For anything in the garden, one cannot prescribe or proscribe specific choices. It’s not the point. In fact, I’d say it’s the opposite. There’s too much variability in climate, plant combinations, time of planting, and, most importantly, gardeners’ own personal preferences for anyone to say any one way is the correct way—for anything. Companion planting is no different. There are multitudes of great combinations and wonderful, idiosyncratic preferences practiced by great and budding gardeners alike. That variability is part of what makes gardening so special and compelling and talking to and learning from other gardeners so interesting. In that spirit, and in that spirit only, we offer you some of our favorite companions and companion teams.
Our Favorites
From our chart of plants’ companions and their adversaries (or antagonists, if you prefer), we have our favorite common companions. If you’re curious about what we do and why, here’s an inside look into our process and reasoning. Again, it’s not meant in any prescriptive or proscriptive way. There are way too many variables for there ever to be one way. It’s just our honest example for anyone who might need something to get them started, can benefit from being able to imagine it in action, or desires a peek beyond the tables into another gardener’s thought processes on why to place one plant with another.
From Poring Over Charts to Common Teams
When we first started planting this way, I pored over the companion and adversary chart every year, writing out every possible companion for each in an attempt to pick the strongest combinations for what we were planting that year. Over time, however, we settled on a few teams based on what we’ve come to commonly grow and our observations of how they do together. Here are our common teams and the ones we keep apart.
Broccoli, Onions, Peppers, and Tomatoes
First, we grow our broccoli, onions, peppers, and tomatoes in a double-dug bed. In that bed, we always grow our onions and broccoli next to each other, since both like each other, and add some potatoes on the other side of the broccoli if there’s room. We add some dill in the spare spaces around the broccoli to attract predatory wasps. We usually keep our tomatoes next to our asparagus since the tomatoes repel asparagus beetles, which only works because we can keep the tomatoes in the same spot for years (there’s more on this in the next chapter). And we always keep our peppers and tomatoes at least one crop space apart, since they’re in the same family and are susceptible to the same diseases. In the spare spaces around the tomatoes, we plant basil, as it’s supposed to improve the growth and flavor of tomatoes, and sometimes carrots and/or onions since they all do well together.
Bush Beans and Potatoes
Since both like each other and repel each other’s pests, our potatoes and beans are always right next to each other. At first we did this to have the beans repel the Colorado potato beetles from the potatoes, but, after having moved to a place where Mexican bean beetles are so prolific, it’s as much for the beans since potatoes repel the bean beetles.
Carrots, Onions, Lettuce, and Spinach
Carrots, onions, lettuce, and spinach all grow well together. We end up mixing them up in all sorts of combinations.
Squash, Melons, and Corn
As you probably know by now, our young squash plants are always surrounded by radishes—which are planted every few inches all over the sloping part of the foot-or-so-wide planting mounds—and nasturtiums, which I plant one facing each cardinal direction. There’s no real need for the latter part. I just like the poetry of paying homage to them as I plant, and it’s the right amount of nasturtiums. Both help repel pests, as stated many times earlier. We also always keep our melons spaced away from our squash and keep them off the plots planted with either the previous year, as we do with every crop except tomatoes (more on this in Crop Rotations).
We plant our sweet corn at staggered times for “continual” summer harvests, and we usually have some beans nearby and let the squash wend its way between the corn. (We’d do the same for cucumbers that we do for the squash but in a different corn plot.) We’ve always continued revising our experiments for growing corn, pole beans, and squash together and have tried several different ways in the past.
For the past few years, however, having recently been inspired by the beautiful and eloquent explanation of it in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer—such a wonderful and necessary book—we’ve been growing the Three Sisters planted in the grid and mound pattern described in Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden by Gilbert L. Wilson. We knew the beans and squash would be fine but thought the corn wouldn’t do well spaced so closely around the mounds, but we’ve been happily surprised at its wonderful productivity. To be honest, however, unless it was completely unproductive, we’d probably continue this practice anyway just for its eloquence and its visceral reminder of our ties to prolific gardeners of the past who have passed down so much to us. It’s our chance to be thankful for what they’ve passed on to us commemorate and and honor their gifts in a way that fills us with a connection that seems more important than productivity. Luckily, we don’t have to choose. Plus, it helps that we typically have more sweet corn than we could ever eat anyway.
Sunflowers and Marigolds
We keep our sunflowers on the northern side of the garden to keep them from shading anything and always keep the beans well away from them since they don’t grow next to each other. And we surround the garden with marigolds, since they’re strong pest deterrents. One year, we also surrounded the garden with spearmint to deter deer and rabbits. The very next day, however, we saw deer tracks making a beeline to the spearmint. They never came back, so maybe they were curious about the new smell they supposedly hate.
The Abandoned Companions
There are some companions that we’ve abandoned over time, one simply because one plant was so prolific, another because it was probably a bad idea.
One year we put bush beans in the bed with the strawberries. We were so careful to get the correct spacing—adding the spacing needed for each together and dividing by two—but it didn’t matter. The beans were so healthy we didn’t see the strawberries again until the end of the summer. We actually even forgot they were buried under the bean foliage until we saw them again after the beans died back.
Another year we had a batch of stinging nettles come up right next to our tomatoes. Being in a neighborhood of manicured lawns, the nearest other stinging nettles were quite some distance away, and none came up anywhere else in the garden. Knowing stinging nettles are supposed to improve the strength of tomatoes and having always wanted to try this companion pair, I, therefore, thought it was a fortuitous gift. What I learned, however, is that when picking tomatoes requires being stung by nettles no matter how careful one is, one’s partner becomes less than enthused about the pairing and, especially, the picking, leading the one who insisted on keeping the nettles to be the only one picking the much strengthened and very productive tomatoes. After the 191st sting, I decided it wasn’t worth it.
New Ideas for the Future
Next year, we’ll surely try another experiment; we always do. Whether it’s a new way to try hill potatoes as close as possible to our pole beans or trying a few garlic cloves, onions, or carrots again next to our tomatoes, we always experiment with something (why not?), and we hope you do the same.
Happy gardening and learning. 🙂
