Banish Pests and Improve Your Soil With Poached Egg Plant

Companion flowers don’t get much easier, or more cheerful, than poached egg plant (Limnanthes douglasii)! I love its eye-catching flowers and finely divided, vibrant green leaves, which look just fab planted along the edges of vegetable beds, spilling out onto the paths and softening the hard edges of raised beds or paving.

But behind that sunny-side-up charm is a plant with some seriously garden-friendly credentials. It’s a magnet for beneficial bugs like pollinators, it’s fantastic for building soil health, and it’s super-easy to grow too – making it a must-grow in the vegetable garden!

Growing Poached Egg Plant From Seed

Spring is a perfect time to sow poached egg plant – and it couldn’t be easier. Start by raking the soil level, and removing any stones. Take a pinch of seeds and lightly scatter them over your prepared soil. If you like, you could sow into shallow rows or drills, but I prefer the more natural-looking broadcasting approach to sowing these. Gently rake them in, and then tamp it all down with the back of the rake. Water, using a watering can fitted with a rose, to set them on their way. Lovely stuff!

Once the seedlings pop up, remove the excess (or transplant them elsewhere) so that the remaining young plants are roughly 4in (10 cm) apart in all directions. That will give them the space they need to really thrive.

Another option is to sow into plug trays of all-purpose potting mix. The advantage of sowing into plugs is that you can simply plant them wherever there’s space or whenever gaps appear. Sow a few seeds into each plug and then cover them over with just a dusting of potting mix, then give them a good drink.

Sowings made in early spring will give flowers from early summer. But for the longest possible display, try making a few more sowings up until the very start of summer to keep the blooms coming for months longer.

Poached egg plant often self-seeds, saving you a job in subsequent years, which is rather handy isn’t it?! They will grow to form low, bushy plants that are just perfect for fitting in here and there among the vegetables.

Build Your Soil With Flowers

Late summer is a great time to sow poached egg plants for an entirely different reason. Poached egg plants also make a fantastic living mulch – that’s a quick-growing cover crop or green manure that suppresses weeds and keeps the ground protected and soil life happy. This is especially valuable over the autumn and winter months when beds might otherwise be empty. Use poached egg plant to blanket empty beds, or grow them between overwintering staples like Brussels sprouts or kale.

If your winters are relatively mild, those autumn seedlings will survive and can be left to flower extra early the following year, giving you a longer flowering season and an early boost for pollinators. The seedlings are surprisingly hardy in fact.

But if your winters are very harsh? You won’t get the flowers next year, but you can still let the plants die back naturally and then rot down into the soil, or dig them in a few weeks before planting in spring. Just like a traditional cover crop or green manure, this injection of organic matter will work to add fertility to the soil and improve soil structure, improving conditions for future crops.

Easy Companion Planting

One of the best things about poached egg plant is how easy it is to manage. It prefers a sunny spot and well-drained soil but will cope with a little light shade too, which makes it great for growing beneath taller summer crops like broccoli or tomatoes, or even paired with narrow-leaved veggies such as onions or garlic.

And if you’re worried about the seedlings being a nuisance popping up here and there, please don’t be! They don’t muscle out neighbouring plants and are easy to just pull up or hoe off wherever they’re not wanted – or carefully dug up to relocate to where they are. But if you’d rather they don’t self-seed in the first place, just pull the plants up once flowering starts to fade before they have a chance to set seed. Easy.

You’ll find poached egg plant, along with a whole host of other vegetable garden-friendly flowers such as calendula and marigolds, in our Garden Planner. Just drop them into your plan and the Garden Planner will calculate exactly how many plants you can fit into the space you have, or check out its Grow Guide to find out everything you need to know to grow it successfully.

Plants Related to this Article

Poached Egg Plant Grow Guide