FIMBY: Enhance your food with edible flowers
This is another installment in our Food in My Back Yard series, devoted to edible gardening.
My first acquaintance with edible flowers was during the crunchy-granola 1970s. I was visiting a friend, whose roommates were preparing dinner. One roommate dashed outside, returning with a bright marigold flower. To my surprise, he crumbled the petals into the salad bowl on the table. Instant color for those greens, and yes, instant flavor pops, too.
Since then, I don’t blink at blossoms on food. I don’t use them as much as I could, but happily grow plenty of plants that can lend their flowers to dishes.
However, edible flowers come with an important caveat: They must be grown organically, without pesticides. No residue on the food, please. That’s why it’s best to plant your own edible flowers — you know how and where they were grown.
Also be aware that not every part of every edible flower is in fact edible. With flowers from borage, roses or calendula, only the petals are edible.
So which flowers are growing right now that can be eaten? An obvious one is the blossoms on the squash plants. Especially if you’re already tired of zucchini, try picking some of these flowers (morning’s best), removing the stamens and pistils, and stuffing them with a cheese mixture before frying them.
Scarlet runner beans are another vegetable with easy-to-eat flowers. The petals of sunflowers are edible, too — save the seeds for roasting or for wildlife.
Also, any flowering herb that can be eaten has, naturally, edible flowers. Not all may taste that great, but you can’t go wrong with chive blossoms, lavender flowers or rosemary blooms. Mint, sage and scented geraniums (pelargoniums) have lovely edible flowers, too.
The Sacramento County master gardeners have compiled an excellent guide to edible flowers, in Garden Note 155. (Find the link on this page.)
Here are my top recommendations for easy-to-grow edible flowers:
— Calendula (aka pot marigold). Likely the flower that went into that 1970s salad. Rinse the petals well and remove the base before crumbling. These easily reseed.
— Dianthus (aka pinks). The petals will lend a clove-like flavor to salad or as garnish on baked goods. Remove the bitter base. Best when small, I think.
— Nasturtiums. These grow in just about any soil, have great color, and will bloom until frost. They reseed, too.
— Pineapple sage. If you can bear to pick the gorgeous red spiky flowers, which appear in fall, they have a pineapple flavor.
— Violas/johnny jump-ups. I grow these under my roses, and they come back year after year. Gorgeous decor for salads, open-face sandwiches and pastries. One friend puts them on her deviled eggs.
Important: Toxic flowering plants are a crucial category for the gardener to be aware of — and why any flower intended for consumption must be positively identified first.
In addition to the well-known poisonous plants oleander and poinsettia, common garden flowers to avoid eating any part of include anemone, azalea, delphinium, foxglove, hydrangea and rhododendron. There are several others listed on Garden Note 155.
If you’re not sure whether a flower is edible, and can’t get it 100 percent identified, don’t eat it. Simple as that.
