How To Grow Edible Flowers

The first step in adding edible flowers to your garden and your plate is to make sure that you have correctly identified flowers that are edible. Do you research - either online or with a good handbook - and make sure that you have the right species. Don't eat anything you're unsure of - it could be poisonous. And, as with all new foods, try a small portion at first.

The second step is to make sure that your edible plants are safe to eat. Don't eat flowers that may have been sprayed with pesticides - pesticides are used on ornamental plants that aren't licensed for use on food plants. Play it safe and make sure your plants aren't sprayed, and aren't polluted by road or animal dirt. And if you're harvesting in the wild, do so respectfully.

Start adding flowers into your diet.

Nasturtiums are common garden flowers that are edible - they have a peppery flavor that makes a great addition to salads, in small doses. You'll have the most colourful salad in the neighborhood, and you won't need to dead-head those plants either! At the end of the season, any seeds formed can be picked as a replacement for capers, too.

Lavender is another flower that many people have, but most don't know that the flowers are edible and can be used as a pot herb. Lavender is quite a strong flavor, so use those flowers sparingly. They lend themselves to flavoring sweet dishes - an easy place to start is using a few flowers to flavor sugar, and then using it to bake.

Scented roses add so much to a garden, but they can also be used in the kitchen - think of the rose water used in Middle Eastern dishes. When you're eating rose petals, make sure to remove the bitter white part of each petal. You could also make crystallized rose petals for edible decorations, or coat them in chocolate for a real treat.

Harvest a few flowers from the vegetable patch.

Chives have beautiful purple flowers that are edible and make a great garnish. So do garlic chives, garlic, leeks and onions, if they flower. They have a similar onion flavor to the rest of the plant.

Zucchini and squash flowers really brighten up the kitchen garden for a few days, and you can pick them and eat them - the classic recipe is to stuff them with cream cheese and deep-fry them, sometimes in a light batter. Early in the season you may find you only have male flowers on your zucchini plants, and you can eat all of those without reducing the yields of fruit later on.

Calendula is known as the pot marigold because it used to be commonly used in cooking. Now grown mainly for the flowers and the insects they bring into the vegetable garden, calendula petals can also be used as a substitute for saffron as they add a golden yellow color to dishes.

Look further afield.

I have mentioned just a few edible flowers that will be familiar to lots of gardeners, but there are plenty more. Look to other cultures, too, which are far more in touch with their food culture than we are. The Japanese, for example, make great use of chrysanthemums.

With a little bit of research you can have a garden that's beautiful, and edible, and some attractive and unusual meals.