Veg vs flowers - the showdown
Post categories: organic gardening,Ìýveg
| 14:38 UK time, Thursday, 10 March 2011
My delphiniums are worried. With so many new grow-your-own-ers, it seems flowers are being left behind. by up to 70% for some suppliers, pushing petals to horticultural sidelines. Images of freshly plucked lettuce are everywhere.
veg beds and growing flowers
On many levels, this is wonderful. Growing food offers important life skills, from , and brings together unlikely communities, as . GYO helps globally, supporting the many around the country preparing for peak oil, and mathematically, towards eating your for a healthier diet. My wallet feels healthy too as it .
But delphiniums are opinionated flowers. Not to mention their woody counterparts such as Ribes and roses, looking longingly over the fence at the veg patch.
I manage a food skills training programme, and have begun suffering 'dramatic pauses' of late before remembering the name of a flower variety. I have, of course, sought immediate comfort in the herbaceous border, refreshing my memory with my notepad and photo collection.
But do flowers risk becoming too low profile, their benefits overlooked by gardeners in a generation inspired by books on growing veg written by Jamie Oliver and Carol Klein?
It doesn't need to be an either/or though: vegetables and flowers can live side by side, and to the benefit of both. For example, flowers attract eager pest-eating insects. Lovely green, slightly translucent hoverfly larva munch on aphids while their parents enjoy hardy annual flowers, such as poached egg plant (Limnanthes douglasii ). Parasitic wasps and birds enjoy chasing caterpillars and other pests, while ladybirds and their larva overcome a terrible sense of direction (as I've observed when weeding!) to maintain a healthy appetite.
Rudbeckia
I find this horticulturally exciting in March. Growing flowers underpins organic growing: saving money, time, and environmental impact of intervening to solve pest problems. I enjoy the satisfying hum of active insects when relaxing in summer, and autumnal excuse to not tidy flower stems so predators can locally hibernate.
I'm also suspicious of food 'monocultures', preferring flowers in residence so airborne pests can't see vegetable so easily. This form of companion planting is my reason for planting furry Rudbeckia seedlings - a favourite since my 103-year-old Grandad let me draw his flowers when they were still taller than me.
Happy medium - carrot flowers
Perhaps carrots offer a happy medium. This lovely, usually co-operative root vegetable offers the best of both worlds. It produces the most magnificent, two metre tall flower spikes if left un-harvested overwinter, or replanted in spring. The umbrella-esque flowers are characteristic of the family that includes parsnips and coriander. Great for attracting pest eating insects and novel hook to get people growing food and flowers!
Some industry folk think , although I've found the demand for growing advice is still strong. However now the 'cut-your-own' trend is tipped to be the next big thing in grow-your-own, with nurseries launching cut flower products. It's perfect timing to transfer veg learnt skills to raising flowers.
At least it means my delphiniums are safe from the veg patch this year. It's the slugs they should worry about.
Philip Turvil is a horticultural adviser for , and also runs their programme linking gardeners all around the country with experts offering advice and support.
Comment number 1.
At 13th Mar 2011, will wrote:Have you checked this point of view with Monty? He is the darling of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ after all, and previous experience suggests you do as Monty does or you do it somewhere else.
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Comment number 2.
At 13th Mar 2011, Doug Arnold wrote:Oh the anguish, the angst, the creative planning in the cusp of the dichotomy of thinking: veg or flowers? Having had the sleepless nights and the pain of the indecision of the purist mind. Well I got me a lotty now so the veggies go down on the plot and the flowers is in the garding. Also this gives me two excuses to tool up and go on the rampage of the ineluctable modality of the herbacious,(to go all Joyceian). However, if, like me, you are just a working class oik, with no class or taste whatsoever, one might just see that it really does not matter and in the average pocket plot of the burbs, there is no room for one or t'other, therefore it pays to lettuce up the half hardy plot and rocket the rose bed.
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