Vegetables Love Flowers: Companion Planting For Beauty and Bounty — By Lisa Mason Ziegler

Centuries ago, before chemical fertilizers and engineered inputs, the most productive vegetable gardens shared one common attribute: the vegetables were paired up.

Not with other vegetables, but with beds of beautiful flowers. Even then, gardeners knew that Vegetables Love Flowers.

Or, to be more precise, vegetables love pollinators, and pollinators love flowers. Drawn by colorful, fragrant blossoms, they visit in swarms, performing their good work. And, the vegetables thrive.

Companion planting with vegetables and flowers is not as simple as it sounds. But, if you follow the timetables, tips and planting schedules outlines in Vegetables Love Flowers, author Lisa Mason Ziegler will show you how to keep the flowers blooming and the pollinators buzzing.

Your vegetables will produce more fruit than ever, and as an added bonus, you will enjoy your lovely cut flowers all season long. 

Seasoned organic flower and vegetable farmer Lisa Mason Ziegler makes a convincing case for the benefits of companion gardening in a friendly narrative that is replete with personal anecdotes about her own struggles and learning curve.

The stunning color photographs, along with detailed seasonal garden designs, offer helpful specifics for the best veggie-flower combinations and ways to cultivate them successfully.

For example, she suggests planting snapdragons in the tomato patch to attract bumblebees, explaining that bumblebees help speed the process of tomato pollination. Winter annuals, when planted six to eight weeks before the last expected spring frost, help grow cool-season vegetables and herbs such as onions and parsley. 

From Lisa: "Flowers attract pollinators, beneficial insects and other good creatures to the garden that provide nature's best and most powerful pest control, pollination, and more.

"There is no better way to bring flowers into the vegetable patch then with a cutting garden. A perfect match, harvesting fresh cut flowers each week alongside the vegetables keeps fresh blooms coming all season long. This constant presence of flowers in the garden keeps all these good guys we have attracted right where we need them, in the garden.

"Vegetables Love Flowers includes why to grow flowers, how-to grow and keep a cutting garden, what flowers to grow, and most importantly — how I garden without using pesticides that can harm and kill the very beneficial creatures we want to live in the garden."

Such a lovely, useful book wit a lot of proven how-tos and years-of-experience-based guidance. And that is why we love Vegetables Love Flowers, and we think you will, too! 

 Vegetables Love Flowers Table of Contents

Introduction: It All Comes Down to Flowers

Chapter 1- Why Do Vegetables Love Flowers?

Chapter 2 - How to Interplant Your Vegetable Patch

Chapter 3 - The Cutting Garden

Chapter 4 - Warm-Season Tender Annuals

Chapter 5 - Cool-Season Hardy Annuals

Chapter 6 - Pollinators

Chapter 7 - Beneficial Predators

Chapter 8 - Tending the Healthy Garden

Chapter 9 - The Year Around the Garden

Appendix - Succession Planting - Garden-Bed Examples

THE DETAILS

Format: Paperback

Condition: New

Published: March 27, 2018

Publisher: Cool Springs Press

Pages: 176, color photos

ISBN: 978-0-7603-5758-3

Dimensions: 7.6" inches W x .82" inches D x 9.2" inches

Rating: ★★★★★ (See FAQs in Contact Us/FAQs)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lisa Mason Ziegler is an author and the owner of Gardener's Workshop, a thriving, small-market farm.

She began her career selling cut flowers to local florists and Colonial Williamsburg. The business soon grew to include florists, supermarkets, farmers' markets, a garden-share program, and a subscription service, and later expanded into selling the tools, supplies and seeds that she used in her own garden.

At the same time, Lisa has steadily built a speaking career, leading presentations and workshops for garden clubs, master gardeners, commercial growers and other groups centered on her simplified organic gardening methods.