11 Best Flowers to Grow in a Vegetable Garden

Flowers can make your vegetable garden much more beautiful, productive, and fun! Here’s my cheatsheet for the best flowers to add to your raised beds each growing season.

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Welcome to the Grow Your Self podcast. My name is Nicole Johnsey Burke. I am the author of two gardening books, one coming very soon. Kitchen Garden Revival and Leaves, Roots and Fruit. My next one’s coming up in a few months, and I am all about getting you into the garden even though you’re busy , even though you’ve never gardened before even though you don’t have any knowledge of gardening. Don’t worry. I started the same way you did, so today I want to show you how flowers can make vegetable gardening so much easier, so much better more beautiful, so much more productive, and so much more fun. Who doesn’t love flowers? I mean, yes, we can buy ourselves flowers, right, and put them in our vegetable garden. Listen, flowers is an essential part of all of my raised bed kitchen gardens. Anytime you see a garden that I put in, you’re going to see lots of flowers, not in the middle of the bed, but on the outside edge of the bed. And I always have a flower list that I pull from. And today you’re gonna get my cheat sheet. You’re gonna get my flower list. Sound like a good plan? Okay, let’s do it. So you’re gonna change your flowers based on the season. I teach you this in my book, Kitchen Garden Revival, how to understand the seasons of where you’re gardening, no matter where you’re gardening. And we’ve got cool season, warm season, hot season. So I’m gonna give you the flowers for each season. If you wanna dive in to figuring out what season you’re in right now, check out my book, Kitchen Garden Revival. So cool season is 35 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit, around that, all right? So still a chance of frost. These are the flowers I put in right at the start of the season. So my favorites are pansies and violas. In the cold, I also love doing snap dragons and then also chamomile and calendula. So those are my go-to flowers when it’s cold outside. Now let’s move on to the warm season, warm and hot season really. So this is when the temps are gonna be over 65 degrees, Fahrenheit, 65 to 85 degrees, no chance, and I say it again, no chance of frost. So first up, everybody’s garden favorite is marigolds. Marigolds do have a very strong smell and they do help with pests controls. The next flower that I love to use in a raised bed in the warm and the hot season is salvia. So not a big salvia, not like a big bush perennial salvia, but a purple or red salvia that is an annual. The next flower I love in my garden in the warm and hot season is angelonia. Man, this flower is a stunner. It is such a producer of gorgeous flowers. You can get yellow, you can get white, you can get pink, you can get purple. And when I was working in my gardens for my clients in Houston, you know, we have super hot humid summers there. And I’m not exaggerating when I say we put this angelonia in May, and it would go all the way until like September, October. These flowers are a great cut flower too. You can cut them off and put them in a vase, but you can cut them off and put them in a vase, bring them inside, and they’ll just keep giving you more flowers in the garden. They’re great for bees and butterflies. They have like a conical shape, little cone-like structure. Really, really pretty. All the different colors I just planted a garden up with these yesterday, white, pink, and purple. Next up, nasturtium. Oh my goodness, this plant is a stunner. It’s full of flowers. You can eat the whole thing. You can eat the leaves. leaves. You can eat the flowers. You can eat the seeds, make little capers with the seeds. And you can get a vining variety of a nastertium or a bush variety. These are gonna grow great from seed. And we actually sell these in the Gardenary seed store. And you get just this amazing like bush on the side of your bed. It’s so beautiful. And here’s the incredible thing. They’re not just edible. They don’t just grow from seed so quickly. but they also are a pest protectant. So they’re what we call a trap crop. They’re going to attract the bees, not the bees, the bad guys to their flowers so that they’ll be less interested in your, you know, your kale, your cabbage, your tomatoes. So they are what we call a trap crop. They literally like trap the bugs there rather than letting them come to your gardens. Next up are zinnias. Be careful here. You want to be sure you’re getting a smaller variety of a zinnias. I think they have like Thumbelina zinnias. You wanna get the ones that are a little bit more compact ’cause zinnias can go wild and big. Next up would be sunflowers. Again, same rule applies that we have for zinnias, whereas I don’t wanna have the big, big zinnias in my raised beds. Same with sunflowers. Put the small sunflowers in your raised beds and then the big, tall ones, the ones that are five feet, eight feet tall, put those in your in-ground beds. So those are my favorite flowers to put into raised beds. Flowers that I would not put into raised beds are going to be perennial flowers. So I don’t put those kinds of plants in my raised beds. One, because they don’t need the raised bed to grow, they are not fussy plants. They are not super needy plants. And so to me, it’s wasting the real estate of my raised beds, which is way more expensive. The soil is more, the beds are more. I don’t really want to waste that prime real estate on a plant that doesn’t need it. So any of those perennial flowers, I’m going to keep them in perennial beds outside of my raised beds. So all those perennials, they need to stay out, natives as well. Any kind of native plant, native grass, native flower, that’s going to stay out of a raised bed, again because it doesn’t need the raised bed. These raised beds, they’re for fustier plants, okay? They’re for plants that need special soil, special tending, more root growth. Native plants are the exact opposite of that. They need nothing extra. That’s why they’re native, right? They know how to grow in your town, your city, your climate. So that’s the rules, okay? Flowers have to go with vegetables. Vegetables love flowers. You’ll have to check out my friend’s book, Vegetables Love Flowers. I’ll put a link for that below this video. She’s amazing and she talks about the different flowers that go great with vegetables. They really do, but these are my short list. This is the list that you wanna follow. So when you’re growing in the cool season, violas, violas, however you wanna call it, pansies and snapdragons, chamomile and calendula. Those are my go-tos for the cool season when there’s still a chance of frost. As soon as frost has passed, we’re going with warm season flowers like marigolds and zinnias and nasturtiums. We’ve got salvias, small sunflowers, and you cannot forget the angelonia. She is a stunner. So those are my favorite flowers. They make the raised bed so beautiful, so productive, protect it from pests. And it’s just more fun to grow flowers with your vegetables. So tell me if you’ve got anything to add to the list right below this video and then check out this video about how I plant the garden. You wanna see how I lay out all these plants, especially the flowers. You’re gonna love this recent project we did, planting up a flower and vegetable garden inside a raised bed. Check that out to see how I put all these things into practice and then check out the gardenery calendar. It’s completely for free. You can get it at gardenary.com/calendar. We’ll also put the link right below this video. You give me two dates. I’ll give you all the rest so you know what to plant and when to plant it, including your flowers. Thanks so much for listening and watching the Grow Your Self podcast. Tell a friend, tell a neighbor, tell, you know, I don’t know, your dog. Tell them to listen to the Grow Yourself podcast so they know what to do in their own garden this season. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll see you next time. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow Your Self podcast. You can keep listening anywhere you love getting your podcast delivered. On Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, iHeart Radio, you name it, we are there for you. And if you want to read the notes and get our free resources to help you grow more, you can go to gardenary.com/podcast.