The easiest edible flowers to grow are marigolds and nasturtiums. Marigolds offer robust growth and a unique flavor, ideal for salads and pastries, while nasturtiums provide a spicy kick but require careful management to prevent invasive spread. Both thrive with minimal effort, making them perfect for gardeners seeking quick, edible blooms.
Edible flowers enhance culinary creativity and offer medicinal benefits, but selecting the right varieties is crucial for success. Gardeners often struggle with invasive species or finicky plants, so choosing resilient options like marigolds and nasturtiums ensures reliable harvests. These flowers also serve as natural pest deterrents, adding functional value to home gardens.
This guide covers growing techniques, flavor profiles, and post-harvest care for marigolds and nasturtiums. You’ll learn how to identify healthy seedlings, maximize shelf life, and integrate these flowers into your garden-to-table routine. The focus is on practical, high-yield strategies for home growers.
You’ll gain actionable insights to cultivate vibrant, flavorful flowers with minimal maintenance, ensuring a steady supply for cooking and garnishing.
By Matthew
TL;DR – Quick Summary
Discover the secrets of growing and using edible flowers and herbs to enhance your garden-to-table experience.
Marigold Benefits: Marigolds are a top choice for edible flowers due to their robust growth and unique flavor, perfect for adding color and taste to salads and pastries.
Nasturtium Caution: Nasturtiums are incredibly easy to grow and have a delicious spicy flavor, but be cautious as they can become invasive, spreading rapidly from seeds.
Healthy Seedlings: For healthy seedlings, look for strong stems, fully developed true leaves, correct color, and white roots, ensuring a successful transplant and growth.
Cool Harvesting: To maximize the shelf life of your produce, harvest leafy greens early in the morning when it’s cool, and place stems in water to keep them fresh longer.
Herb Harvesting: Herbs like parsley, dill, and cilantro can be harvested using the ‘cut and come again’ method, allowing for multiple harvests and continuous growth.
Pro tip: For the best flavor and yield, focus on growing herbs that you frequently use, and consider the ‘flavor per square foot’ when planning your garden space.
Easiest Edible Flowers to Grow and Their Benefits
Matthew: Matthew Enloe: So edible flowers are really fun and they’re really important to some folks who are into medicinal gardening. Calendula, marigold, there’s plenty of others that aren’t coming to mind that have that people use for medicinal gardening practices. But what I want to talk about is what’s the easiest to grow? What’s the easiest edible flower to grow that I can end up actually eating? So my rock solid go-to is marigold. And it’s not like… I think a lot of people haven’t eaten marigold flower, so the flavor might be a little bit interesting or off-putting. But what I love about marigold is that it grows really strong and it does have a very specific flavor that I like. So when I go to add it to a salad, When I go to add it to a salad, it has that very pronounced, just by breaking apart the flour and sprinkling it in. I’m usually doing it for the color, but I’m doing it for a little bit of the flavor as well. And then also what comes to mind is nasturtium.
Now, big warning on nasturtium. It’s very easy to grow and it tends to be a little invasive. when Nistertium gets growing. it goes from flower to seed really quickly and there’s such an abundance of flowers on your big nasturtium bush that those seeds which look like little dried up like nuts or peas, they’ll drop and even if you rake and try to get them all up you’ll miss some and then you’ll have nasturtium again in a couple of months. So for some areas like on a hillside on the side of your yard it can be really great because you’ve always got nasturtiums. and can always just pull them out and you know they’ll come back. The flavor also is delicious. It’s one of my favorite flavors on the planet. So if you’re wondering what one of the easiest edible flowers is to grow and get onto your plate, nasturtium is super easy, super delicious.
It has a molecule in it called allee isothiocyanate, and that’s that spicy mustard flavor, that spicy wasabi flavor, the one that tickles up in the back of your back of your mouth, up into your nose. It’s a different spicy from like hot pepper spicy, which is capsaicin, is the molecule that’s actually telling your tongue, triggering your heat receptors on your tongue. Alliisothiocyanate, on the other hand, is triggering your olfactory system. So up at the back of your nostrils, it’s, it’s tickling all of that back there and that’s the spicy sort of that we feel when we eat really spicy mustard or wasabi or nasturtium flowers. They’re really easy, they’re really delicious, but they’re really invasive so be careful with nasturtiums. And then forward back to the marigold.
Marigold, think, is like really solid and it’s kind of like a secret gem of the gardening world because you can get it anywhere. It’s really easy to grow and it’s kind of fun to throw some color into your salads and also to use on pastries as decoration. So that’s edible flowers. So like if you’re doing your nursery at home, we’re talking about that succession planting.
Signs of a Healthy Seedling for Successful Transplanting
Matthew: One of the questions I get are what are some signs that my seedling is super healthy and going to take a good transplant? our seedlings here we do the best that we can to make sure that they have a few key qualities. That’s a strong stem, at least one fully established set of true leaves, and also good chlorophyll production, nice and green. It’s the colors that we’re expecting. and that the roots are nice and white. So here’s a spinach. This will be ready in not next week, but the following week. But it’s already starting out really strong. So we have good strong stems, which is kind of hard to see on camera. But if you look down in there, there we go. There’s some strong stems. They’re not too floppy, so it’s like keeping its structure. It’s not just flopping straight down. And this is still still developing, so that stem will only get stronger. We’ve got a pair of true leaves already emerging, so this is almost ready to go in. But we want those true leaves fully developed.
They’re still on the small side. The color is right. This is our red spinet. So you can see there’s some of the red in the stalk. I don’t know if you can really see it, but it’s definitely there and it’s coming up. This one’s a little bit better, for example. So the color, that’s just one of the seed husks from when the seed germinated. There’s a little bit of red. I hope it’s coming through, but the color is correct. It’s nice and green. It’s got that red because it’s a red vein spinach. And then last is the roots are nice and white. They’re strong. They’re healthy. They’re not brown and tangled up.
There are some varieties like thyme, oregano, some of the lamey hessi, where the roots can be a little bit on the browner side, because they’re thin and they tend to run. So it’s not a hard and fast rule, but I would say that the four main signs of a strong and healthy seedling is a strong stem. fully developed, one fully developed set of true leaves. the right color, so lots of green chlorophyll pigments, as well as if it’s a variety that has certain color characteristics like a rainbow chard or a red vein spinach, that they’re developing that color. And then last is strong, is very healthy white roots.
So those are the four main things to look for. in a healthy seedling. If you’re doing your nursery at home, which I definitely recommend, we do our seedlings to help people get a head start on their garden, help people catch up if their nursery might have fallen behind, and to help people who are just getting started to get a good start. But once you’re getting into the point where we’re talking about like garden to table production, you’re going to want to start thinking about your own nursery work. And that’s what I want everyone to be keeping in mind. Also, if you’re shopping in person… at a store looking for looking for seedlings. You can also look for that.
Post-Harvest Practices for Extending Produce Shelf Life
Matthew: If you’re at a nursery and you see a really thin stalk and it’s not holding itself up at all, even at like an angle, sometimes it’s a it’s a larger stem. So like it’ll lean a little bit, but you don’t want it just completely flopping and having like that arch in the stem. That means it’s not strong. It’s probably light deficient. And it might have gone through some stresses where it’s gonna have a hard time rebounding from those stresses. So that’s like, as we’re talking succession planting, growing food on a regular basis, doing your own nursery or doing a nursery for other folks. That’s my tip. So. on to another topic is What is post-harvest practice?
How do I take what’s in the garden and get it onto a plate? There’s resources out there. Where I learned most of my post-harvest practices is by tapping into some of the resources from each state has. Each state has resources available to growers where there’s, like in California, we have the UC Extensions Program that works with the California Department of Farm and Agriculture to give farmers and gardeners resources to know about certain crops. So… Each crop has its own needs and when you get into cut flowers it’s even crazier. Like some cut flowers, they’ll pick them at a certain time of day. Some they put them straight in bleach. Some they put the stem straight into almost boiling water. Some they’ll burn the end of the stem after they’re cut. Flowers is something else. Home gardeners don’t have to worry as much, but I’ve got a couple of tips for post-harvest practice.
One, leafy greens, harvest them when it’s cool. Harvest your leafy greens preferably as early in the morning even before the sun’s out. Your stems are nice and strong, full of water. There’s not a huge heat differential that the leaves are going to start dumping that water as soon as they’re cut. What you’ll see if you harvest right in the middle of the day on a sunny day is that the protists will wilt really fast. So if you’re trying to avoid your protists wilting and staying longer in your refrigerator is or out on the counter getting it onto a plate. Harvest when it’s cool.
Early in the morning is great. Another tip is you can put stems in cups of water. That helps a lot of plants grow. A lot of plants stay healthy. Like for me when I do my, when I harvested parsley for dinner last night, I cut off a nice big bunch and I took what I needed and I put the rest in a cup of water and it’s just on my counter at home. And I harvested after the sun had gone down and that parsley is going to be good to use for the next couple of days. So harvest when it’s cool. If you have cut a long stem, you can put it in a cup of water.
And if it is hot, then what you want to do is get that temperature down as fast as possible. An example is like strawberry growers. For strawberry growers picking out in the field, sometimes they’ll put full shade structures over so that where the strawberries are being picked, it’s already cooler than the area around in the field. and then they’ll put them into their cases and sometimes even in the field before they get into their storage area, their cold storage, they’ll have fans that are blowing that hot field air out.
So they want to evacuate the heat that might be just sort of held by the fruit in the cases that they’ve picked into. And then they’re rushing it over to again blow the hot field air out and bring that temperature down to around freezing right around 35, 32 degrees. The quicker for every minute that the temperature gets brought down in the field is hours of shell fly down the line. And again, the information that I how I learned about this, these practices, post-harvest practices for strawberries, is I actually listened to a whole, watched a whole video series that was released for free on North Carolina’s Department of Field and Agriculture, had a whole packet of, I think it was like 25 videos each one of… half hour to an hour and a half long by the professors at their universities, at their agricultural universities. So they’re just full lectures available online for free from the North Carolina Department of Farm and Agriculture. And I had no idea that this is what folks did to extend their strawberry practices.
But So if you’re interested, going to university sources, going to state sources for information is going to be a solid resource because there’s like academic research to back it up in years and these resources are for farmers. So and the intention is that these farmers… will have more success out in the field. That’s why these departments exist. The UC extensions program that works with Department of Farm and Agriculture is actually coming out in a couple of weeks to help us to help take a look at our greenhouses to see if they have any tips on how we can improve our practices to control moisture or, and then also to help look at some of our water chemistry and see if there’s anything where like maybe where we could make improvements there. So. state university resources for harvesting practices, but from just a practical personal gardener method, harvest when it’s cool, get it cooled down fast, and put stems into water, it’ll stretch out the shelf life for your produce. What else?
Maximizing Herb Yield with Proper Harvesting Techniques
Matthew: What do we got next? Let’s see. Okay, so this topic is similar to harvesting for, to extend the shelf life of your produce, but it’s about herbs.
So, it’s, the topic is, How do I extend and maximize the amount of yield out of my herbs that I’m growing in my garden to, like, what harvesting practices can I use to get the most out of that one plant? Herbs are a great example because they’re perfect candidates for cut and come again. Green onions. So I’ve got some green onions right here. On green onions, once this plant grows up nice and tall, the way I do my green onion harvesting is I clear cut and I just leave behind about, let’s say this plant’s about maybe 10 inches. I leave behind two inches below and out of that same stock that green onion will do a couple more pushes. That’s if I need the whole bunch. Sometimes I’ll also pull off a bunch. off to the side and just clip that to the same two inches down and then that area will push and then maybe next week or a couple days later I’ll pull off the other side that I didn’t harvest so we’re bouncing back and forth on the same plant.
Parsley, dill, cilantro, fennel, green onions. Maybe there’s some that I’m missing, but those I always do cut and come again. I’ll just go down and I’ll just make sure that I’m not going all the way down to the bottom. I’m leaving two, three inches so that there’s more growth to come up behind. And I’ll just clip off what I need and use it and then let the younger growth come up behind and replace it. I do two, three, four harvests off of… my herb plants.
Now that’s the faster herbs. The slower herbs, the thyme, sage, thyme, sage, oregano, mint, I just grab what I need and then usually with all of them, like once or twice a year, I’ll give them a haircut down to about three inches and then let them push out again with a bunch of fresh growth. When an oregano plant gets going really big, sometimes the older leaves start to get and the stems start to get really woody. I want that fresh, young, new push of growth. So I’ll cut it down, give it a haircut. And at that point, the roots are super established, really strong.
And I’ll only leave behind inch or two inches of growth on a bush that was maybe this big, maybe like a foot in diameter of oregano. I know I’m not going to use all of that oregano right now. It’s going to be compost. But in a couple of weeks, a month, and you can even dry all of that oregano. And a couple of weeks in a month, a couple of weeks, a month or two, that oregano will come back even stronger with fresh, young, tender growth. So that’s thyme, oregano.
I don’t do it so much with sage because it’s more of a bush. Sage, rosemary, that type of stuff. I just cut off what I need and then I’ll prune it kind of in more of a… Like how I prune a shrub where I’m pulling off larger branches. But the creeping Lamey Ashi, I give them a haircut. That’s Lemon Balm too. Lemon Balm, do it all the time. Just right down to the bottom. Let it push back with fresh young growth. And then let me see if I’ve got anything else I wanted to talk about.
Flavor per Square Foot: Maximizing Garden Yield
Matthew: This was a so one One of the last things is like flavor per square foot so we’re we’re talking about how to How to maximize Like yield how to quantify yield right your yield might be in the dollars that you save By not having to buy at the grocery store That’s going to mean that you’re going for the most expensive thing in the grocery store that you would be buying, your thyme or oregano, rosemary, sage, as a fresh little clamshell, and you’re saving a lot of money by not buying those every once in while. You just have it in the garden. You have it forever, pretty much. But a fun one to think about is flavor per square foot. And anything that you grow at home, if you, as you get better at gardening, sometimes you’ll grow a cherry tomato and you didn’t water it enough or it got stressed out or didn’t get enough light and it doesn’t have that much flavor.
That happens every once in a while, but every strong plant that you grow at home is going to have more flavor than what you can get at the grocery store. Typically, unless you’re maybe paying top dollar. Farmers markets have really great flavor for the most part in their produce. But if you want the flavor per square foot, obviously it would be an herb garden. They pack the most punch. But the way I want to think about it is like, what flavors are you interested in? What are your favorite flavors? And that’s what guides me in my like flavor per square foot. When I’m thinking about I only have 27 ports on my hydroponic tower.
I just think what’s most important to me? We’re going into some of the holiday seasons and I’m actually hosting this time of year. So I’m doing collards, a big chunk of my tower, as collards and mustard greens. Because I want to do one big stewed greens as a kind of surprise for my family. We don’t usually have stewed greens, but I am really excited because those, that’s how I chose to use the space on my tower for the last month, was because I want to share those flavors. with my family. So think about your favorite flavors, think about what you like to grow, and plan out your garden accordingly.
Garden to Table: Holistic Gardening and Food Production
Matthew: Yeah, so talking farm to table, garden to table is pretty fun. I’m usually answering like specific garden questions for folks, but I like to zoom out and sort of think more holistically about like, how do I how is my gardening gonna end up as food?
And I think even just by like starting the conversation, starting to think about the topic, you’ll end up making those decisions. thank you guys for taking the time and listening to some of my thoughts on the topic. I’m hoping that maybe one of our next podcasts we’ll start having guests on, which I’m really excited about. And yeah, happy growing and thanks for listening. I’ll catch you guys on the next one.
Further reading: Herb Varieties & Uses: Holy Basil vs. Italian.