Edible Flower Gardening?

It's no secret to my friends that I can be a bit...weird, and even hobbyist sometimes. I get on these weird hobbyhorses and ride them straight into the ground. Sometimes I let them recover for a few years and hop right back on. Right now, I'm being maybe a tiny bit obsessive about gardens. Odd because I'm not really an outdoors-y type, but, well, I like flowers and I like fresh vegetables, and the bugs and dirt and sunburns are kind of a necessary part of all that. So.

A couple of years back, my husband got me a couple of bare root roses for a birthday present -- one a climber called Zephirine Drouhin, the other a... I don't know. Hybrid tea? Floribunda? Grandiflora? Not a clue, but I do know she's named "Sweetness." Lovely, delicately pale purple blossoms, lemony fragrance. & Zephirine has some very very PINK blossoms and a gorgeous fragrance. Anyway. After several years of judicious pruning, Zephirine is an explosion of blossoms this year, so I've been wondering what to do with the petals -- our climate is such that I've gotten 2-3 or sometimes 4 blooming periods from my roses.

So I started looking into things like rosewater. Rosewater is a great thing for cosmetic use, but it's also used as flavor in recipes (like for delicate clear soups, for pastries, etc.). Of course, for either use, you want to use rose petals that are free of pesticides, and the only way to truly control that is by growing your own. The two methods of creating rosewater are to create a small stovetop still (which is actually pretty cool; gonna try that sometime!) or to steep rose petals in boiling water, rather like making tea. The steeping version requires rather less volume of fresh petals, although you can also use dried; but I really REALLY want to try the still, which means kind of a lot of petals. Which means more roses. Therefore... I've been researching methods of propagation.

SO, this year, I am going to be trying a couple of different methods of propagation. If one of them works for me, I may use it on my mom's roses; I've wanted to do that for years because they're lovely -- a white and a red -- but I've never really tried to figure out HOW. Additionally, I'm considering learning how to preserve the rose petals by drying so that I can use them in the future (or, y'know... make a sachet to throw in my lingerie drawer).

Part of my rambling through Teh Interwebz landed me on a list of edible flowers, so now I'm also kind of taken with the idea of planting my flower garden full of edible blossoms -- marigold, nasturtium, pansy, etc. -- and other edibles -- sunflowers might be nice, along with herbs and a few veggies. The biggest problems are that in the already semi-cleared garden section in front of the house there seems to be an underground nest of wasps which must be removed (in an ecologically sound way so that I can plant edibles there) and the fact that I'm going to have to dig up more yard. And probably there will be soil amendment necessary, as well.

Gonna be a task!

(Also, eventually, there will be pictures!)