How to grow calendulas

Calendula, also known as pot marigold, is a fast-blooming annual grown as much for a cutting garden as for the kitchen. It produces daisy-shaped flowers in orange and yellow that open with the sun and close at dusk, held above compact, upright plants that fit easily along a bed edge. Home gardeners grow it for steady color through a season, for edible petals tossed into salads or dried into soups and stews, and for the beneficial insects it draws into a vegetable garden, particularly around brassicas.

The hardest part of growing calendula well is staying ahead of the flowers. UNH Extension notes that cutting spent blooms keeps the plant producing, and Utah State University Extension found that deadheaded plants rebloom in about two weeks. Skip that task for a stretch in midsummer, as a second-year gardener juggling a full bed often does, and the plant shifts its energy into seed instead of new buds. Flowering slows and stops, and because calendula self-sows readily once left to seed, the bed fills with volunteer seedlings the following spring, crowding whatever crop was meant to follow in that row.