Creative companion crops

General Discussions
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We all know about the three sisters method, of course, and I’m planning to try a dry farmed three sisters bed this year with sorghum, tepary beans, and zucchinis that are used to being dry farmed in my climate.

But how about other mutually beneficial plantings? Have you tried anything unusual and neat that has worked?

I’m seriously pondering try to grow dwarf banana plants surrounded by perennial kale plants. I can see quite a few potential benefits to this.

  • Both families are not particularly drought tolerant, and do well with a whole lot of mulch.
  • Both families do well with high nitrogen fertilizer.
  • I want both to stay long-term as perennials.
  • Brassicas will probably do better with shade in the summer. Banana plants will shoot up and get tall with big leaves in summer.
  • Bananas will probably do better with cover in winter. A big, bushy brassica that stays alive through the winter may work as a great windbreak and blanket.

Basically, I think they’re similar enough to not demand different growing conditions, and opposites enough to protect each other during their most difficult season.

I hope it will work!

How about you? Have you found any unusual and wonderful combinations?

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2

One of our local soil scientists, Dr Christine Jones, reckons you should aim to plant at least 4 different plant families together, the more the better. We try to follow her advice but find it easier said than done. At the moment we have the following combinations:

  • corn + squash + cowpeas (mostly corn though),
  • corn + watermelon + cowpeas,
  • common beans + sorghum + sweet potato,
  • tomatoes + climbing beans + carrot + kale + buckwheat + peas (6 botanical families…yayyyy),
  • lettuce + silverbeet (aka leaf beet),
  • grain amaranth + mung beans,
  • runner beans + various perennial brassicas + perennial silverbeet
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Last year I planted green bush beans and diakon radish together. I planted the radish late in the season as the beans matured. Let the beans then go on to produce seed and die as the radish continued to grow and develop as a fall crop. I doubled my crop production in the same space.

This year I’m planning to try a few different varieties together to assist in a larger harvest of more diverse plants in the same space. I was thinking of planting some of these combinations:
Onions & Chickpeas
Kale & Diakon radish
Cabbage & marigolds

There will be more as I continue to map out my garden for this season. Great topic! I look forward to your continued insights and others sharing too.

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(Laugh.) I’m happy to hear putting plants of different families together is good, because that’s what I’ve done.

My primary garden bed last year had . . . let me see . . . squashes, one brussels sprouts plant, one tomato plant, a whole bunch of carrots, and a whole bunch of garlic. Five families? Oh, six if you count the lima beans off on the edge. They were my only beans that lived this year.

Good to know I should do that in the future. I did it mainly because I like having a wide variety, and they seemed to coexist quite nicely.

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I put all the garlic under my big bush zucchinis because I was hoping the smell of garlic would drive off insect pests. I don’t think it worked, but the garlic did all live and is now overwintering happily, so that’s good. I’m not sure if that means intercropping them with squashes was a good idea, or if it was a bad idea and they just happened to survive it and start doing well once the squashes were frost-killed.

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Now you’ve got me wondering if bush green beans and radishes would go well together! I bet they would. All the more because I like the seed pods of radishes best, so I could go through and pick immature seed pods from both at the same time.

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I plant everything super close together due to relatively small spaces and wanting to shade the ground and reduce both irrigation area and evaporation. Pole beans actually don’t seem to do well with corn – maybe there’s a timing thing or varieties that do better that way, or I’m planting the corn more closely than the beans want. Squash and cucumbers do great with both corn by itself and trellised beans because they just sprawl away. Onions and leeks do great hidden amongst just about anything (tomatoes, beans, tomatillos, etc.). I plant garlic in late fall and then harvest in early June – it will deter sprouting of most seeds planted near it or right after its harvest (especially if it was a lot of garlic plants in one area) – however beans seem to do fine, especially tepary beans. Teparies and cowpeas seem to make good under-planted crops with thinks like tomatoes, peppers and melons. Parsley does well hiding out under things.
Last year, I planted a “high diversity” cover crop densely and the daikon radishes, collards, millet and field peas all grew well together.

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8

In line with what Ray was saying, RegAg folks also tend to advocate maximizing diversity in plantings, both food and cover crops. I hadn’t heard four different families before but I had certainly heard the magic number eight (types of crops together).

I make a lot of my companion decisions based on my knowledge of our growing conditions and the Ayurvedic qualities of the plants themselves. A year or so ago I found out that Filipino banana farmers traditionally sow two pepper seeds (as in the vine I’m pretty sure) in the hole they sow the banana in. The wet, sweet, heavy, banana and the dry, pungent, light pepper complement and balance each other.

As near as I could see (and from dipping my toe in Vrikshayurveda) it was the same rules as food combining. A meal of corn, squash, and beans is excellently balanced. I believe that these three sisters beloved by first nations should help preserve balance in the soil wherever they can grow together.

But when you have clay soil like ours which is wet, heavy, and as near as I can guess by what grows well here, cold-natured, and you want to grow something like squash (also wet, heavy, and cold), it’s going to be more of a struggle. By my thinking it could go accompanied not just by corn (light, dry, heating) and beans (typically light, and by my understanding most often dry and cooling) but with, say, corn and beans and mustard and radish. And kale and quinoa. And so on. In sandy soil and assuming comparable soil nutrients, I would expect loading up on so many light and/or dry and heating plants would be much less likely to yield a good result.

As for what we’ve actually found, I grew garlic and watermelon together this year and got our best watermelon harvest ever. I’m also growing a tiny little windowsill microgarden with borlotto bean, sorghum, chickpea, buckwheat, pepper, and even squash all in the same tiny planter. The squash hasn’t come up yet

Whether the other untested-by-me pairings are great or not in my conditions in practice (I just started thinking this way and letting it inform my growing last season), I do feel quite confident that the goodness of companion fit is context dependent, and that the context extends beyond merely the characteristics of the companions involved.

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9

My intercropping just happens. I like to think i do mini monocultures. Usually i have forgotten i’ve sown something already. Other seeds have been laying dormant.

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What lovely pictures!

Yeah, I can see intercropping “just happening.” Especially if seeds from a previous year decide they want to germinate a year late!

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Ryder, do you want to start a thread about Vrikshayurveda? You seem to know a lot about it, and there may be other gardeners here who are interested.

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I’d be happy to :slightly_smiling_face:. I wouldn’t say I know a lot though

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Hi everyone! Since this is my first post here I want to say hello first :grinning: :wave:

My default style of gardening and growing plants is to mix it all up. I think I’m unable to have a single crop in any one space. Below are few examples - first one is an experimental bed (mini sunken hugel) that is really mixed up; second one isone of the regular beds, still mixed but on this photo it actually looks more tidy than usual, this was one month ago, today it’s a bit more chaos in some parts.

Third photo is actually about this:

I didn’t have the experience of deterred sprouting, but that might be just for some plant families and I simply didn’t put anything that garlic can “slow down”.
This year my garlic is nestled between lamb’s salad and they started sprouting roughly at the same time (autumn sowing, October). As both grows I’m harvesting lamb’s salad continually, I will leave just a few plants to go to seed (have enough of it on other beds) and I figure that will leave enough lace for garlic to grow well during late spring and early summer. I will pick garlic in June, if nothing extremely happens, last year it had to be first half of May due to hot weather…

EDIT: had to attach photos, my post finger was way too fast…

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14

I’ve watched few of her lectures and I like them very much.

One of the thing that she mentions is the long term Jena experiment in Germany as an example of high resilience of plant communities vs. monocultures. After many years of research in that experiment, nearby river flodded all experimental fields for many days. They thought that the experiment was over, but after the water finaly withdrawed it was a surprise to see that on some of the fields plants survived - it was on more biodiverse ones, I’m not sure about the number, but I think it was at least 8 different plant families together in one plot that did the trick.

Here’s the link for Jena site: http://the-jena-experiment.de/ There have many interesting research articles linked.

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15

Now, that’s really interesting. So having at least 8 different plant families in one space sounds like a really good idea. Makes me glad I’ve decided to add the Musaceae family to my garden! :smiley:

That’s also a really good argument for my continuing to grow garlic every year. It’s the only allium I like – all the rest taste like onions to me, and I can’t stand onions. But garlic is tasty. Since garlic is the only allium I’m likely to ever grow, it may be valuable for me to consistently grow it, whether or not I need to that year, just to have a representative of that plant family.

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16

Have you tried garlic chives (Allium tuberosum)? Grows like your regular chives (bushy and perennial) but have a distinctly garlic taste.

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Oh, interesting! No, I haven’t tried those! Where’s a good place to get some?

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This winter I bought a couple of ounces of garlic chives seeds online to plant freely across several areas. I am proud to say I’ve direct sown and container sown most of my supply, but there is plenty left to send you a tablespoon Emily if you would like. Shoot me a note.

I can’t can’t vouch for these seeds yet because it’s the first time I’ve grown them, but if you also find the idea of tons of seed appealing, this is the link: https://amzn.to/3Xagd6o

Maybe someone else with a more proven source or supply will respond as well :slight_smile:

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There are some seed companies that have garlic chives seeds, but not that many in my area. I ended up buying seed for sprouts, have two small bunches growing already, I just seeded some more today.

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Oh, that would be cool! I’ll send you a message!