My Last Garden Post – yes Brian, more about the garden!

I have already had to scrape frost from my car’s window, so winter is fully on the way. But even still, my Nasturtiums are green and glowing. By the way, they die as soon as the ground cools to freezing, so in week or two, these will be no more.

Nasturtiums are an edible flower and leaf. Though not native, they are hearty and have been growing in North America since late colonial days. The leaves have a radishy taste. My father loved them, and grew them as a child a long time ago (he was born in 1899. Easy to grow from seeds, they are oddly difficult to transplant, so garden stores don’t sell them except as seeds. Once a very common plant, especially in farm gardens, they have been eclipsed in the modern flower garden by more modern varieties like impatiens, but they deserve attention from the home gardener. If you have a patch of soil that can’t grow anything, I’d bet nasturtiums will do fine there. They are also a great plant for a little kid to put in the ground.

Because of our wet spring, a bunch of plants that would have been restricted to the front edge of a bed morphed into a garden monstrosity, but a beautiful one in any case.