Vegetables feed the body, while flowers feed the soul.

While I like to quote that saying, it isn’t totally accurate here on our farm anymore.

Now we also grow flowers to feed the body.

Yes, edible flowers! Calendula (pot marigolds) & Centaurea (bachelor’s buttons) mostly.

They are beautiful!

Uses for the flowers include sprinkling the petals on a salad, or decorating cakes & cupcakes with the blooms. And as usual our customers at market teach us how to use our produce. One young lad scatters the flowers atop his mac & cheese dinner – how’s that for elevating a simple dish into something elegant! And last weekend our edible flowers adorned a wedding cake!

They look amazing – in the field, in the basket, and on the table at market. While we don’t sell a lot of them, they do attract a lot of attention & draw people to our table. And equally important, the bees & bugs in the fields love them. The flowers are always teeming with insects!

Earlier on, we also offered elderflowers. These large white blooms are cooked with water, sugar and a bit of lemon, to make a simple syrup. This is added to drinks or used in baking. A market customer told us that back in the old country when she was a child, they would dip the entire bloom into pancake batter, then into hot oil to cook it, then into maple syrup, and then right into their stomachs! Delicious!

The extreme heat last week finished off the elderflowers in a hurry, so they’re done for another year. But there will be lots of elderberries for eating next month.

We will be offering edible flowers in our CSA share this week – something a little different for most of us! How will you use your flowers?

What’s in the box?

Beets, broccoli, lettuce, salad turnips, green onions, garlic scapes, herb bunches, & edible flowers.

• Along with an assortment of vegetables, enjoy some herbs this week. Choose from cilantro, dill, parsley & mint.

_____________________________________________

What else is going on around the farm this week …

The blackberries are almost finished blooming and little berries are already forming. In about a month they will be ripe!

Tomatoes & peppers are coming along nicely too.

The zucchini plants that the insects ate are making a comeback (to the left in the picture) – some of them anyway, but of course the harvest is delayed. We also transplanted a new batch of zucchini plants into the field today.

And the rabbit damage on the beans is hardly noticeable now. We’ve had some success keeping them away from our crops 😉

Sunflowers, and a second planting of beans.

Cover crop on a fallow field growing well.

Other vegetables and weeds growing well too!

A little nest with 4 tiny eggs hidden in the grass, right on the ground. Lucky we didn’t drive over it!