This Plant Does EVERYTHING | Borage Growing Guide

There's an extremely popular annual flowering herb that I've never talked about. Nevertheless, it is in my garden. It is known as the herb of courage. Pliny the Elder used it in ancient Rome. It is something that is known as bug gloss, bee bread, has all sorts of funky names. Even its seeds are used as an oil. So there's a lot to do with this plant in your garden and that plant is borage. So borage, it is a plant that is native to the Mediterranean, the Eastern Mediterranean. It has a long and storied history throughout our culture. I mean, Pliny the Elder thought it to give courage to a man due to its calming nature. There's actually an old wives' tale that if you slip borage into a promising young man's drink, it may give him the courage to propose to you. So if you're out there and you're trying to get a proposal, slip a little borage in your man's drink. Let's now talk about exactly how to care for this plant and some of the unique elements that I think make it a must plant in your garden. So this particular borage plant I have in my front yard raised bed right here, it's going off. It's going crazy. You can see all the bee activity. They really like this beautiful sort of light blue to darkish blue flower. It seems to be really an attractant for the bees. But the plant itself has some unique characteristics. First of all, it's fully edible. It kind of has a cucumber-y type of taste to it. The flowers for me are really popular to just drop into a drink as a garnish. You certainly could eat them. I think they're a little more beautiful as a garnish than as something to eat. But also it's related to comfrey. Comfrey is a plant that is what's known as a dynamic accumulator. It's a plant that has a really deep taproot, tends to bring up nutrition from the subsoil into the surface of the soil in the plant matter. And then it dies off and builds the soil for you. Borage kind of has the same vibe here. So it is a plant that has pollinator benefit, edible benefit, and benefit for the soil. When it comes to borage varieties, well, I've got the standard Borago officinalis. This is just the born and bred borage. It's a normal borage. It's the one you see right here with the beautiful flower. You also have Borago alba. That is the borage with white flowers. Leaves look the same. Then there's Borago variegata. So variegated borage. The flowers are the same blue, but the leaves have a little bit of a white variegation to them. And then there's creeping borage, which is, as the name implies, much lower to the ground, more of a short-lived perennial. But borage itself from a care perspective is a annual. It's an annual plant. It is frost sensitive, tends to flower later on in the season and readily self-sows. Actually one of these flowers just fell off. Might save this for a drink later. As you can see, gorgeous, gorgeous plant. So how do you care for it? Well, I have the seeds right here. These are just some standard seeds that we picked up. And as you can see, the seeds are massive. So anytime you see a massive seed when you're starting out seeds in the garden, your thought should be, I should probably direct sow this instead of transplant. Not to say you can't transplant. You certainly can. But if you're going to do it, well, you have to remember, we talked about it being like comfrey with a deep taproot. Anytime you're growing a deep taproot plant and then transplanting it, if you damage that taproot, you're damaging the plant for life. It's really not going to do that well. So I'd encourage you with borage, take these big seeds, plop them down into your raised bed or into your in-ground or your container, cover it up, water it well, and you'll see it sprout up with pretty much no problems at all. And just try to keep this in an area that gets a decent amount of sun, stays nice and warm. Remember, it's a Eastern Mediterranean plant. It does not want to be planted into cold temperatures or into cold weather. That's kind of it as far as the care goes, but there's a lot of different uses for this plant in the garden that I'd like to share with you. So for using borage in your garden effectively, we've already gone over a few of the use cases, but I think this is a really good example of how we've used borage here at the Epic Garden to improve some of our yields. So what you'll notice is I have a borage plant here. There's actually another one over there, but what's right next to it are these Japanese cucumbers. Cucumbers have male and female flowers. A lot of the times people resort to self pollinating those or hand pollinating those. Well, with an abundance of bees right next to these cucumbers, where do you think their next meal is going to be? Well, it's probably going to be these cucumbers. So I'm a little bit more confident that my pollination is going to happen appropriately here. And I also have my strawberries right next to that and I see the bees migrating. When I stand out here and watch for a little bit, I'm actually seeing them in the cucumbers right now. So using the borage not only for its attractant qualities, but then placing it next to something that needs those attractant qualities. And it kind of brings us to something in permaculture called a guild, which is basically just a collection of plants that work well together. Over in the orchard, I'll show you another application you could do. So over here in my front yard orchard, I have a couple stone fruit trees. This is an Ava's Pride peach, I have to say. It's more like Kevin's Pride because this thing is popping off. I have never grown peaches in my life until this year. And just look at this. This is an absolutely delectable, I think, pretty dang close to ripe peach. Guys, come on. Okay. I know this is a borage video. Let's talk about why I'm even here. If you're talking about a stone fruit tree, you got a lot of space underneath these trees. Trees that need a lot of pollinator activity, much like those cucumbers or strawberries we talked about. Why not throw some borage underneath? There's really no reason not to. It's not going to really interfere too much with the plant. You know, maybe space it somewhere in this area, maybe in the gaps between plants. It's not going to get too tall, maybe about three, four feet tall. Not really going to interfere with the light, but it is going to bring a lot of pollinators in. And when these are budding and throwing out a lot of flowers, you better believe you want that fruit set. So I did not need them this year. It looks like I had a pretty crazy peach year, but under-planting your orchard with borage is another great, great application. So this borage plant here is probably the oldest one on the property and it makes it a really good case to show you how to reset that cycle. Like I said, it readily self-sows. When these flowers die, they form, of course, the seed in the seed pod and it just kind of falls down. But I'll show you what you can do if you really want to get particular about saving your seed is take a spent flower like this. And if you peel back the leaves, usually there are four seeds. In this case there's only one. I think the rest have probably fallen out, but there you go. I've got my borage seed and I can reset this plant for the next season or succession, so if I've got enough time left in this season. So borage is a fantastic plant, really should be in your garden in one way or another. Hope you enjoyed. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.