My Love for Borage

Borage isn't a common garden flower.  There are no poems about the beauty of its petals.  No songs waxing poetic about it as a symbol of enduring love.  That's fair really.  The flowers are only a couple centimeters large, forever facing downward so that you don't normally see their fair faces.  Worse still they don't bloom in large masses, creating a riot of colour.  Rather the bunches of flower buds open one by one, just giving us a glimpse of sky blue petals.  For these reasons I don't believe borage has ever risen to great heights of popularity.

 

Yet I still plant it each and every year. Not in my flower beds, but in my vegetable garden.  Not that these starry blue flowers wouldn't be at home in any flower bed.  Woven through other plants the bright spots of blue (and sometimes pink) flowers are eye catching, and the soft silver coloration of the leaves provides a welcome and interesting foliage addition.  Personally though I like to plant it in large clumps.  This year I have one such clump on the far edge of the small vegetable garden.  Another large clump is smack dab in the middle of my tomatoes.

 

There's a reason for this.  Some of you may be aware that borage is edible.  Flowers make a pretty garnish on drinks and desserts.  Flowers and leaves can be steeped for tea.  You can cook the leaves like a green, or even make soup.  There are plenty of medicinal properties as well.  Borage is classed as a herb and can be used in poultices and salves.

I've tried eating it and wasn't too fussed honestly.  The plant has fine prickly hairs from tip to toe and I didn't particularly like that texture.  What I really love about borage is what it does for my other plants.  It attracts pollinators. 

If you have a vegetable garden you want to make sure that your plants get pollinated.  I have found over the years that bees love borage and will visit my garden in droves when I plant it.  Subsequently they venture into my tomatoes and do some good work there.  By planting borage I ensure good pollination of my crops and provide a healthy food source for bees.  Since borage doesn't bloom in one quick explosion, it also means that insects are able to find food all summer long.  A mass of plants provides flowers over a two or three month span in my climate.  

One downside as a seed collector is that seed ripens very haphazardly.  Some is ready to drop while other flowers are just starting to bloom.  For the home gardener it means that borage will spread on its own and you will never be without plants if you grow it once.  The seedlings are easy to spot with their large silver leaves so if you don't like volunteers they are relatively easy to pull. 

 

Borage has become a standard in my garden. I look forward to those bright blue flowers every year and watching the bees hum along from plant to plant.  I hope it becomes one of your favourites too.

A New Garden

You may be wondering if I dropped off the map again and that would be fair.  I'm surprised to see that several months have gone by and I haven't managed to write a word.  The reality is that I have been obscenely busy!

Turns out starting a new garden is hard work.  Some of you may recall that back in 2010 I started my first vegetable garden here in PEI.  It was just an empty spot of land then, situated between the house and the garage.

It's so funny to look at that empty space now.  It feels like so long ago.  It took me several years to go from an empty bit of lawn to a garden.  I wasn't in a hurry and I wasn't sure about shape, tilling, or raised beds at first.  I took my time trying out various methods and in the end I did both.  Some beds feature perennials, others are dug each year.  Raised beds have proven wonderful for carrots and other root veggies.  I added a plastic hoop tunnel, trellis, and compost bin.  Today it looks like this.

 

I experimented with different plants over the years.  Corn has become a favourite.  Strawberries got the boot for requiring too much effort.  Certain varieties of plants like Queensland Blue Pumpkins and Mexico Midget tomatoes are planted again and again.

 

 

This year has been very different.  The garden you see in the photo above I now refer to as the small garden.  The real work has occurred in the field to the right.

Tractors were brought in back in April.  First they plowed the ground, then they came back and tilled.  And tilled again.... and again.  Leaving me with a beautiful patch of dirt to really work at.

The first plow

Since then I've had to make lots of decisions in short order.  How do you weed this amount of ground?  How do you water?  What should I plant?  Rows or blocks?  Plastic or straw?  It's a lot to take on but I've been enjoying every minute.  Today the field looks like this.

It's been quite the journey but well worth it.  Despite having gardened for many years I'm still learning.  I love that.  Just when you think you know how to do this mother nature throws a curveball.  Some of it's not fun.  I had a cucumber beetle invasion this year.  It decimated my pumpkins and I wanted to cry.  But some is amazing.  Like discovering a watermelon seed that works in my climate!! I can't wait to try delicious fruit in the very near future.  I'm hooked on my new space and thrilled with how much I can grow here.  Like any good gardener, I'm already planning how to rearrange, change and expand next year!