This episode I’ll be talking about Companion Planting, or if used as a primary method in your garden, companion gardening. Done properly it can reduce, if not eliminate, the majority of reasons why you would need to use chemicals in your garden.
Companion planting is a mix of gardening fact and folklore that advocates growing certain plants together for their mutual benefit. The reasons for putting plants together can be quite practical, while others are harder to explain why they seem to work. Through much trial and error many gardeners have figured out what plants reliably perform better when planted together. One of the best books I have found on the topic is "Great Garden Companions" by Sally Jean Cunningham.
I recently wrote on my blog that I have no interest in growing anything I can’t eat. If you are like me in that belief, you may discount the companion planting philosophy since it involves flowers and other non-edibles.
Or at least not traditionally edible. You’d be making a huge mistake. The main reason you would plant non-edibles is for bio-diversity. Even a flower hater like me can find a use for flowers in the garden if I can understand their purpose. One of the great benefits of bio-diversity is providing a home for all those beneficial insects so they can turn your garden into a battle ground against the harmful insects.
As a way of bring more bio-diversity to the garden, I’d recommend you set aside a part of your garden, as a wild or native planting area. Animals of all sizes need a home near your garden that isn’t always in turmoil with you planting, harvesting, weeding and the like. Give them a refuge to call home. You may want to include some kind of water feature or bird bath as well. Not just birds need water, flying insects need water too. You might also want to consider providing water down on the ground as well in ash trays or other pans. Put some pebbles in the bottom of the pan so bugs can crawl around and not drown.
But don’t restrict the non-edibles to one side of your garden. Consider your garden as a neighborhood. You are going to have the good guys, the bad guys, the various types of houses, places to eat and drink, and places to work. A properly designed neighborhood is not one that puts all of one kind of house on the west side, and all the businesses on the east side, and puts a train track down the middle leaving the bad guys on one side and the good guys on the other. You need to mix it up a little. If you want to plant 5 tomatoes plants, don’t plant them all together. Plant them around the garden with their various companions. The notable exception to this is corn since it needs to be in groups to grow properly. And believe it or not, you need to leave some weeds. Learn which ones are really beneficial, and how to recognize when it’s time to control them.
So how do we actually put this into practice?
You need to divide up the vegetables you want to grow into families, and then find their friends, and put them together in your neighborhood. It may seem confusing at first trying to sort all your garden plants into each family, but luckily there is plenty information available from folks who have already done this heavy lifting for us. You can find a list of the common vegetable plants and their friends on the MyChicagoGarden website in the ‘Learn More’ section. Much like anything in gardening, you’ll probably start with some basic information and someone else’s plan.
It’s that simple. Okay..it’s not simple. It’s a mater of doing some research and actually mapping out your garden. But that’s okay. If you’ve been following along with the podcast you’ll remember that we already mapped out how much space we have, what we want to grow and how we are going to grow it.So we have everything we need now to put the data into a spreadsheet or document that maps out what plants go with what.
Once we figure out all the various plants we need, not just the ones we want to grow to eat, we can do some research on best planting time for each, time to harvest and draw out some succession planting schemes. That will be the last piece we need to pull together to allow us to start ordering seeds. That sounds like we have a handful of podcasts to do right there.
