Pretty vegetable garden? I want to use combinations of flowers & vegetables in my...
I want to use combinations of flowers & vegetables in my garden but I want the effect to be pretty, any suggestions?
Flowers:
Marigolds, Day Lillies, Tulips, Other assorted flower bulbs, if you want bulbs so you don't have to replant every year.
Vegetables:
Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Green Peppers, Watermelon, Cantaloupe, Pumpkin. All of these hold flowers as blossoms before the vegetable starts to grow.
Taller growing sunflowers - you can then plant climbing beans underneath them and the stalks act as supports while attracting bees and giving you flowers. Can grasp sunflowers in shades of pallid, brown/red and orange today.
dwarf sunflowers around the edge of the vegies give you flowers and edible seed
Violets flower and you can add the flowers to salads.
nasturtiums enjoy edible leaves for a hot adition to salads, and the flowers can be shredded for a colourful salad tally too.
marigolds (African in the summer and English surrounded by the winter) are colourful, and the flower petals added to salads.
the herb bergamot is very bee attracting, have large red fluffy flowers, and you can use the leaves for flavouring
Chives enjoy purple flowers in summer, are toothsome and you get the leaves for cooking
carnations are pretty contained by full flower, can pick them for the vase, and flowers are sweet flavoured and used for garnish and added to salads (petals only - underneath of flower is bitter)
Answers: There are some darn fine books on this subject that you will find at the public library.
So, I would never plant a strictly utilitarian vegetable garden, and within fact own gone to great pains to create striking ones. The most spectacular are always Formal Knot Gardens, within which you lay out geometric patterns surrounded by the garden area, the simplest to illustrate surrounded by words is 4 squares of equal size with a sundial or bird hip bath in the center. You follow? Then you creep these beds beside your choice of greenery, typically something that will last adjectives of the summer. You can go so far as to use a everlasting non-vegetable material, such as dwarf box, or you can clip closely planted herb such as hyssop or one of the very tiny-leaved dwarf basils. Then pack in the bed near either one type of vegetable, or another model of them. (example: diagonal rows of alternating red and green oakleaf lettuce.)
Be sure to bring in some echelon. It is always worthwhile to splurge on something that will attach some real class surrounded by this department, such as a quartet of standard bay trees. Stunning! Also don't forget to throw within a few frivolously showy flowers for color and interest.
Definitely marigolds around the fringe only and nasturtiums too this site give more a more detailed list http://gardening.about.com/od/organicgar...