Easy Companion Groupings to Get Started

To make getting started with companion planting easier, here are three combinations of common vegetable garden plants listed in order of what they do well next to:

COMPANION COMBINATION ONE

COMPANION COMBINATION TWO

COMPANION COMBINATION THREE

Notes

Note that, since the sun will be slightly to the south, even in summer, taller plants like tomatoes, typically go on the north side of a bed, so there are no garden plants in their casted shade.

Groups listed together here mean they’re planted interspersed. 

• For onions & carrots, spinach & onions, and lettuce, spinach, & kale, this can be every other plant or every other row, whichever works best for you, but you can also do it however you want. I’ve certainly done it in patches or even little mini-blocks. 
• For tomatoes & onions and tomatoes & carrots, both onions and carrots—or even a mix of the two—make a great companion border for tomatoes and fill in the extra spaces around a plant that, if viewed from above, grows in a roughly circular area but is often in a rectangular bed. 
• For carrots and lettuce each with early radishes, the radishes are often planted mixed right in with the carrots and lettuce seed, where they sprout strongly and help their slightly weaker companions break through the soil crust, and then are harvested earlier, leaving space for the lettuce and carrots to fill in. 
• Finally, lettuce, spinach, & kale—and even onions and carrots with them—make a great set of companions, with the kale continuing on all season and growing to fill in the space vacated by the earlier-maturing lettuce and spinach—which are typically pulled when they start to bolt and go to seed during the first flush of hotter weather. As you can see in the third column, you can also use this combination strategically adjacent to the rows of carrots and/or onions surrounding a tomato plant so that you end up with a row of large kale next to your tomato that is surrounded by carrots and/or onions. 

It’s worth noting that groupings that include onions often lead to other plants benefiting at the expense of onion bulb size. Therefore, while it makes sense to add onions to such groupings as sort of sacrificial companions, for onions you want to reach the ideal storage size, plant them in their own, separate block, ideally spaced apart.

It’s also worth noting that the second grouping’s location of sweet potatoes next to broccoli and potatoes, followed by onions and bush beans the next respective spots away is a wonderful set of groupings. Not only do they all grow great next to each other, but it also works great temporally. First, the potatoes and broccoli, and then the onions and bush beans, are done growing and vacating their areas of the bed just in time for the sweet potato vines to fill the extra space just as they need it.