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Showing posts with label Companion Planting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Companion Planting. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Monday, June 15, 2015
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Companion Planting Basics – How to Use Companion Plants in Your Garden
Just like with people, plants have their best friends – you know, those other plants that they like to grow old next to. When you grow certain plant combinations together they have surprising powers to help each other grow and thrive in the garden.
Companion planting works in a few different ways. For instance, tall plants provide shade for sun-sensitive shorter or even vining plants. Companion plants can also prevent pest problems. Plants like onions and marigolds repel a lot of different pests and other plants like Nasturtiums can lure them away from more desirable plants. Another great example of companion planting is attracting beneficial insects like butterflies and bees to the yard by planting butterfly bush or trumpet vines.
Great Combinations of Companion Plants
Corn and Green Beans: One of the oldest companion plantings is with corn and beans. The green beans grow up the corn stalks keeping them off the ground and the beans attract beneficial insects that prey on corn pests. A beautiful friendship was born!
Cucumbers and Nasturtiums: Both plants love to vine out and attract many pests. Nasturtiums are great in salads and have a peppery taste – they also are one of the biggest pest attractors in a garden. They are great to grow with cucumbers so the insects will eat the nasturtiums and leave the cucumbers alone.
Roses and Chives: Gardeners have planted garlic with rose bushes for hundreds of years. Garlic repels pests that eat the rose petals. Garlic chives are also a good repellent and I love them because their white and purple blooms look great at the base of the rose bush.
Tomatoes, Cabbage & Dill: Tomatoes are a natural repellent to the diamondback moth larvae, which are huge caterpillars that chew large holes in cabbage leaves. It is best to grow tomatoes on all sides of the cabbage patch and next to the plants to keep the caterpillars at bay. Any plant in the cabbage family such as broccoli and Brussels sprouts helps keep the dill upright and the dill attracts tiny beneficial wasps that keep cabbageworms at bay.
Radishes and Spinach: Plant radishes among spinach plants to lure leafminers away from the spinach. Since the leafminers don’t do damage to the radish itself, just its leaves, this is a great compromise in the garden.
Potatoes and Sweet Alyssum: One of the best smelling plants in any garden is sweet alyssum. Its tiny flowers attract many beneficial insects. Plant sweet alyssum beside potatoes, or on the edges if growing in a container, and let it spread. The potatoes grow pest free underneath the ground and you get a wonderful scented garden all year long.
These are just a few of the best companion planting combinations, but there are many more. Learning companion planting combinations will help ensure a garden working together and producing beautiful flowers and a bounty of fruits and vegetables.
Companion planting
Traditional gardening wisdom teaches that certain plants grown together create mutual strength and disease resistance. Companion planting is one way to create a disease-resistant tomato plant.
The National Sustainable Agriculture Information Services provide charts and lists of companion planting. Tomatoes become more disease free and pest resistant when planted near onions, nasturtiums, marigolds, asparagus, carrots, parsley, and cucumber. Basil repels whiteflies. Dill and borage repel hornworms.
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Companion Planting | What NOT To Plant Together
Often times when we talk about Companion Planting we discuss the plants that play nice together and should always be planted side-by-side in our gardens. If you are just Getting Started With Square Foot Gardening, you may want to just plant everything that you want at once.
But there is a catch…..
Not too often do we talk about those plants that just don’t get along. It’s like we are gossiping about the neighbors or something. I mean, even though we love having sunflowers in the neighborhood they sure don’t play well with others. They emit a toxin from their roots that inhibits other plants from growing too close to them as they want all the nutrients in the surrounding soil. Who knew?
Well, I’m here to give you the dish on what plants to NOT plant together when you are companion planting, even if they would look just perfect in your vegetable or herb garden next to each other.
Anything in the bean family, whether it is growing string green beans or bush beans all the way to lima beans don’t get along with quite a few other vegetables. Their biggest nemeses in the garden are chives, garlic, leeks, and onions. They are not fans of bulb-type vegetables (luckily, you can grow many bulb vegetables from kitchen scraps)! Beans also don’t do well with peppers, either the sweet green peppers or their fiery cousins the jalapeños. One plant that I was shocked that beans don’t get along with are marigolds, which are typically crowd pleasers as they deter pests. In fact, all the plants that the bean family shuns are those that deter pests. Go figure!
Peas are cousins to beans and they also loathe the bulb veggies including chives, garlic, leeks, and onions.
Both broccoli and cauliflower have a few enemies in the vegetable world. They are not fans of peppers, all types of squash including yellow squash and even pumpkins (and yes – this means that if you are growing zucchini, you need to plant them far away). How they don’t care for strawberries or tomatoes I will never know, but they don’t. It seems the cool season crops of broccoli and cauliflower have something against those fruits and veggies that like it a little hotter to grow.
Besides cauliflower and broccoli, steer clear of planting cilantro and cucumbers near tomatoes. Dill and carrots would rather be at other ends of the planter bed too.
So now you know too who would rather stay on their own sides of the garden!
To sum it all up – when companion planting:
- Beans: Don’t plant near chives, garlic, leeks, onions, peppers, marigolds
- Peas: Don’t plant near chives, garlic, leeks, onions, peppers
- Broccoli and Cauliflower: Don’t plant near peppers, squash, strawberries, tomatoes
- Tomatoes: Don’t plant near broccoli, cauliflower, cilantro, cucumbers
- Dill: Don’t plant near carrots
- Sunflowers need to be planted at least 12 inches away from any other plant.
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