Growing flowers in and amongst your kitchen garden is highly beneficial for so many reasons. Flowers bring pollinators and beauty to your kitchen garden. You’ll notice that beneficial insects help with pest pressure. This is incredibly important when you want to grow holistically and utilize organic gardening principles. I love growing flowers, especially cut flowers and today I want to share four of my favorites with you!

• Zinnias – An absolute favorite and perfect for beginners! Zinnias are beautiful annual flowers that range in height. I recommend pinching the stems when they reach about 8-12 inches tall so that they will bush out for more blooms. The best way to tell if a zinnia is ready to be harvested is by doing the wiggle test. (Grabbing and shaking the stem to see if it is stiff or wiggly, when they are stiff it is time to harvest.)
• Sunflowers – Sunflowers are a summertime favorite around here. They are another easy to grow cut flower that does well in our heat. There are many varieties to choose from. My favorite is the “Goldy Honey Bear” variety from Botanical Interests. It has always been an amazing producer for me. I see many pollinators on these throughout the season. I keep some on their stem to over winter so birds and other critters as a food source in winter. If you let them go to seed and leave them, you will be sure to have volunteers the following season if birds and critters don’t get to them.
• Bachelor’s Buttons – These are quite showy and give many blooms throughout the season. I love growing a mix of colors when I can find seeds that are not sold out. This is a popular flower to grow, so look for seeds early in the season.
• Snapdragons – These cut and come again flowers hold a special place in my heart. I was gifted a hanging basket of flowers for the volunteer work I had done at my sons elementary school when my youngest was moving on to middle school. I let the snapdragons in that basket go to seed and have been growing flowers from the same lineage ever since. 

These flowers can easily be grown by beginning gardeners. They will all add beauty to the garden and attract beneficial insects. I highly suggest looking at different varieties of each type and choose colors and varieties that will work in your garden. (You can go for a color theme or mix and match.) Each flower mentioned will also give you about 7 days of vase life when harvested at the correct time. Each one will have the right harvest time, there are many places online to find best harvest dates. A bonus cut flower I always grow are Cosmos, but they have a shorter vase life of about 5-6 days. They are beautiful and grow abundantly! I hope this post inspires you to add cut flowers to your kitchen garden. Let this be a jumping off point, delve deeper into the world of cut flowers. There are too many to name in a single blog post.