Borage

It’s winter right now and there’s not much to forage for in Michigan at the moment, but the off-season is a great time to be planning for your garden, flipping through seed catalogs, and buying plants for the next season.

I’ve talked about this plant before, but I want to give it the whole article it deserves so you can incorporate it into your landscape if it makes sense for your site!

Plant Profile:

Scientific Name: Borago officinalis

Preferred Habitat: Old gardens, woodland edges, pastures, not too picky with soil.

Edible Parts: Leaves, flowers, stalks

Distribution: Coastal regions, the Midwest, and the Southern US.

Harvest Season: Late Spring through fall

Key Identifiers: Star-shaped flowers with fuzzy stalks and fuzzy rounded leaves

Toxic Look-Alikes: Comfrey can look similar but is not toxic and does not have star shaped flowers

Nutrition:

Though it can be used as a vegetable in some cases, most people use it mainly as a medicinal herb (which I recommend). That said, less is known about the nutritional profile vs the medicinal uses which I have listed for you below:

• Reduces inflammation

• May alleviate asthma

• Borage oil helps maintain healthy skin and may in some cases alleviate certain skin conditions

• Borage oil can also improve your skin’s wound healing

• May alleviate rheumatoid arthritis

• Can alleviate ADHD symptoms

• Can be used to treat PMS symptoms

• Treats fevers

• Treats coughs

• Helps ease bug bites

Uses

Borage can be used in teas, tinctures, fresh as salad greens, poultices, seed oil, soaps, salves, cooked as a vegetable, jelly, dips, lemonades, or grown as microgreens!

If you use the seeds to make oil, it is generally recommended that you use the oil topically and NOT internally if you want to get the medicinal and skin benefits.

One of the most common uses for borage in our garden is not as an herb or vegetable though, it’s as a biomass crop. That said, I enjoy munching on the flowers in the summer since they have a very distinct cucumber flavor.

Even as a cooked vegetable it tends to keep that cucumber flavor rather than tasting like spinach or Swiss chard!

Growth Habits

Borage grows very easily in our garden. It produces a lot of seed so even though we planted some a few years back, it returns every year on its own making it very easy to grow.

To keep it from growing out of control, it’s pretty easy to pull out or chop down before it forms many seeds. It can definitely spread all over, but I consider it pretty easy to keep under control.

Borage plants tend to have a large thick taproot like a carrot. Like some of its relatives (comfrey in particular) it is very good at being a dynamic accumulator and bringing nutrients up to the surface from deep in the soil making it an excellent mulch!

Another one of the big benefits of growing borage in the garden is how many pollinators it attracts. Despite being from the old-world continents, borage actually feeds a wide range of pollinators including honeybees, bumblebees, pollinator flies, native bees, and other native pollinators!

This is largely due to how many flowers it produces in a very short amount of time! Each single flower has a lifespan of less than 1 day, and it produces hundreds and hundreds of flowers for a few months. This provides a massive amount of food for these insects!

Additional Information

Borage is supposedly susceptible to powdery mildew (a fungal disease that forms a white powder on the leaves) but we have powdery mildew really badly in our garden and borage never seems to have an issue. I’m not sure if that’s a difference in varieties or local conditions.

Borage also makes an excellent companion plant for fruit trees and other crops in plant guilds. Consider putting borage with the following plants:

Perennials:

• Strawberries

• Pears

• Quince

• Apples

• Goji Berries

• Blueberries

• Cranberries

• Lingon Berries

• Grapes

Annuals:

• Squash

• Melons

• Brassicas

• Tomatoes

• Peppers

• Eggplant

• Legumes

• Radishes

• Basil

Try to avoid planting it near potatoes since they can spread potato blight between each other, and of course not near fennel which is allelopathic.

Other than those couple no-nos, you really can’t go wrong planting it with any plant that would benefit from having pollinators nearby so don’t overthink it!

Cultivars

There aren’t many cultivars of borage (maybe an opportunity for plant breeding?) but here are a few existing options:

• White borage - This is the main variety we grow; it just has white flowers instead of blue.

• Blue “common” borage - This is the easiest to obtain and it has blue-purple flowers.

• Variegated borage - A variegated variety which adds an interesting look in the landscape.

• Creeping borage - A different species in the same genus, creeping borage actually acts like a short-lived perennial rather than an annual. It has smaller flowers and creeps rather than getting tall. (I couldn’t find anyone selling seeds for this except overseas unfortunately. If someone has a connection, hook me up)

I also plan to have borage plants (at least the white, probably the blue) for sale in the spring so stay tuned for that!

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