Breathtaking Raised Bed Garden FULL of Veg & Flowers (Only 6 Months Old!)

In our previous garden we created all the vegetable beds first and it was only after about three years that I created a central flower garden and at that point I suddenly realized just what I'd been missing for so long and it was to have flowers in my life really, have them around me. So when we started planning this garden I thought one of the first things I was going to do after I built the beds was to get as many flowers as I could into the beds, annual flowers that would bring me that joy from year one. And so it's taken about eight months to put all these beds together and in that time I've grown some flowers, I've grown an awful lot of veg and it really feels like the garden is not just coming together, but it's my garden. But growing flowers in the vegetable garden isn't just about it being pretty, there are some really good reasons for having a lot of blossoms in the garden and it's also not just about cutting them to take them in the house, but the more flowers you've got and the more diversity of types of flowers and things that are in bloom at different times of the year, the more you're going to attract pollinators and predators of pests into your garden and you're going to increase biodiversity. Bees, like the ones on these lupins, ladybirds and almost every other insect in between are going to be invited in and encouraged into your garden and it's also going to bring with it some pests, but the nice thing is once the pests come it's not very long before their predators arrive and you start building a balance within the garden, a natural balance that's going to help deal with the pests as they come along, that's going to help improve pollination of your plants. So things like beans and peas, courgettes and squash, all of which need to be pollinated to produce their seeds, they're all going to do so much better by having more and more pollinators in your garden. Now you can grow flowers with vegetables as companion plants, I'm not quite doing that here, I'm growing these because I love them, they're not warding off particular pests, they're not adding a particular something to each vegetable, what they're doing is a more overall job of attracting pollinators and predators into the garden, but at the same time some of the plants are grown as companion plants and in this bed I've got masses of cosmos and orangiums and various other flowers and in amongst them I've then got vegetables growing almost as a companion to the flowers, so things like the curly kale, well to be honest we don't eat kale, the ducks do, so I'm very happy to grow for them, we've tried time and time again to eat kale, just don't like the taste of it, not even lovely kale chips, they're not lovely, so I think I might be doing it wrong, but I am growing these plants as food for pollinators, food for butterflies and then food for the ducks and in turn we get the duck eggs. But the other thing that it allows me to do is add foliage into the flowers when I'm picking those and makes a really fantastic addition to a bunch of flowers and the thing that I've aimed for this year is to produce a bunch of flowers for the house every week so that we've always got fresh flowers from the garden to go with the fresh vegetables. So this beautiful purpley spiky flower here is agastache and it's part of the mint family and it's got the most incredible scented leaves, they're slightly licoricey, slightly aniseedy, the smell is wonderful, it's really important for me, it's that thing of not only am I creating something that's visually nice, that's nourishing our bodies through the vegetables, but I also want to have my senses pleased, I don't want to have them provoked, aromas are really good at, oh sorry bumblebee, aromas are really good at bringing back memories, so having lots of scented plants in the garden like agastache, like lemon balm and mints that you can just brush past, so having plants that provide scents and aromas in the garden is a really important thing for me. So I'm also growing loads of thymes and marjorams in the garden and all these herbs I use in cooking, but right now they're all in flower and sadly the stems are far too short to add to my bouquet, but I do sometimes pick a very small bunch of these and put them in an egg cup by the bed, just so that we've got that aroma in the bedroom, oh and it's so lovely. When I'm cutting flowers for the house I like to try and include herbs, so things like this flat leaf parsley and this is really simple to grow, I don't even grow it from seed, I buy a pot at the supermarket and divide it up because I know then it's already well rooted and happily growing and then just put several pieces from one pot in the bed, away it grows and it provides not only a food for the kitchen but then provides me some greenery to go with the flowers. While I'm out here I'll just deadhead a few flowers as I go, so this is calendula or pot marigold and not only has it got this intensely orange beautiful color but this is really useful in the kitchen, I can use the petals in salads and put them onto lettuce leaves and different leaves that we're eating, but I also dry the petals and then use them as an alternative to saffron, it's a very very subtle, very gentle taste to them, but putting them into rice or into eggs just lifts the flavor a tiny bit. And this plant which we've got in several colors in the garden is bergamot or monarda and it's also known as bee balm because it attracts bees to it, but it's actually the leaf that's used in earl grey tea with this incredible aroma to it, so you can use it in tea or you can make a separate infusion from it and it's herbaceous perennial so it does this and then it dies down over winter, comes back up, it's clump forming, it spreads quite a lot so it can be a bit of a bully in the garden but I have no problem with it being here, it's absolutely doing its job, it's attracting insects and it's providing food for our bees. This is fennel, bronze fennel and although we use the leaves quite a lot in cooking, one of the things I really like are the really attractive flower heads and then I leave it to flower and I leave it to go to seed and then I harvest the seeds for use in the kitchen. Pretty much every plant in the garden I will say, oh this is my favorite, but this nicosiana is an annual, I buy them as small plug plants because I've just not been very good at growing them from seed, but they are amazing, they go from nothing to these tall stately incredibly beautifully scented flowers. So I don't use the leaves in cooking, I don't use flowers in cooking, these are purely ornamental but these are here because I just love them so much. And then another favorite is a good old-fashioned dahlia, they go in and out of fashion, so they were very popular when I first started gardening many decades ago and then they went out of fashion, but I'm pleased to say they're absolutely back in fashion again now and growing dahlias is such a joyful thing, the range of colors, the range of flower shapes, they flower their little socks off for weeks and weeks on end and as long as you keep deadheading them, they just produce more and more flowers. Why wouldn't you want this in the garden? And then we've also got lots of nasturtiums, I grow a huge number of nasturtiums every year, pretty much every part of this plant is edible, so you can use the leaves in a salad or stir-fry, they've got a slightly peppery, in fact a very peppery taste to them. The flowers are edible, you can use them to decorate salads, dessert, cakes, you can even lay them out on a tray and then roll butter across them so they stick to the butter if you're having a special tea party or something. Here comes the cat and on the end of very curly flower stems, they produce seeds and the seeds can be pickled and used as an alternative to capers. So in just a few minutes of wandering around the garden, I've been able to produce another nice bunch of flowers to take into the house this week and it's a reminder while I'm in the kitchen of all the scents and the flowers, all the vegetables that are growing in the garden. A big thank you to Gardena for supporting the Inspiring Garden series.