Borage: Wedding Cake Beautiful & Healthful Companion Plant

I love experimenting with multitasking plants. I mean, I’ve now eaten most of the weeds that thrive in my somewhat neglected (but highly productive) garden, and it turns out they’re not only edible and beautiful of cakes, a lot of them are extremely nutritious and have some potent medicinal properties.

Borage plant is a bee magnet, which is great for your fruit and vegetable yields. Worldwide, pollinators are having a really tough time, what with the rampant use of pesticides and destruction of habitat. Everything we can do to make our yards welcoming for them is a good thing!

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

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!

Borage flowers creatively adorn any white confection as in this lovely flowerfetti cake by Casa de Valentina! They just call out to be put on a summer birthday cake or wedding cake.

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 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 also deters garden pests, particularly cabbage moths and tomato hornworms. Brings in good bugs and keeps away bad ones, plus adds nutrients – not bad for one unassuming plant!

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

Borage handles full to partial sun and is pretty tolerant of a range of soils, poor to rich, dry to moist. Sow directly in the garden in early spring, or plant in fall and they will germinate when the soil warms again in spring. You will likely never have to purchase them again.

Garden Party, Wedding Cake Worthy

This bright sky blue and lavender 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!

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” ~Robert Louis Stevenson

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