Companion Planting

Tuesday I planted the second sister, Kentucky Wonder pole beans, in my lasagna garden. The corn is really taking off for the most part. It's about 6 in. high. (Although a couple mounds have tiny 2-3 in. plants. You can tell where most of the nutrients ended up.)

In the excitement of wanting to discover more on companion planting, I checked out Carrots Love Tomatoes from the library. Although kind of a hard book to follow at first because it's in alphabetical order by topic/plant/pest/etc., it had a lot in interesting info plus a suggested garden plan. The nice thing was that the author is from Southern Oklahoma, so it's one of the few books I've discovered that actually discusses okra, peanuts, sweet potatoes, and even cotton.

I took a lot of notes, copied a few pages, and recharted a possible long term plan for my garden. Here are some basics that I will definitely try either this year or next:

1. Tomatoes and garlic can be planted practically on top of each other. Not only does the garlic help ward off pests for the tomato, they both can be planted with roses to help with aphids, black spot and other nasties.

2. The brassica group (cabbage, broccoli, etc.) gets a lot of help from the aromatic herbs such as dill, mint, sage, thyme, basil, and rosemary.

3. Onions should be rotated with the other root crops such as carrots & beets, not with the legumes as my other chart had showed. Carrots & onions together confuse their separate pests. (Score one for me. I actually did that this year for no good reason.)

4. The three sisters plan was mentioned several times. It's a good plan, and I'm sticking to it for now.

5. Strawberries should be interplanted with spinach.

6. Sunflowers can be happily underplanted with melons. I will attempt canteloupe next year maybe.