An Ode to Nasturtiums

Trailing Nasturtiums from 2014

Last year I grew lettuces for the first time. We had just moved into the house we are renting and I had not kept a garden since I moved out of my parents house. The lettuce did better than expected, but I must admit that I did not have the space or the timing to do the kind of succession planting that would have given us a constant supply of salad greens. Luckily another plant in our garden provided an abundance of greens for salads and other purposes. Nasturtiums have become one of my favorite plants and I would like to tell you why you should make a place for them in your garden.

Like many things worth doing, there is more than one good reason to grow nasturtiums. I grew them mainly because they make good companions to other plants in my garden. Nasturtiums attract hover flies which eat aphids, a garden pest that can make swiss cheese out of many of your plants' leaves. So they act as a natural form of pest control.

But I also knew that you could eat the both the leaves and the flowers. I can still remember the first time someone handed me one of their mildly peppery leaves to taste. Some people have compared them to arugula, but I find it much milder. In any case, they go great in a salad and if you include their red/yellow flowers it will look as good as it tastes. The only problem:  at times I had more of them than I knew what to do with. Not a bad problem to have I guess. Still, I found a solution. Whenever you have too much of certain kinds of lettuce and you want to use it before it goes bad, make pesto. When making pesto from nasturtiums you can use the leaves, flowers, and even some of the more tender stems (though I would suggest not to use too many). I will post a nasturtium pesto recipe soon. I have read that the seeds can make a good substitute for capers, but I don't care for capers so I will leave that to others to experiment with.

I found them very easy to grow from seed. No pests ate them. They grow quickly and cover the ground, blocking out weeds and creating a kind of living mulch. All of the nasturtiums I sowed last year thrived and this year's crop look like they will do at least as well.  I have read that if you put them in richer soil you will get more leaves than flowers.

The last reason to grow nasturtiums is because they are simply beautiful plants. Their abundant leaves and flower make them pleasing to human eyes and to the pollinators they attract.