Off-the-grid back-to-the-land homesteading articles

• Introduction to off-the-grid homesteading, living in a backwoods wilderness home
• Back to the Land: In Search of the Good Life
• Living totally off-the-grid
• Year-round gardening, winter gardening in the Pacific Northwest
• No-till mulch gardening in the Pacific Northwest
• Edible flowers for your salad bowl
• The best traditional and exotic fruit and nut trees for the temperate-climate homesteader
• Living on raw organic vegan foods on a self-sufficient homestead
• Organic building materials
• Organic home furnishings: bedding, curtains, bath
• Energy-efficient LED & solar lighting
• Enriching the soil: Compost & humanure
• Life with wildlife
• Keeping chickens, ducks, and geese
• Saving seeds for a never-ending bountiful harvest
• The joys of backyard clay-bottom ponds
• Water, well, and solar pump for the garden
• ©2000-2009 Touch Jamikorn. All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce without written permission from author.

Edible Flowers for the Salad Bowl

Top photo: Calendula in bloom. You only eat the color petals which come in many shades of yellow, orange, and red. Calendula lives on for many years in our mild temperate West Coast maritime climate. Plus it self-seeds readily.

Edible flowers in your garden and salad bowl

Edible flowers add interest, color, and piquant taste to any salad. After 10 years of homesteading and gardening, we've found that we like 6 flowers the best for their looks and taste: calendula, nasturtium, edible Chrysanthemum (shungiku, whose greens are used for chop suey), zucchini (I leave most to grow into zucchinis), kale (great when few other edible flowers are around, like in early spring or late fall), and borage. Apple blossoms are nice, too, but we don't eat them because we want the fruits more. We don't include figs, even though what we think of as fig fruits are actually the inverted flower of a fig tree. Of course, broccoli is a flower, too, so we actually do eat more than just the six. Violets are good to eat, too, and add a nice purple color to salads, but it's difficult for us to grow them in our sunny and dry location, so we make do without them.

Edible flowers are great in many other ways, too. They attract beneficial birds and insects to help with pollination and insect control. Their ripened seeds feed wildlife. And they are beautiful to look at. We interplant them everywhere with our vegetables and at the base of fruit trees.

Nasturtiums are probably the most well-known edible flower of them all. Its unique taste with a bit of bitterness and tang goes well with greens. And the colors are gorgeous; you can have nasturtiums in yellows, oranges, reds, and a combo of these colors. The spicy, bitter leaves are edible, too, and in small quantities are good in salads.

Rose petals are edible but not tasty. The Japanese have long made rose petal candy to make them more palatable. A mixture of sugar and egg whites is used to coat the petals which are then frozen or cooled to set. I've been told the resulting candy is beautifully aromatic.

Even though sunflower is a flower, the part of it that we eat are actually the ripened seeds, so technically a sunflower doesn't qualify as an edible flower.

This is not an edible flower, but since I haven't made a section on garden flowers, I'm posting the photo of this gorgeous flower here. Please don't go and eat this flower!

This is borage. It's the tastiest flower of them all, in my opinion. It tastes somewhat like cucumber. Borage is in the same family as comfrey, which we grow all over the garden because the leaves are great for compost tea and mulch. It's in the bio-active category as it helps speed up decomposition. Borage leaves are rough and abrasive to the touch and resemble comfrey leaves.

Our dinner salads won't be as nice, colorful, or tasty without edible flowers.

d the compost pile. You push into the flower and dislodge the blue edible petals and discard the rest which is bitter.

Spotlight on Denman Island Artists

• Matsuki Masutani (poetry) (page D1)
• Jane Masutani (country life -- with an edge) (page D3)

RawForLife Raw & Sustainable Living Ezine

• Rawganique.com Blogs
• Edible Flowers (page 1)
• Michael McCarthy: En Route to Portland (page 2)
• Rawganique Convergence (page 3)
• Random Ruminations (page 4)
• On Hybrids and Such (page 5)
• Steve Scharmer's 36-day Fast (page 6)
• The Simple Life IS the Good Life (page 7)
• Raw Veganism and the Protein Myth? (page 8)
• Rawganique Diet (page 9)
• September 11, 2001 (page 10)
• No-till Vegan Organic Gardening (page 11)
• Rawganique.com's Story
• Humanure (book review)
• Hemp Facts & Info
• Hemp & Raw Food Books (30% off)
• Free Gourmet Living Foods Recipes

All opinions expressed herein, excellent though they may be, are those of their authors and do not in anyway imply agreement from us or our staff. We publish them here solely in the spirit of sharing and in the hope that they may be of service to others who are also seeking a simpler, more sustainable, and healthier way of life. We do not give recommendations or advice and cannot be held responsible for them. Please seek advice from professionals if you need help. There are also many excellent books out there by qualified professionals to help you on your path to health. May your journey be a gentle, loving, happy, safe, and fulfilling one.

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