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Planning your vegetable and flower garden for color

This is the perfect time of year to start planning for next year, as it will soon be winter in a few days.  When you combine flowers and vegetables in the garden, considering the colors is also important.  You take care when you are just planting flowers; that the colors and plants don’t clash or look totally as if they were just thrown together.

Nature’s color palette

The same is very true of vegetable and flower combinations.  Nature has provided us with some guide lines even if you never have given it much thought before.  Take tomatoes for example, they have yellow flowers which look great with the ripening tomatoes on the same vine.  Even if you have the orange or yellow variety of tomatoes.  The colors are all pleasing to the eye.  When I plant dill with my tomatoes to keep the tomato hornworm away, the tiny yellow flowers of the dill compliment the tomato plant.

You can get lucky

Sometimes you just get lucky even without any planning.  I have the perfect example in my own yard.  Many years ago I planted a camellia.  It has grown up to be a beautiful plant, many thanks to the hummingbirds who have so graciously hung around.  The camellia blooms from the end of October through to the end of February.  It has “hot pink” blossoms and definitely gives a beautiful burst of color for this time of year.  Not far from my camellia is a bunch of iris…purple iris!  But since they are not in bloom at the same time it has worked out wonderfully well.  I also have phlox and they are lilac in color and still no conflict of blooming time.  When these are all finished blooming the star jasmine blooms.  The jasmine quits blooming and soon the camellia starts again.  I just got lucky on this one and there was absolutely no planning.

Flower color

The marigold is great for keeping bugs off the plants and the yellows, golds and orange colors will look great with most plants.  So plan to scatter a lot of these through out your garden.  The one good thing with some vegetables that might clash, the clashing color is below the ground as in beets.  But still the leaves of the beets do have some of the beet color.

Leaf colors and flowering colors of vegetables with the final produce color should all be considered to match up with flowers.  Not only the blossom colors but the leaf shapes and colors need to come into play when combining together in an area of the garden.

The size of the plants, watering requirements and sunshine requirements all need to be considered when deciding to place certain flowers and vegetables together.  If you don’t leave enough room for either to grow to their full potential the plant will not be able to give its’ best.  Planting without considering the requirements, although may look nice together; you may end up not being happy with the results.

 Seed packets tell a story

You can learn a lot by seed packets of the plants you want to grow.  The packet will describe the needs of the plant, the size it should grow to, the requirements, when to plant, where to plant and basic care.  It will give you colors on the front of pack for flowers.  For vegetables or herbs there will be a picture of it at ideal harvesting.  With all this knowledge you can have a better idea what will go together well and what might look good.

 Start your planning

If your planning doesn’t go to well and you end up with a few misses…well I always say, you learn by your mistakes and you now know what doesn’t work.  Transplanting is a possibility, but sometimes it is just not worth it.  If the color is the only issue and all plants are thriving well, just chock it up to learning, if anyone asks you tell them ” It was an experiment!”

On those cold and snowy days this winter start planning for your spring and summer garden of flowers and vegetables.  You might just want to throw in a few herbs while you are about it.