Growing edible flowers with the experts

Flowers bring natural beauty, colour and flavour to homegrown salads. The experts at Aweside Farm share their tips on growing plants for delicious, edible blooms

- SINEAD FENTON

Edible flowers showcase a hidden side of our gardens and give us the chance to unlock an array of flavours and textures, all while creating lots of food for wildlife to enjoy, too. For someone who loves food and has boundless culinary curiosity, these plants provide some incredible and unusual surprises.

You'll be familiar with many of the classic edible flowers - nasturtiums for their watercress-like flavour, borage for its cucumber hit, and the pretty petals of calendula, cornflower and the ever-popular viola. Building on last month's advice, where we explored some of the amazing flavours harnessed from herbs, this month we'll delve deep into the most popular and sought-after flowers on the farm - edible blooms that are more than just pretty petals on a plate, they also champion a range of seasonal flavours and textures.

Classic edible flowers

Many of the flowers you may already be growing can be used in meals. Here, we share some of the most popular and how to best use them

Sunflowers (Helianthus annuus)

Sunflowers have a wonderful nutty flavour. They make up a huge part of our floral salad and in everyday dishes we use them as we would any salad leafy green. Pull petals away from the flowerheads you want to eat and cut back the flowering stems throughout the season to encourage them to keep producing blooms. This is an annual plant that we grow year on year, by collecting and saving their seeds - although we find the birds always beat us to them, which is no bad thing. 'Autumn Beauty' is our favourite mix for a wide range of colours. Best for: salads