Winter panies in a vegetable garden

Angelo's Facebook photo

An Italian friend's post on facebook reminds me of when we lived in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland around 1980. There were still lots of Italian families living there any many of them had large vegetable gardens. Typically, the edging of their winter plantings (kale, cabbages, broccolini, etc.) would be something like these pansies, but they saved their own seed from year to year, so the flowers were a multiplicity of shades - more yellow than lavender in this garden, more white/purple in that garden. And these flowers are also edible!  It was a charming effect, making winter and early spring a special time to walk around the neighborhood.