Companion Planting for the Kitchen Gardener by Allison Greer published 2014
Despite all the practicality of modern convenience, watching something edible grow still possesses a delicate magic that can’t be replicated in the grocery store. Every time I talk to people about gardening, they either profess their love for growing things, or they see gardening as something beyond the realm of possibility. In all cases people appear to recognize the majesty of a simple garden.
Allison Greer, Chapter 1, page 1.
Although I keep telling myself that I will have a real vegetable garden each spring, I always wait too late to properly prepare a true vegetable bed. Instead, I plant just a few veggies among my herbs or in my rock garden (my area for propagation experiments or for something interesting to grow which I find magically springing from my compost pile) These vegetable plants may include a tomato or two, maybe a cucumber plant, a pepper or cantaloupe or squash seeds growing from the compost pile.
So as usual in 2020, I waited too late to plant a real vegetable garden, but I did decide to read the above titled book this summer. I thought it might inspire me for spring 2021 or at least to make me consider how I might more knowledgeably include more veggies in my yard’s herb and flower garden areas.
Ms. Greer opens her book with her definition of companion planting followed by the benefits to gardeners and the principles of companion planting. She notes that companion planting is supported by numerous scientific studies of specific plant combinations.
Her definition of Companion Planting involves creating an environment where flowers, edibles and herbs all intermingle.
Benefits: Pest control, retarding weed germination around plants, attracting beneficial predators and parasites, providing shade for some plants, using space efficiently without competition of plants for nutrients by planting various veggies at different depths, and using certain plants to enrich and aerate the soil.
Principles of Companion Planting:
1. Crop Rotation (The author discusses the reasons for rotation and provides a handy list of vegetable plant families and their members to assist in determining crop rotation.)
2. Interplanting
3. Planting Intensively
4. Flowers and herbs belong in the edible garden and
5. A companion planted garden extends beyond the garden border
The next three chapters describe how to establish your garden by addressing the questions you need to ask before setting up your garden, the importance of garden observation, the soil that will make your garden successful and how to start your garden by seed.
Chapters 6 and 7 discuss flowers and herbs for the kitchen garden while Chapter 8 discusses how companion gardening will attract beneficial and predator insects to your garden. Ms. Greer also provides information on some plants that should not be planted in a kitchen garden because they put certain chemicals in the soil to ward off other plants near them. Chapter 7 provides an extensive list of herbs both perennial and annual and their ability to act as mulch, attract beneficial insects and to deter pests.
Chapter 9 describes why keeping a garden journal is essential when starting a companion kitchen garden.
Chapters 10 and 11 provide detail about the pairing of specific plants as companions in the garden. I found these Chapters highly informative. In Chapter 10, the author uses six topics cover plant friends, companion planting, growing, harvesting, foes, and seed possibilities. In this same chapter, she provides some companion garden bed illustrations.
I doubt I will ever become a gardener of a large vegetable garden, but I have learned much from this book about what veggies I could pair successfully with my flowers and herbs and how to do it.
Holly Sparrow, Headwaters Master Gardener