Home Vegetable Garden: Companion Planting

I must first of all thank my fellow hubber, Micky Dee for giving me this idea.

I touched on this briefly in my last hub, but now I would just like to expand on the concept of companion planting in all home vegetable gardens.

Companion Planting is great for organic gardening in any home grown vegetable garden because you can cut down on the pests that would spread to the same vegetable in this way. Growing vegetables together that are “friends” will benefit from each other because of their different characteristics.

Why wouldn't you want to learn more about home vegetable gardening. We are always trying to find out new ways to a healthy lifestyle, but here you will find it in your backyard with a range of of fiber vegetables to choose from.

Carrots with onions and lettuce

Radishes with cucumbers or beans

Potatoes with cabbage, basil carrots and onions

Onions with beets, lettuce, carrots and cabbag3

Eggplant with peppers, beans and marigold

Beans (pole) with the corn vegetable and radishes

Beans (bush) with potato, celery, cucumbers and strawberries

Lettuce with onions are really as well as strawberries, radishes, and cucumbers

Tomatoes with carrots, onions and parsley

Cucumbers with corn, sunflowers, peas, beans and radishes

By planting vegetables that grow well together they will provide you with more vegetables than usual compared to vegetables planted using bad combinations. It is said that vegetables will yield up to twice as much when planted with good combinations. This may get you interested in the idea of companion planting.

The soil can be enriched with nutrients and organic matter. Different vegetable plants give off different chemicals. This is one of the ways how vegetables are organized into groups of combinations.

You will be attracting the good kind of insect and chasing away the bad using companion planting in your garden.

By planting flowers with your vegetables you will not only be chasing aways pests, but also attract pollinating insects towards your vegetables, which is what you want.

• Probably the most historic one is beans and corn growing together. This is a classic example of two vegetables working in harmony together. The native American Indians added squash to beans and the corn vegetable, now known as the Three Sisters. You can see by this example that companion planting is nothing new.
• Plant pepper and basil with your tomatoes and it will improve their flavour
• Plant Garlic to get rid of aphid. They don't like the smell of the bulbs.
  
• Planting geraniums with corn and cabbage are great if you don’t like seeing cabbage worms and the Japanese beetle around
• Nasturtiums help eradicate the squash bug when they are planted with zucchini and cucumbers

• Onions won’t do well with strawberries that might have diseases
• Corn does not go well with tomatoes, celery, or potatoes
• Carrots should be planted away from dill as they share the same bad bugs
• Cabbage hates strawberries, beans and tomatoes
• Tomatoes and potatoes have the same blight, so keep them far from each other
• Fennel is not liked by most plants so put it away from your garden

It has been stressed before that you don’t need a huge space for a vegetable patch so how far apart should you space your vegetables?

Companion Planting can even be achieved in a small space.

You have to keep several factors in mind when considering spacing requirement between plants. Mostly it will depend on the size of the plant and if you want to plant another vegetable, herb or flower for that matter it might need more sun. Lettuce, for example grows well in the shade.

A hexagonal plan is a good idea to go with for your plants that are allies (plants that are friends with each other). When you are planning your garden design make it in the form of a grid so that you will have sections that can be divided into squares where different vegetables grow together. Climbing vegetables can be planted 6 inches apart and won’t interfere with each other.

Plant tall plants such as tomato and corn around one of the grids and then you can plant lettuce next to them, also 6 inches apart in a row. The tall plants will provide shade for the lettuces because they enjoy the shade. Each grid would be 1 to 2 ft so the vegetables who are not friends will be well-spaced out.

I would rather live with a friend that I got on really well with and I’m sure a vegetable would too!