Sweet Alyssum: Your Garden’s Best Friend

Hi, friends!

This post is dedicated entirely to one plant: sweet alyssum!

Most of you know how much I love mixing flowers with edibles in my garden, but I just may have discovered my new favorite floral companion.

With its delicate white flowers, rich green foliage and sweet smelling blooms, alyssum is truly a vegetable gardener’s dream!

You can grow alyssum from seed or buy starts from your local nursery in the spring. (My garden has a combination of both at the moment.) No need to splurge on large plants—alyssum likes to spread and grows quickly when well watered, so those multipacks of tiny starts will work just fine!

Because my raised beds are part of my backyard landscaping, I plant for form as well as function when I’m planning the layout.

As such, I like to keep my raised beds tidy, with everything planted in neat rows. I also think about color and size when planting, mixing different shades of green and leaf shapes and matching flowers to the rest of my landscaping. While alyssum comes in a few color options, I always choose white for this reason. It just looks so clean and pretty!

Alyssum is relatively low maintenance, and is a great friend to fruit and vegetable plants in the garden. Its sweet blossoms draw in pollinators and provide ground cover. I like to plant mine right in the front of my raised beds so they can trail over the edge as they grow throughout the season.

One more good thing about alyssum: it is amazing at re-seeding! If left in the ground when the blooms die off, it will drop hundreds of tiny brown seeds. These seeds are great at nestling into the dirt and popping up as new plants the following season!

Have I convinced you to plant alyssum in your garden? What’s your favorite thing to grow?

Thanks for stopping by, friends!