benefits will be reaped. The key to having an ongoing supply of blooms is to have two planting areas for flowers. One area or bed will be blooming while the other spot is in the
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process of being planted and growing for the next season of flowers. While enjoying the spring blooms, you will be planting the summer blooms, and so on. Keeping the flowers of the season clustered together leads to easier tending, but it also makes it easier for the pollinators and beneficial insects to find the flowers. One of the challenges we face when planning our gardens is how to divvy up the available space to make the best use of it. This applies not just to the ratio of vegetables to flowers but also to achieving a balance within each of those groups. We almost always want to grow more than we have space for. You can expand and even double what you can grow in a space by realizing that annual plants have a lifespan. When they stop contributing to the effort of a working garden, it is time for them to be replaced.
An early-spring harvest of leaf lettuce, dill, and bachelor buttons gets spring off to a tasty and beautiful start.
APPEN DI X
Allowing space for two patches of flowers in the vegetable garden provides a consistent supply of blooms in the garden and for the kitchen table.
Learning and practicing this discipline will help you make the most of every square foot of the garden and keep maintenance to a minimum while maximizing your rewards. Removing a crop at its decline and replacing it with a fresh planting is my secret to reaping such abundance from my small urban farm. In my experience, the next natural step in the life of a tired plant is removal. There is no point in leaving a plant to decline until the end of the growing season. These removed plants continue to contribute to the garden in a whole new way; I toss them into the compost heap, where they will become next year’s soil food (more on that in Chapter 8). Treating this garden as a working garden and not a landscape bed will open the door for more blooms
to harvest. I suggest that this garden, no matter how big or small, be located out of view from where you might work or sit in the house. Why? Because while this garden will be a beauty, its purpose is to produce beautiful blooms and delicious organic food for the table, not to be confused with and viewed as a landscape bed. Folks who can view and enjoy the garden from inside their home are less likely to harvest the flowers as often as needed and rotate crops as suggested because they enjoy looking at them so much. My suggestion is based on years of fielding questions and listening to experiences of gardeners. The perfect place to locate this garden is exactly where you don’t landscape because it is out of sight, perhaps along the side of the house or behind the garage.
A PPEN DI X
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