Borage: Beautiful, Healthful, Companion Plant

Borage, a lovely herb in the garden, bears multicolored-blue flowers and attracts hummingbirds, bees, and pollinators of every kind.

It’s a wonderful, fail-proof plant in the child’s garden, and will most certainly enchant a young gardener as you share a moment picking the flowers and savoring their delicate flavor!

They taste a bit like cucumbers, slightly sweet. We feel extra-healthy just eating them right off the plant.

Skin-Healthy Borage

The flowers are rich in gamma-linoleic acid which is known to fight inflammation. GLA is classified as an omega-6 fatty acid. Borage oil from the seeds is excellent for the skin and can be helpful with eczema and dermatitis.

The flowers are just radiant in their blue dress lending a cottage air to a garden.

The plants can grow 2-3′ tall and half as wide, they self-sow readily, but don’t transplant well.

Borage is a great companion plant for strawberry plants, actually enhancing their fruit flavor and yield. Also, tomato growers will be happy to know that borage enhances tomato vine growth and disease resistance when planted nearby.

Borage plants are an excellent source of calcium and potassium, so be sure and compost your spent plants.

The seeds are worth saving for next year…let the plant go to seed and collect the unique, rough pods. For the sustainable garden, just start with one packet of store-bought seeds, and you will likely never have to purchase them again.

Garden Party Worthy

This bright sky and lavender blue flower is hard to ignore for its airy beauty.

You can plant it once the frost is past and still have a harvest of flowers for placing in ice cubes for a late summer iced mint tea. Just thinking of a tall glass of fresh, garden-picked mint tea on ice makes me feel like sitting down with a good book under the shady arbor.

Summer is here!

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