7 Reasons You Should Grow Flowers in Your Vegetable Garden

January 2, 2024 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

For foodies, homesteaders, and dedicated vegetable gardeners, it is easy to squeeze as many different vegetables into our gardens as possible and let other plants go by the wayside. This is a mistake! Some of the most beautiful and productive gardens are a mix of food crops and flowers. Whether you want to be as self-sufficient as possible or have a passion for heirloom tomatoes, adding flowers to your vegetable patch has many benefits.

Flowers attract pollinators.

Many of our favorite vegetable crops, like squash, watermelons, tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers, rely on insect pollination to produce. These pollinators do an incredible job, too!

A look at greenhouse tomatoes found that those compared with pollination by a vibrating hand wand (a tool workers use to ensure pollination manually), tomatoes pollinated by buzz-pollinating bees had improved seed set and higher fruit weight.

Adding flowers to your garden and aiming to have something blooming throughout the season can help support these creatures and ensure they spend more time in your garden. You won’t get a good harvest without them.

Flowers may help reduce pest and disease issues.

Companion planting isn’t just an old wive’s tale! There’s much evidence that avoiding monocultures and mixing plants together can help reduce pest and disease issues. Creating mixed plantings can help significantly reduce how diseases and pests can spread through a crop.

Try specific pairings if you have a recurring issue. For example, research has shown that French marigolds help protect tomatoes from whiteflies.

You can also take a more broad approach. A study on large monoculture plantings found that adding wildflower strips was highly effective at reducing pests and plant damage.

There are many edible flowers available.

Growing flowers doesn’t mean that you have to give up productive food-growing space. There are plenty of edible flowers that you can use to make soothing herbal teas, toss in fresh salads, or decorate cakes. A few of our favorite edible flowers include nasturtiums, chamomile, breadseed poppies, echinacea, and hollyhocks.

You can use them to create shade.

Generally, we don’t want our flowers shading our vegetable crops, but occasionally we might. When we’re trying to stretch the season for cool-weather-loving crops like lettuce and kale, having a few taller flowers around can be helpful to create a bit of shade.

They’re beautiful.

Growing as much of your food as possible is a wonderful goal. Hopefully, our above points illustrate that saving room for flowers can help with this goal. If you’re still not convinced that flowers deserve a bit of your garden, think about what you want your garden to feel like. Ultimately, gardens should bring joy. While vegetables are beautiful in their own right, tucking a few flowers in amongst the vegetables can make your garden a happier place to be.

Flowers can help provide habitat and food for wildlife.

While you probably know that pollinators are using your flowers for food, you may not be aware that they may use them for shelter, too. Some pollinators and beneficial insects use flower stalks or debris as shelter to overwinter or lay eggs.

Birds will enjoy the flowers in your vegetable patch, too. Songbirds enjoy perching on tall flower stalks and searching the seedheads of species like sunflowers and echinacea during the fall. They will also help pick a few pests off while they’re there. Of course, the charming Ruby-throated Hummingbirds of our area will also take advantage of blooms during the season.

Flowers can be low maintenance and affordable.

Growing flowers doesn’t have to be difficult or stressful. Some of the easiest flowers to start with are annuals like cosmos, marigolds, sunflowers, and zinnias. All four of these plants are easy to start indoors or direct sow. They grow fairly quickly and make a big impact in the garden.

These four are also easy to save seeds from, meaning you won’t need to purchase packets of seed each year, helping you cut costs. Given the opportunity, they also have a tendency to self-seed, and you’ll probably get a few volunteers, too!

If you don’t want to work on planting flowers every year, you can establish a few hardy perennials like coneflowers (echinacea), bee balm, salvia, or rudbeckia. Many of these options, such as the echinacea and rudbeckia, are also incredibly drought tolerant once established.

When you’re shopping for seeds this year, don’t forget to add a few flowers to your list! Flowers are easy to grow and can help you to have a healthier, more productive garden in 2024.

Garden Advice, Seed Saving

Growing Guide: Ground Cherries

December 18, 2023 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

You’ve probably grown tomatoes and maybe even tomatillos, but their lesser-known relative, the ground cherry, deserves a spot in your Solanaceae (nightshade family) lineup. Ground cherries have a more sweet, fruity flavor, hence the name ground cherry. They’re well suited to sweeter, dessert-type recipes than their relatives and are tasty fresh, too!

Ground Cherry History

Ground cherries are native to South and Central America and may have originated in Brazil before spreading to Peru and Chile. They were one of the many crops cultivated by indigenous peoples in the Americas before European contact, and Europeans brought them to England in 1774.

English colonists brought them to the Cape of Good Hope, earning them one of their other common names, the Cape Gooseberry. As colonists traveled with them, the plants made their way back to North America.

While ground cherries were popular with small farmers, they were never commercialized, probably due to their ripening and harvest, which we’ll get into in a bit. Today, they remain popular among specific communities like the Pennsylvania Dutch, who grow them for jams and preserves.

Starting Ground Cherry Seeds

Growing ground cherries is a lot like growing tomatoes! Start your seeds indoors about 6 to 8 weeks before your last frost. Plant the seeds about 1/4 inch deep, and for good germination, maintain a soil temperature between 75 and 85 degrees F.

Ground cherries typically take 7 to 10 days to germinate.

Transplanting Ground Cherries

Ground Cherries should be transplanted out after all danger of frost has passed. Harden off your transplants for a couple of weeks before planting.

Transplant them into a bed that has rich, well-drained, light soil. You may need to amend the bed with compost, as ground cherries are heavy feeders. You should also select a bed that receives full sun.

Rotate Your Ground Cherries

Rotating your crops is essential, and ground cherries are no exception. We like to rotate crops by family. Ground cherries are a member of the Solanaceae family, like tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, eggplants, and potatoes, so we avoid planting them in beds where any of these crops have grown in the last couple of years.

One of our customer favorites, Cossack Pineapple Ground Cherries

Ground Cherry Spacing

Unlike tomatoes and tomatillos, ground cherries don’t require trellising or cages. However, they still need proper spacing. Ground cherries have a sprawling, spreading growth form, so you should place them 2 to 4 feet apart. In some varieties, like Mary’s Niagara Ground Cherry, plants can surpass 6 feet wide in good growing conditions.

Ground Cherry Care

Keep your ground cherries weeded and water consistently. Keep the soil moist but not soggy. After the soil temperature has risen in June, mulching around plants is a good idea. It will help with weeding and prevent the fruits from getting dirty or rotting as quickly around harvest time.

Harvesting Ground Cherries

Ground cherries are edible and tasty when fully ripe and yellow, and their husk is brown and dry. Usually, this also means the cherries have fallen off the plant and are lying on the ground. Collect your fallen cherries and remove the husks before eating.

This habit of dropping ripe fruit is one of the reasons ground cherries have never seen widespread commercial interest.

Using Ground Cherries

Ground cherries can be eaten fresh, cooked, or preserved for later. Ground cherries also have a good shelf life and can be kept fresh for weeks before processing. Here are a few of our favorite recipes we’ve found for ground cherries:

Preserve your ground cherries for later with Grandma Ott’s Ground Cherry Jam from Seed Savers.

Make breakfast special with this 10-Minute Ground Cherry Coffee Cake from The Kitchn.

Try this Ground Cherry Tart from The Forager Chef for a simple dessert that really lets the ground cherry flavor shine through.

Try a more savory approach with this recipe from Ground Cherry Salsa from Health Starts in the Kitchen.

Turn your ground cherries into moist and delicious cake with this Coley Cooks recipe for Ground Cherry Torte.

Saving Ground Cherry Seed

You may not have to save seeds, as ground cherries have a strong tendency to self-sow. However, if you’d like to steward a variety, we recommend separating varieties by 300 feet for pure seed. You only need one plant to save viable seeds, but if you want to maintain a variety over many generations, save seeds from between 5 and 20 plants.

Processing and saving the seeds is exactly like processing tomato seeds. Squeeze the seeds and pulp into a jar, add about as much water, and let the mixture ferment for 2 to 3 days, stirring once a day. A little mold growth on top is fine.

After fermenting, add more water so that the pulp and non-viable seeds float to the surface and pour them off. You may need to repeat this a couple of times. Then, rinse your good seeds in a mesh strainer or cheesecloth with clean water.

Let your seeds dry out of direct sunlight for three weeks. Then, store them in an airtight container out of the sun.

Announcements

New Varieties for 2024!

December 14, 2023 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

New year, new seeds! We’re heading into 2024 by offering a few new varieties on our catalog and website. Some of these are heirlooms that have been shared with us, like the Turkish Cekirdegi Oyali Watermelon. Others are new varieties like Xiye Butternut Squash that have recently been bred for features like disease resistance, climate adaptability, and flavor. Not all of our new varieties are available on the website yet, but these fourteen are, so be sure to grab them while our seed supplies last!

Adirondack Blue Seed Potato

This new variety from Cornell University will quickly become one of your garden staples. Adirondack Blue produces moist, stunning, blue-skinned, and blue-fleshed potatoes. The vigorous plants support good yields.

Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera)

Ashwagandha is an important herb in Indian traditional medicine. Herbalists use the roots to strengthen the immune system, increase resiliency to stress, and relieve insomnia. You can also use the berries as vegetable rennet.

Ashwagandha is native to the dry regions of India, the Middle East, and North Africa, where it grows to be a small shrub. It’s in the solanacea or nightshade family, like tomatoes and peppers. In the U.S., it’s only perennial to USDA zone 10 but can be grown as an annual in temperate regions.

Appalachian White Wheat

Homescale grain production is easier than you think, especially with this excellent variety from North Carolina State University. Appalachian White Wheat has high protein (14%) and mild flavor.

It’s a semidwarf variety with good disease resistance to most wheat diseases of the Mid-Atlantic. ½ pound sows 125-250 square feet as a cover crop or 250 square feet as a grain crop.

Biquinho Spice Pepper (C. chinense)

These little Brazilian Peppers are relatively mild and delicious pickled. In Brazil, they’re a popular snack in botecos or neighborhood bars and are often served with sausage or fish. They get their name, which means “little beak” in Portuguese, from their inverted tear-drop shape.

Biquinho Spice Peppers grow about 2 feet tall and are highly branched. The peppers are small, about ½ by ¾ inches, and relatively mild. Their harvests are more likely to taper off than with other Chinese types.

Cekirdegi Oyali Watermelon

Cekirdegi Oyali is a Turkish heirloom introduced to the U.S. by our friends at Two Seeds in Pod. This variety produces small melons, about 5 pounds each, with sweet orange flesh.

One of the joys of saving seeds from this variety is its unique-looking seeds, which look like they have been carved. As they dry, the black seed casing cracks, revealing the white seed inside.

Fiesta Trailing Mixed Color Nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus)

With a stunning mix of yellow, orange, rose, and crimson blooms, Fiesta is a must-have for any nasturtium lover. These plants produce long trailing vines of attractive, edible leaves and flowers with watercress-like flavor that works well for salads and garnishes.

Green Finger Cucumber

Green Finger is an excellent variety for market and home growers bred by Cornell University. It produces crisp, thin-skinned cucumbers 8 to 10 inches long. They have great flavor and productivity and consistent fruits.

Green Finger shows excellent disease resistance to powdery mildew, papaya ring spot virus, watermelon mosaic virus, zucchini yellow mosaic virus, and high tolerance to angular leaf spot. It matures in sixty days.

Enjoy them right off the vine as you stroll through your garden, in a salad, pickled, or as an addition of crisp freshness to your cool summer drink!

Pink Zinnias

Who doesn’t love zinnias? These easy-to-grow flowers are staples for all kinds of flower gardens, so we jumped at the chance to add a new zinnia to the listings.

Pink Zinnias produce a smorgasbord of pink flowers on tall plants, including a lovely mix of single, double, and semi-double flowers.

Purple Viking Potatoes

Purple Viking has great looks and flavor. These attractive potatoes have purple skins with pink splashes and bright white flesh. They have great flavor, too, and are excellent mashed or baked.

Purple Viking produces big potatoes on compact plants. Their productivity and beauty make them an excellent choice for market gardeners.

Quan Yin Batavian Lettuce

This Batavian-type lettuce produces lovely, big, dense heads. Quan Yin grows well in the summer heat, germinating more easily in hot soil than other lettuce types. It’s cold tolerant too and overwinters well in mild winters.

Our seed stock for this variety came from the wonderful folks at Siskiyou Seeds.

Queensland Romaine Lettuce

This Australian heirloom has great heat resistance and is a favorite for growers in Florida and the Deep South! It features tasty, large, light green leaves.

Our seed stock for Queensland Romaine came from the amazing seed keeper and artist Melissa DeSa. You can find her on Instagram @southern_seed_queen.

Showstar Melampodium

Looking for easy-to-grow plants that tolerate heat, humidity, drought, and poor soil? Look no further! Showstar Melampodium produces mound-shaped plants with many 1 ¼ -inch yellow flowers. It flowers most heavily in the fall and continues until frost, without deadheading!

Spinners Ivory Cotton

This new cotton variety was bred by Cindy Conner through Homeplace Earth’s Cotton Project right here in Virginia. She bred Spinners Ivory from a cross of green and brown varieties.

Cindy named this variety for its naked seeds (no lint), making it easy to remove by hand or spin right off the seed. It has a short staple and off-white color.

If you’re interested in cotton or fiber arts, we highly recommend you read Cindy’s book Homegrown Flax and Cotton: DIY Guide to Growing, Processing, Spinning & Weaving Fiber to Cloth.

Xiye Butternut Squash (C. moschata)

This new winter squash was bred by Care of the Earth Community Farm in Corryton, Tennessee, and named in honor of climate activist Xiye Bastida. This variety was bred from a cross between San Jose Mountain Club Squash (from Costa Rica) and Waltham Butternut.

This great-tasting squash was bred to resist downy mildew and tolerate variable and unpredictable climatic conditions. The plants are fully vining and very productive. Xiye Butternut is sweet and nutty and has a caramel or butterscotch flavor when roasted, and the exterior color is a deep tan.

Selection is ongoing for butternut shape, size (selecting for 4 lb. size), smaller seed cavity, dry matter content, flavor, and ability to store for at least three months. Xiye is currently in its 7th generation; expect a bit of variability for all characteristics.

Adding new varieties to Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and preserving old favorites is always a careful balancing act. Whether heirlooms or newly bred varieties, these fourteen crops have earned a place on our website and catalog for their delicious flavor, hardiness, disease resistance, beauty, and productivity. Consider adding one of these new varieties to your garden this season, and be sure to let us know how it goes!