Sugar coated pansy petals look beautiful on a cake, but the truth is, no one really enjoys eating them. “They taste of nothing and are too chunky to be delicious – it’s like eating a wad of felt!” proclaims Sarah Raven in her terrific new edible landscaping guide, The Great Vegetable Plot. [1]

Nasturtiums, on the other hand, are stunning to look at, delightful to eat, and quite literally the easiest flower you could possibly grow. No matter how brown your thumb, if you can make a hole in the dirt with your index finger and pop in a nasturtium seed, you, too, can have gorgeous flowers all summer long to toss in your salads and add to soups and sandwiches.

No yard to plant them in? No problem. There are plenty of varieties that thrive in containers and window boxes. And nasturtiums actually prefer poor soil, so please, no fertilizers, organic [1] or otherwise. They’ll bloom more with a bit of benign neglect.

If you’ve ever eaten a nasturtium, you know they have a pleasantly peppery bite. That’s because they’re actually a kind of watercress. And the leaves taste as good as the flowers, adding a piquant note to soups and sandwiches. If you’re really adventurous, you can even pickle the seedpods to make a kind of caper.

Nasturtiums contain a volatile mustard oil and compounds similar to the ones that make radishes spicy. According to the Herb Society of America’s Encyclopedia of Herbs, nasturtiums are “rich in vitamins and minerals, including iron, iodine, and calcium.” Their many medicinal virtues include the ability to clear toxins and aid digestion.

In the garden, there are nasturtiums for every purpose: the exuberant trailers and climbers, spilling out of second-story window boxes or clambering up a trellis; and the more restrained, mounding types content to bloom their heads off in a container.

There are several varieties of nasturtiums that I especially love, and it would be really hard for me to narrow it down to just one favorite. Thanks to Select Seeds [2], I don’t have to: their “Nasturtium Garden Bouquet” collection offers six of the very best, including my favorite heirloom nasturtium, a pale primrose yellow climber called Moonlight.

If you get your seeds now, you can plant them out as soon as the weather warms up. Nasturtiums don’t like to be transplanted, so don’t try to get a jumpstart on spring by starting them indoors.

Every winter, the snowplows dump piles of snow in front of my fence, and the salt kills off whatever was growing there. So I start over each spring, spending, oh, about 10 minutes tucking nasturtium seeds into the ground. Then I sit back and contemplate all the delicious soups and salads I’m going to be making come summer.

Nasturtium Bouquet Garden

Cost: $11.95, plus shipping

Where to Buy: Select Seeds, at selectseeds.com [3] or 1-800-684-0395