Eat Your Yard: Companion Planting

When many people picture a home vegetable garden, they see neat rows of tomatoes, carrots, and onions in an expanse of carefully-weeded dirt. In reality, this type of setup can encourage pests and disease while losing the potential benefits to be had from mixed plantings of complementary fruits, vegetables, and even flowers. Companion planting has many benefits: it attracts beneficial insects, repels or confuses pests, decreases weeds, conserves moisture, and takes advantage of plants' varying growth patterns to make the most of limited space.

Controlling insect pests can sometimes seem like a never-ending battle in the vegetable garden. Garlic and onions are just a few of the plants which can scare off or confuse pests with their strong scent. Also, don't downplay the role of beneficial insects. By incorporating flowering plants such as mint, bee balm, and dill into your landscape, you can attract lacewings, tiny parasitic wasps, and other insects which feed on pests. Flowers also attract valuable pollinators to your vegetables.

Interplanting takes into account the varying maturity times, heights, nutrient and water needs, and root systems of different crops to maximize the yield from a limited garden space. Cool-weather crops such as broccoli or cabbage can be followed by a summer path of bush beans, for example. Lettuce appreciates the summer shade offered by taller vegetables like tomatoes or peppers. Shallow-rooted onions do not compete with deeper-rooted squash, and can be harvested before the squash take over a bed. Low-growing crops such as beets, carrots, or lettuce planted around taller plants help control weeds and protect soil moisture while yielding a second crop in the space. An interplanting strategy also avoids large monocultures of a single crop, which can encourage the spread of disease.

This is just an introduction to the colorful art of companion planting. Have fun experimenting with some of these ideas! You may find your garden more interesting and beautiful, not to mention more productive, than ever.

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