Picking Borage Flowers and Leaves: How to Pull the Star Cleanly

The flower is the crop, and it pulls out of the calyx

A borage flower hangs face down on a curved stem, five sharp blue petals around a black cone of anthers, held in a green bristly calyx. What you want on a plate is the blue star on its own, with no green attached and no bristles. Pinch the black anther cone between finger and thumb and pull gently straight down, and the whole flower slides out of the calyx in one piece, leaving the green cup on the plant.

Pick in the morning once the dew has gone. Flowers open over the course of a day and a freshly opened one is deep blue and firm; by the second day it has faded towards pink and lilac and it collapses within an hour of picking. Pink flowers are perfectly edible and taste the same, but they look tired on a plate and are not worth picking for garnish.

Do not pull the flower by a petal. The petals tear away and you are left with the black cone still in the calyx, which is fiddly to remove and looks wrong.

Picking without stripping the plant

Borage keeps producing flowers as long as you keep taking them, so regular picking increases the total crop rather than reducing it. Each curved flowering stem carries buds that open in sequence from the base towards the tip, so work along a stem over a week or two rather than stripping it in one go. A plant in full production gives thirty to fifty flowers a day.

1. Take the open ones, leave the buds Go over the plant every morning and pull only the flowers that are fully open and still blue. The buds behind them open over the following days.
2. Leave a share for the bees Bees work borage constantly and the nectar refills within a couple of minutes of being emptied. Picking half the open flowers leaves plenty and keeps the plant working for pollination elsewhere in the garden.
3. Collect into a shallow container The flowers are fragile and crush under their own weight. A single layer in a wide bowl travels; a bag full does not.
4. Use them the same day Flowers wilt within hours at room temperature. In an airtight box lined with damp paper in the fridge they hold for about a day, and no longer.

Leaves: young only, and handled for the bristles

Every part of borage above ground is covered in stiff white bristles, and on a mature leaf they are prickly enough to be unpleasant raw. Pick leaves at under four inches (10 cm) long, when the bristles are still soft, and take them from the middle of the plant rather than the oldest bottom growth. The flavor is clean cucumber with a faint saltiness.

The bristles break down with any of three treatments: chopping finely, wilting in hot fat or water for a minute, or blanching for thirty seconds. Cooked young leaves behave like spinach and are the traditional filling use. Raw whole leaves in a salad are a mistake almost everyone makes exactly once.

1. Wear gloves to pick Handling a large plant bare handed leaves your forearms itching. The bristles are not dangerous, just persistent.
2. Pick from the middle, not the base Lower leaves are old, coarse and often splashed with soil. Take the half grown ones from the upper half of the plant.
3. Chop or wilt before eating Shred finely across the leaf, or drop into boiling water for thirty seconds. Either destroys the bristles completely.
4. Use it the day you pick it Borage leaves go limp and blacken at the cut edge within a day. There is no useful way to store them fresh.

Borage leaves contain pyrrolizidine alkaloids and are treated as an occasional food rather than a daily green. Use them as a flavoring in small amounts, not as a bulk leaf vegetable, and leave them out of anything eaten in quantity every day.

Keeping the flowers: ice, sugar and vinegar

Fresh flowers cannot be stored, but they freeze perfectly in water and that is by far the most useful preserve. Set one flower face up in each compartment of an ice cube tray, half fill with water, freeze, then top up and freeze again so the flower stays suspended in the middle instead of floating to the top. They keep their color for months.

Drying is not worth it. Dried borage flowers turn gray and lose the blue entirely. Crystallising with egg white and caster sugar preserves the shape and color for a week or two but no longer. Steeping flowers in white wine vinegar for a fortnight gives a pale pink vinegar that keeps for a year and is a better use of a glut than drying.

1. Freeze in two stages Half fill the tray, add a flower face up, freeze until solid, then top up with water and freeze again. One stage freezing floats every flower to the surface.
2. Use cooled boiled water Water that has been boiled and cooled freezes clearer than water from the tap, so the blue shows through the cube instead of being hidden by cloudiness.
3. Bag the cubes once frozen Turn them out into a freezer bag and label it. They keep six months and free the tray for the next picking.
4. Make flower vinegar with a glut Pack a jar loosely with blue flowers, cover with white wine vinegar, and leave two weeks somewhere dark. Strain and bottle. The color turns pink and holds.

Borage flower color is pH sensitive. Dropped into anything acidic the blue turns pink within minutes, which is worth knowing before you garnish a lemon drink and wonder what went wrong.

What to record about the picking season

Write down the date of the first open flower and the date the plant went over, and do the same after the midseason cut back for the second flush. Those four dates across two seasons tell you precisely how to stagger your sowings to have blue flowers on the table continuously, which is otherwise guesswork.

Note the daily count roughly, even as a category rather than a number, and note which plants gave the heaviest flush. Borage varies a lot with soil, and the plants in the poorest corner of the garden are usually the best producers. That single observation, written down once, will change where you sow next year.