“Grow Vegetables as Beautiful Ornamental Plants in Your Garden: Tips from a Garden Expert”

Every vegetable gardener knows: growing vegetables is a lesson in dealing with adversity. Extraordinarily character-building. You used to have a vegetable garden that was often separated from the ornamental garden by a low hedge. But then again, who still has the time – or the space – to keep a separate vegetable garden?

That is why there is a lot to be said for planting vegetables and ornamental plants together. And admit it: many vegetables are just as beautiful as ornamental plants. The brightly colored leaf veins of Swiss chard and the hazy green of asparagus outshine regular border plants such as asters and phloxes.

The artichoke is delicious on your plate as a flower bud, but you can’t imagine a more spectacular flower. Plant a few to eat and the rest to watch. And plant them for the insects, because flowering artichokes are a feast for butterflies, bees and bumblebees.

You could apply that policy – ​​part for yourself and part for the insects – with more vegetables. Parsnips are delicious to eat, but if you let the plants shoot too much, they form man-high stems, topped with large yellow umbels that are often full of hoverflies and orange-red beetles called soldiers.

The golden yellow flowers of salsify, now a delicacy in starred restaurants, are also popular with insects. When the salsify was still popular food, it was called kitchen maid’s grief, after the sticky substance that coats your fingers when peeling the salsify. But the solution is simple: first boil the salsify and then peel off the skin with the greatest of ease.

Endive blooms with funny turrets of sky-blue flowers. With curly endive you have a real personality. And at the same time you learn that flowering endive can hardly be distinguished from the chicory you see blooming on the roadside. The plants are two variations on the same theme.

Carrots do not bloom spectacularly, but still leave a few. With a bit of luck you will find caterpillars of the queen page in late summer. The queen page is already a spectacular butterfly to look at, but the exotic-looking caterpillar takes the cake: it looks like it has crawled out of a nature film.

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