This simple and summery cucumber salad features a bold herb vinaigrette, briny feta cheese, spicy red onions, and pretty edible flowers to top it all off.

In case you’re sick of pickles but your garden keeps churning out the cukes like there’s no tomorrow… this quick and easy lettuce-less salad is a great way to use up at least a few of them.

I may or may not have harbored a slight fixation with edible flowers this past spring, which lead me to fill my patio container garden with edible blooms in addition to my typical herbs. I meandered up and down the aisles of the nursery, phone in hand, googling various flora and fauna to see if they were in fact edible. While they didn’t have the chamomile flowers I was so hoping to find, I did end up with marigolds, borage (which I’ve grown and used before), and these gorgeous purple and white dianthus.

Needless to say, I was looking for an excuse to use some of my home-grown flowers in a recipe before the blooms withered in the summer heat, and this recipe is the result. Does it matter where the inspiration came from if the outcome is this delicious? I say not.

While I love that the purple and white of the dianthus matches the colors of the salad, I think marigold petals, with their peppery bite, would work equally well in this dish, as would arugula or radish flowers, or even herb flowers like chives or oregano (while I typically try to keep my herbs from flowering, when they do bolt I always try to put the flowers to good use).

Regardless of its origins, this recipe is perfect in its simplicity. While the recipe itself isn’t all that different from our always-popular tomato cucumber salad, we made the dressing a little bit different by adding an assortment of fresh herbs in addition to the olive oil and red wine vinegar.

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