Eat Your Flowers! - Five edible flowers to try this summer

As I have delved a bit more each year into local edibles, I have discovered an assortment of edible flowers.  Of course, we dry various herbs and flowers for tea, but there are those that are good for eating as well. What is so great about edible flowers?  These can add beauty to your garden while still being practical in that they are a source of food - a win-win for any survival situation. Some of these I have mentioned in previous posts, but for ease of reference, I am listing them again here. Here is a short list of blossoms we have tasted:


Oxeye Daisy - These flowers are fabulous for adapting to the flavor of whatever dish you are preparing. We first tried these battered and fried.  While prepared this way they didn't seem to have a strong flavor
of their own. Nevertheless, we enjoyed eating them both with a savory and with a semi-sweet batter. One of my good friends and favorite foragers, Mary Banducci, has a paleo-friendly daisy fritter recipe on her page. Click here for her recipe.

We next tried the oxeye daisy pickled. Again, they didn't have a strong flavor of their own - they just seemed to take on the flavor of the pickling brine (which is not surprising). Click here for the recipe we tried.

I haven't yet eaten these raw.  If you give it a go, let me know what you think. 


Borage - While the plant is a bit prickly, the blossoms themselves are smooth and taste like cucumbers. These are fabulous for adding both color and flavor to your salad. As a bonus, borage seed oil is high in essential fatty acids and is reportedly good for helping with inflammation (see here). This bonus makes it a good candidate for your survival garden, especially if you have an oil press.

We planted our borage from seed.  Here is a link to the seeds we purchased.


Nasturtium - Nasturtium is a popular flower for garden boxes and garden beds.  While some have likened the taste of the blossom to diesel, I found it to be quite pleasant.  It has a flavor similar to radish or spicy turnip and is a great addition to a summer salad. Both the leaves and blossoms are edible and flavorful.

We planted a jewel mixture seed in the corners of our garden beds this year. We have planted seed in the past without much luck, but this year the plants did well. I will be collecting seeds this year to use in our garden next year.  If we don't end up with enough seeds, we will be seeking out another non-GMO option such as this. 

Tip: I learned that when they grow well, they spread out (I didn't realize they were a vining plant since they had never grown well for me), so next year we will be planting them next to a trellis to allow them to climb and us to get more usage out of our raised bed.  Vertical gardening in small spaces can be such a help! 



Image by 165106 from Pixabay
Daylily - These grow in abundance in our area. We have eaten them raw in our salads.  They have a nice mild flavor. Some say the taste is between asparagus and sweet peas, others say it is more akin to iceberg lettuce.  Personally, I think it is somewhere in between. We have also tried these mixed with oxeye daisies and pickled (see above). One interesting quality to note, is that the Old Farmer's Almanac says that these are used to thicken soups (see here).  For that purpose, we have dried some blossoms to add to our soups this fall and winter.  I will have to report on the effectiveness of the dried blossoms for that purpose in a future post.


Dandelion - We have dried both leaves and blossoms for tea. We especially like roasted dandelion root tea, but since every part of the plant is edible, you can eat the flower, too.  Like the oxeye daisy, there are recipes to batter and fry dandelion flowers. 

You can also add them to breads. Here is one such recipe I found that looks amazing.



Challenge: Find out what blossoms in your area are edible and then try a few varieties.  As always, be sure to properly identify the plant before you pick!

Note: This post contains affiliate links for your convenience. As an affiliate, I may earn from qualifying purchases.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Water Glassed Eggs & Homemade Butter

Image
I love to experiment with new recipes, different methods of preservation, and ways to avoid waste.  Here are last week's efforts: Water Glassing Eggs  I finally tried water glassing eggs this past week.  I read about this method of preserving eggs a long time ago, but I needed to get unwashed farm fresh eggs in order to try it AND I needed to have enough eggs on hand to not cut us short in our weekly egg usage (we eat a lot of eggs throughout the week). Last week was finally the week. I got the pickling lime I had been saving for this purpose out of storage, picked out the cleanest unwashed eggs I had purchased from some friends down the road, and preserved 18 eggs in a gallon sized glass jar.  I followed the instructions from The Prairie Homestead, which can be found here . Why preserve eggs in this manner? Since we do not have our own chickens, we rely upon a couple of friends having extra eggs to sell. I wanted to preserve some eggs for those times when we cannot get them fresh
Read more

Fried Daisies, Yarrow Tea, and DIY Rose Oil

Image
We had a lot of rain last week, which "dampened" my forays into the woods to forage, so I spent some time on the website better organizing it and adding another article.  We now have a DIY project section and an article on jean quilts. Click here to see what is new! In spite of the damp weather, I spent a bit of time outside and picked enough to fill the dehydrator.  While I collected several kinds of plants, here are the ones I focused on this past week:   Oxeye Daisies I collected oxeye daisies mainly to dry for tea, but they are also wonderful to eat.  They can be battered and fried, much like fried mushrooms.  We have tried both a sweet and a savory batter for these and have enjoyed both. As with any new food, be careful to avoid these if you have an allergy to other plants in the asteraceae (daisy) family.  One of its many uses in tea is for coughs accompanied by an excess of mucous. Oxeye daisy is said to decrease mucosal secretions and calm inflamed tissues. It reporte
Read more

Garden Report - 10/9/23

Image
Last week I spent a bit of time tidying up the garden for fall. I gave my tarragon and mint their last trim for the year.  I bundled the bounty and hung it in the attic to dry along with some dill.  I had three nice bundles of orange mint, two smaller bundles of tarragon, and one of dill. I also filled the dehydrator with borage, winter savory, oregano, and mullein. I gathered some seed from the nasturtiums, dill, cilantro, and calendula. I then picked the ripe tomatoes and pulled the onions. What did well in our garden this year? Our tarragon produced very well. I think this was my third or fourth cutting of this year.  I am pleased we have enough to share with the girls and a couple of friends as well. The orange mint I planted last year also produced well as did the dill, pepper plants, and the nasturtium. We were pleased to have a nice crop of potatoes, too. The potatoes produced well for the 3 foot by 3 foot area we planted (we were following the square foot garden method).  I lef
Read more