Growing a successful vegetable garden isn’t just about what you plant, but where you plant it what you plant it with. This is the entire idea behind companion planting, or planting vegetables next to each other that can help support the growth of each other. Companion planting can do a lot for a garden from saving you space to deterring pests. If you’re interested in figuring out if companion planting is right for your garden, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s take a closer look.
What is Companion Planting
Companion planting is the act of planting crops with beneficial relationships together in the same plot. Benefits for this can include saving space, deterring pests, attracting pollinators, fixing nitrogen, controlling soil temperature, controlling soil moisture, preventing weeds, and supporting companion plants. That’s a lot of benefits!
Why Don’t We See More Companion Planting?
Companion planting works great small scale, but resists industrialization. The historical example of the “Three Sisters”, corn, beans, and squash, all work great together when planting and harvesting by hand. The beans climb fix nitrogen for the corn and squash, the corn supports the beans, and the squash shades the ground holding moisture and preventing weeds. However, scale this up and you can’t harvest these with a machine. Even if you could design a machine that harvest all three it would a further engineering nightmare to separate them without damaging any one crop.
Since companion planting resists industrialization it is less utilized than it should be. The other side of this is that companion planting is perfect for the home vegetable garden where you want all these benefits and typically are not worried about scale.
Plants are Mostly Friendly
Old lore about companion planting used to categorize plants based on what was good together and looked at other plants as being bad together. This overly black and white view of the issue complicated things for a lot of gardeners without much scientific backing. In reality most plants can be grown together and the way to choose successful pairs is to cluster plants based on the benefits they provide.
For example, when you are adding a plant that adds shade and grown cover, it covers that benefit and you should avoid planting additional plants that fill that role in the same space. Instead look to find other plants that work to provide the garden with additional benefits.
Remember, while most plants can work well together, they are still all trying to compete for nutrients and sunlight, so even though you are putting your crops closer together you still can’t over crowd them.
Flowers in The Vegetable Garden
Something that companion planting leads to is planting flowers in or along your vegetable garden. While you likely aren’t going to eat your flowers (though some you can) they often act as a way to bring in pollinators and deter pests that vegetables can’t deal with quite as well. Some plants even attract the predators of certain garden pests, for example dill attracts ladybugs which eat aphids.
Common Companion Planting Combinations
- Basil and Tomatoes – Basil works as a fantastic insect repellent for thrips, moths, and army worms, all of which can absolutely destroy tomato plants. On top of this basil attracts bees and can help you get more tomatoes faster due to increased pollinators.
- Dill and Anything – Dill attracts ladybugs which are a huge help in the garden. Ladybugs eat aphids as well as a lot of other small garden pests which makes dill an ideal candidate to pair with anything.
- Garlic and Potatoes – Garlic is an alternative to dill when it comes to dealing with aphid. While garlic doesn’t attract lady bugs, it certainly deters the aphids who abhor it’s leaves and smell. Garlic is best planted between rows of potatoes as it has a small footprint, but it can also work between rows of head lettuce and cabbage as well.
- Sunflowers and Vining Plants – Sunflowers make for great supports smaller vining plants like pole beans or pickling cucumbers. While not everyone eats sunflower seeds, they produce great bird seed at the end of year if nothing else and look great in the garden.
- Sage and Carrots – sage repels carrot flies and fits nicely between your rows. The roots are not so large as to disturb your carrots growth and they have similar watering needs. Alternatively, sage also works well to deter cabbage moths and can be planted with head cabbage.
Just the Start of Companion Planting
These simple suggestions are just the beginning of what you can do with companion planting. While we’ve highlighted a lot of plants that can be planted right next to each other, there’s a further group of plants that you can plant off your garden to draw pests away! There’s so much you can do with companion planting and it really comes down to knowing and understanding the benefits that each of the plants you grow adds to your garden. If you understand the benefits your plants bring, pairing up those benefits can help you create an amazing garden in no time!