You May Call Me MISTRESS Gardener

I adore nasturtiums.

 They belong to the category of flowers that used to be labelled "thrifty":

flowers such as geraniums and marigolds and sunflowers
that can easily be grown from seed and aren't too picky about the soil.

 I've read that they're good for planting next to vegetables,

BUT

my raised-bed veggie garden has soil as rich as chocolate cake...

... and that's not a good match for nasturtiums.  

The growing advice for these bright flowers, after all,  is
"Be nasty to nasturtiums."

The saying means that rich soil and plentiful water will

give a gardener lots of green leaves but not many flowers.

So I decided to make a bed-within-a-bed for my nasturtiums.

I started with a plastic nursery pot...

and buried it in my bed within an inch of the top.

I got some "gardening sand" from Home Depot...

and mixed it in about a ratio of about one part sand, two parts soil.

I filled the nursery pot,

then moved some seedlings from another pot into their new, lean beds.

Do you see all that space around the new seedling?

Yeah, that didn't last long, once the zucchini took over.

Next year, the zucchini are banished to their own pots.

BUT!  The nasturtiums that fought for space are flowering,

which means their new beds -- and soil -- are working out just fine.