You need flowers for vegetables

 A few weeks ago I read an article that a woman wrote about her gardening experiences. In it, she talked about how, when she first started out gardening, she had never been a fan of flower gardening. She had a huge vegetable garden and that was her gardening passion. In fact, she said that at that time, there were hardly any flowering perennials or annuals on her property at all. She also said that none of her neighbors were gardeners either.

She talked about how every year her vegetable plants would grow huge and have tons of flowers, but would hardly produce any vegetables. I'm not sure what her "A Ha" moment was, but somehow she realized that the problem with her vegetables was the fact that she didn't have any other flowering plants in her yard to attract the pollinators. Since realizing this, she has started adding flowering plants to her gardens and swears that this has made all the difference in her vegetable production.

This story really got me thinking. In order to get the best results from your vegetable garden, you need other flowers around too. This makes so much sense! You need flowers for vegetables, and not just the flowers on the vegetable plants themselves. I know, this might sound like a no brainer for some people. For me, I never thought of it this way before and I found this concept very interesting.

Since reading the story, I have really started to notice the plethora of pollinators in my flower gardens. Some of the flowering plants have so many pollinators on them that I don't want to go near them (because most of the pollinators could sting me)! This made me curious so I walked over to my vegetable garden. Wow, what a difference! I mean, sure there were lots of pollinators flying from flower to flower in the vegetable garden too, but not nearly as many as I see swarming the blooms in my flower gardens.

I have always had my vegetable garden separate from my perennial garden. Now that I think about it, I have no good reason for this. I guess it makes it easier for me to till the vegetable garden in the spring, and I like having a dedicated space for planting vegetables. I usually have pretty great success with my vegetable garden, but could it be better?


Since I am all about experimentation in the gardens, next year I plan to plant flowering annuals mixed in with my veggies. I will choose the flowering plants that the pollinators seem to love the best. I can't wait to see if it makes a difference for my vegetable production.




Note: I wish I could find the article that I read and reference it here, but I was unsuccessful in my searching.

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