Swanky fresh organic restaurants are famous for their creative and healthy dishes decorated with edible flowers.  These aren't traditional garnishes that look great but are rarely eaten.  Edible flowers are really edible!  They add vivid color and gentle flavor to your salad, appetizers and main dishes.   They make you look like a real epicurian when you get creative with color.

When you plant your veggies, don't forget to include one or two edible flower plants to incorporate beauty and zest into your kitchen creations.  These options do best early in the season when temperatures are cool, but they may perform all summer long in the temperate north.

These smallest of the viola clan offer you flowers you can use whole so the little faces become part of your meal and kids love to eat 'em!

Violas have been kitchen fare for centuries.  During the Middle Ages, before breeders advanced the small flowers known as Johnny Jump Ups to the larger forms, these vigorous small plants were all the rage.  In those days spring salads of violas and onions were famous British castle fare. Yes, they ate the plant too, but today I just snip the flowers with scissors to add blue and purple and yellow to my spring greens.

Pot marigolds come and come again if you promptly cut the flowers before they fade to use in the kitchen.  Don't let them go to seed or they slow down.

The pot marigold of Europe, from genus Calendula are the old fashioned trick for turning cheddar cheese yellow.  The petals of these flowers drizzled over a freshly grilled steak or added to a salad give instant impact.  Note: Do not confuse these cool season lovers with the hot zone annual marigolds, genus Tagetes.

While in San Diego this weekend lecturing on water conservation gardens I was asked more than once how to cope with rabbits that decimate vegetable gardens.  That led me to believe some of you new gardeners in this program are having a tough time with them too. They come in the night to nibble everything down to nubs and if there's little to eat in the wild they'll come in brazenly and do the same in broad daylight.

I was thrilled to see at the conservation garden one solution for protecting gardens in ground or in grow boxes from these hungry critters.  They demonstrated rectangular structures made out of 1/2" diameter PVC pipe and wrapped in chicken wire that are portable and reusable.  Often just getting the plant large enough so there is some for you and the rabbits is all it takes. 

Make yours with the dimensions of the grow box or this size which is roughly 12-18 inches tall by 18 inches wide and 4 feet long.  Here's a detail that shows you how to use L and T fittings to put it together, then glue it with PVC pipe glue.

There are 2 kinds of pvc pipe: more expensive high pressure Schedule 40 and cheaper class 200, which is more economical for this kind of project.

These are excellent ways to protect your greens from skunks, raccoons, prairie dogs etc.  It's also a good way to keep dogs and cats that love to dig where you dig out of your crops without fencing the whole area off.

Color is a big part of preparing beautiful meals of home grown veggies.  So when you plant or add to your existing food garden, try to vary your greens.  One easy way to do this is with basil, my favorite summer annual herb.

There are dozens of different basil plant varieties, but many of them you must grow from seed because they don't often appear as seedlings at the garden center.  The sweet basil of Italian cooking and pesto is Ocimum basilicum the standard by which we compare the nuances of other basil flavors.  Other varieties of this species have been developed for their taste variations such as citrusy Lemon Basil and very potent Thai Basil.  For the accomplished cook, the subtle variations of each basil are a treasure trove of experimentation.

If your basil wants to flower like these, cut off the flowers as soon as buds form to keep them lush and prevent going to seed prematurely.

My favorite is different only in its color.  Purple Basil produces dark burgundy colored foliage.  It makes my garden more attractive and provides exciting colored garnish.  It's really sweet on mini-toast appetizers with olive spreads.  Grow both together and you get two-tone options for every dish. 

 Here's a valuable planting tip that grows bigger and better tomatoes.  The general planting rule for seedlings of any kind is to plant them at the same level as they were in their former pot.  This applies to everything but tomatoes.

Tomato plants have the ability to strike roots at any point along their stem.  For this reason old time tomato farmers would actuallly lie their seedlings down in a trench and bury the stem to give them a stronger foundation and larger root mass.

When you plant your seedlings, put the root ball lower in the soil than you would other veggies so that more stem sits underground.  The roots that form along this buried stem will help the plant take up more water and nutrients to support larger succulent fruit.  This technique is doubly important in hot dry climates. There the ability to take up more water in times of stress is essential to surviving an extreme heat wave or hot winds.

Like a great oak that springs from a tiny acorn, your little food garden can be the seed of a lifetime of growing.  You will find inspiration from gardens around the world where peoples and cultures have evolved their own ways of growing more vegetables on less land.  Some are practical while others are more beautiful, buy no kitchen patch is comparable to the French potager (pronounced po-ta-ghaa).

In this garden the shape of the beds is constant, but their contents changes each year as vegetable crops are rotated.

Potager describes a type of beautiful food garden laid out in a geometric pattern of hedges called a parterre.  This plan can be down sized to fit perfectly into a square backyard. The simplest version is the four-square garden divided by narrow paths.  In lieu of hedges most folks use bricks or wood sides for raised beds.  Our inspiration comes from the uniquely French technique of turning the four-square into a colorful quilt of edible plants.  The complex patterns in the garden of Chateaux de Villandry is the world famous example of now intricate a beautiful food garden can be.

One day when you graduate from a grow-box garden to an in-ground one, consider the potager, where there is no division between vegetables and ornamental plants. To learn more and see amazing images of how the French do it, log on to the web site of historic Chateaux de Villandry   www.chateauxvillandry.com