My Flower Point Presentation

 The Flower Point Presentation ready to go.

The wonderfully community-minded citizens who have formed the Avon-Otakaro Network (AvON) invited me to give a food-from-the-garden talk at their inaugural Spring River Festival on Saturday October 20. In keeping with the season of flowers, and also because all our food starts with a flower, I decided to give a Flower Point Presentation.

I made 3 identical tussie mussie bouquets of flowers and leaves from food plants – two to be passed around the audience while I was talking, and one for me to pull apart and speak about each flower and how we use it, or the vegetable or fruit that grows from it, in the kitchen.

My bouquet included flowers that can be eaten directly – nasturtium flowers to scatter over the top of a green salad, and calendula petals to toss within it. There were also flowers that grow on leafy greens – rocket and pak choi – which we don't usually eat, but which are fine to eat raw or cooked. The leaves rather than the flowers of sage and thyme are what we grow the plants for, but I have over-planted these herbs in my vege garden because they are so attractive to bees. For the same reason I included some sprays of forget-met-not in the tussie mussies. I let forget-me-nots self-sow freely in my vege garden, because although humans don't eat them they also bring the bees to the vege garden, and without bees to pollinate our food plants, we would go very hungry indeed.

Other food plant flowers included in the tussie mussies were peas, pineapple sage, chives and two tree flowers – apple and walnut. Apples have an easily recognisable flower, but walnuts have catkins. These are still tightly closed on the Eco Garden trees, and my audience had a hard time guessing what food came from them.

An Eco Garden doesn't make a strict division between flower garden and vegetable garden, but recognises the useful role that annual flowers which are usually confined to flower beds can play in a vegetable garden, attracting bees and other beneficial insects and generally increasing biodiversity. It also makes sense to let some vegetables and herbs flower freely and self-sow next year's crop. Coriander, dill and rocket are my top three for this neat trick. The self-sown plants are always stronger than the first sowing from a packet, because they have adapted to your garden's soil and climate. If they grow in inconvenient places they can always be transplanted when very young. 

Last – but not at all least, to my way of thinking – flowers in the vege garden make it a more colourful, beautiful and enjoyable place to work in, and that has to be good for the gardener. 

 This view of the Flower Point Presentation shows 

the walnut catkins more clearly.