Meet Cal

I love Calendula! From sowing their weird little shrimp-shaped seeds in February to saying goodbye to the last bloom in … November! Cal and I have probably the longest relationship of any other flower. The first greenhouse job I had I was tasked with choosing the types of flowers we would grow, and I was obsessed with edible anything. Calendula and Nasturtium were probably the only 2 flowers I had heard of at that time besides roses and baby’s breath, and both are edible, so they were top of my list. It’s funny to think that Calendula was one of the first flowers I ever grew, and here we are saying hello again for the ninth February in a row.

As a garden plant, you really can’t beat it. It’s easy to sow, and in fact you can sow it indoors, directly in the garden or winter sow it all with good results, so it can fit into pretty much any set up. I have seen it self-sow in the garden, though not so reliably that I’m willing to ditch sowing it myself.

Besides the fact that it’s a prolific edible flower, its bloom window is second to none. It’s one of the first flowers to bloom for me in spring (when planted in mid-March), and it’s so prolific I have trouble keeping up with it. It does take a break in the heat of summer, as its a cool season hardy annual. Sometimes I will remove it around July to plant other crop successions, but the times I have left it in place, I’ve had blooms well after the first fall frost into November!