Flowers Make Vegetable Gardening So Much Easier

Listen, I can buy myself flowers, and when I do, I put them in my vegetable garden. Not in my ornamental garden, but in my edible garden.

Flowers can make vegetable gardening so much easier, much more beautiful, more productive, and even more fun. They attract tons of beneficial insects and can even repel garden pests. Reason enough for me to consider flowers an essential part of any raised-bed kitchen garden.

I like to mix flowers and herbs around the border of every raised bed, and I've found certain flowers to be raised-bed rockstars over the years. So I have a pretty short flower list that I pull from, and I'm about to give you my cheatsheet.

Before I do, a quick head's up that these are annual flowers that will need to be changed based on the growing season (cool, warm, or hot). I teach you how to understand your gardening seasons no matter where you live in my book, Kitchen Garden Revival.

Let's start with the best flowers to grow with your vegetables in the cool season.

The Best Cool Season Flowers to Grow in a Vegetable Garden

The cool season is when the average high temperatures are between 35 and 65°F and there's still a chance of frost. If you live in a cooler climate, your cool season will likely be in the spring and then again in the fall. In warmer climates, your cool season might run throughout the winter months.

Here in Nashville, these are the flowers I put in right at the start of the gardening season because they can hang in there through some snow and frost.

My favorite cool season flowers include pansies, violas, and snapdragons. Pansies are amazingly frost resistant and add so much color after the dull winter months.

I also love to add two frost-resistant flowering herbs: chamomile and calendula. They're easy to grow from seed and so pretty. Calendula, in particular, helps with organic pest control for your leafy greens by attracting pests like aphids to its stems and distracting them.

Those are my go-to flowers for when it's cold outside, but there are plenty of others you can do. You can tuck some bulbs like tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths into your raised beds. I've found that their bloom time is so short that I question whether they're worth the space.

That's never the case with pansies, violas, and snapdragons—I mean, those things will flower and flower and then flower some more. They fill out the edges of the raised beds nicely and look so beautiful. I love all the colors in contrast to the herbs. Then, of course, they're also providing food to bees and butterflies. It's wonderful to support pollinators with our gardens.

The Best Warm Season Flowers to Grow in a Vegetable Garden

Now let's move on to flowers that thrive in the warm season and can hang on into the hot season. The warm growing season is when your temps are 65 to 84°F and there's no chance of frost. The hot season is when temps are 85°F and above. So flowers that like to grow in these seasons are not frost tolerant—they don't even like getting cold at all. Make sure to add them once all chance of frost has passed.

Marigolds

First up, we have everybody's favorite in the garden—marigolds. You've probably heard a gardener swear to you that marigolds will keep all kinds of animals out of your garden. They're treated as if they have magical powers. I grow tons of marigolds, and I still have rabbits and squirrels and cabbage loopers. But marigolds can certainly help with organic pest control thanks to their strong smell.

I love growing marigolds in all different sizes and shapes, but my favorite for raised beds is gem marigolds. They have itty bitty flowers and smell lovely. They're marigold perfection, in my opinion. I also love others like Kilimanjaro marigolds, but those grow really tall, so they're not ideal for the border of the garden. Marigolds are super easy to grow from seed, even if you're a beginner gardener.

Salvia

The next flower that I love to use in a raised bed in the warm and hot seasons is salvia. I'm not talking about perennial salvias that grow into small bushes. I'm talking about purple or red salvias that are annual flowers. That means they finish their life cycle in one year and won't come back the next year, except from seeds they dropped.

I put these red and purple salvias all around the borders of my raised beds. They produce flower spikes that bees and butterflies absolutely love; plus, they add some interesting texture and deep colors to the garden.

Angelonia

Man, this flower is a stunner. It produces gorgeous flowers in yellow, white, pink, and purple. I added angelonia to all my clients' gardens back in Houston to last over the super hot, humid summers. They'd go in around May and bloom all the way through October, I'm not exaggerating.

Angelonia makes for beautiful cut flowers. Cut off some stems to bring inside, and your plants will give you more flowers. The blooms are also great for bees and butterflies because they grow on long spikes like salvia.

You got to add these to your garden, as well. 

Nasturtiums

Oh my goodness, this plant is a stunner with its tropical-looking flowers that grow in all different colors, and guess what? You can actually eat the leaves, the flowers, the seeds, everything.

You can buy seeds for a vining variety (which can cascade over the side of your raised bed or grow up a trellis) or a bush variety of nasturtium. They grow really easily from seed and look so beautiful in your raised beds.

Here's the incredible thing. They're not just edible and so beautiful. Nasturtiums also help protect your veggies from pests. They're what we call a trap crop. That means they actually attract pests that would normally eat your kale, cabbage, or tomatoes to them. Just another way that flowers can help with the productivity of your garden.

Consider nasturtiums a must-grow flower in your kitchen garden.

Zinnias

Zinnias are one of the most gorgeous flowers, they're so easy to grow, and they come in tons of different color and petal options.

Make sure you're planting a more compact variety of zinnias in your raised beds, something like Thumbelina Zinnias, because zinnias can grow really tall and wild.

Zinnias are great for organic pest control. Certain pests like Japanese beetles will go to zinnias instead of attacking your eggplant or tomatoes. They're also a huge attractor for pollinators.

You can grow zinnias from seed right in your raised beds and then save your own seeds for next year.

Sunflowers

Sunflowers are one of the best flowers to attract bees, ladybugs, and butterflies.

Like with zinnias, make sure to grow a compact sunflower variety. You really don't want an 8-foot-tall sunflower in your raised bed. Well, maybe you do, but it'll crowd neighboring plants and cast too much shade on your fruiting plants. Look for a teddy bear sunflower—that'll look so beautiful in your raised beds.

Which Flowers Should Not Be Planted in a Raised Bed?

There are some groups of flowers that I wouldn't put in raised beds.

Perennial Flowers

Perennial flowers come back year after year. They might die back in winter, but as soon as the soil warms up in spring, they pop back up from their rootstock and often quickly double in size. Perennials are typically not as fussy about the soil as annual plants, so they really don't need the nutrient-rich, loose soil in your raised beds to grow. Even though I love perennials like echinacea and rudbeckia, I wouldn't put them in my raised beds because it would be a waste of prime real estate. I'll save that space for much needier plants.

Grow your perennial flowers in perennial beds around your raised-bed kitchen garden. Some of my favorite perennials are echinacea, rudbeckia (AKA black-eyed Susan), anise hyssop, and salvias.

Native Flowers

Raised beds are for fussier plants that need special soil, special tending, and extra depth for root growth. Native plants don't need any special treatment. They're used to growing in your climate, right in your native topsoil (read: the dirt in your backyard).

Native flowers include things like bluebonnets, Texas sage, and milkweed. This also goes for native grasses. I love growing milkweed, but I would never put milkweed in my raised beds. These plants are perfect for an in-ground garden.

Super Big Flowers

I wouldn't grow a standard-size sunflower or a tall zinnia in a raised bed. The same goes for coreopsis and cosmos. I love how beautiful those flowers are and how easily they grow from seed, but they can grow too wild for raised beds. Some can reach 3 to 5 feet wide and 5 to 8 feet tall. Again, don't waste precious raised bed real estate on something that would be just as happy, maybe even happier, growing right in the dirt.

Plant Flowers with All Your Vegetables

This is my short list for flowers that go great with vegetables, but check out my friend's book, Vegetables Love Flowers, if you want to learn more about the different flowers that can improve your space.

Here at Gardenary, we're all about getting you into the garden even if you're busy, you've never gardened before, you don't have a ton of knowledge about gardening—don't worry! Make sure to check out this post on companion planting with herbs and flowers if you want to learn more about how I lay out all these plants in each raised bed.