I’m going to be trying lots of companion planting, interplanting, succession planting,… we’ll see how it goes.
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That’s a great idea. I’m always looking for ways to maximise space with interplanting. I’ve not been real intentional on what I mix yet but, as a rule, if there’s a void, it gets filled with something or in anticipation of an inevitable void. I end up being a mixer inadvertantly or often I will have single or double rows of different veg/herbs tightly spaced. Seems to make for happy plants anyways. Rhubarb, oca, leeks, romanesco/cabbage. 
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Chives and garlic grow feral around here in Western Illinois zone 6a. They seem to act as Spring (and to a lesser extent, Fall) ephemerals. I think perennial alliums can be treated as such. I have heard though that some plants don’t like to grow near alliums: beans, peas, asparagus and parsley. I don’t know from experience. People around here tend to practice clean cultivation with straight single rows and one species per row, so I don’t have a local mentor. They look at my garden jungle with disbelief and ask me why so many weeds.
On the topic of weeds: I like to allow some weeds to grow, not to take over of course, but to have a presence. Lamb’s quarters (Chenopodium album, white goosefoot) is an edible green but more importantly I have observed songbirds foraging on the seeds in autumn and winter. There’s an annual grass I also allow because it doesn’t seem to interfere much and the songbirds forage on the seeds. Maybe I will start a Weeds thread if there isn’t one already.
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In trying to recreate the Indigenous Three Sisters method of growing beans, corn and squash together, I have come to understand that there is much more to it than just planting the Three together. For one thing, Indigenous Peoples selected seeds for this method for thousands of years. Then along came colonial culture which attempted to obliterate Native practices and selected seeds for very different monoculture methods over the last 500 years. In those 5 centuries it may be that some of the varieties have become somewhat estranged from each other, and it may take some generations of reselecting to re-familiarize them. Then there are other skills and knowledge that have become obscured or lost. I know that there are still First Nations people growing the Three Sisters way, but for example not around where I live as far as I know. A lot of things that seem simple turn out to be more nuanced when you start doing them. Like the wheel: simple concept but can you make a good wagon wheel on your first attempt? I think persistence, experimentation and acceptance of failure as a learning experience are necessary when you don’t have access to a skilled mentor.
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Yeah, Carol Deppe talked in one of her books about how hard it is to find beans that will produce well in the deep shade of a corn patch. She recommended a variety (I believe it was called Withner White) which, sadly, seems to be impossible to find now. 
I think you’re absolutely right about this. I’ve been thinking for awhile that companion crop mixes (“these seeds of Species A and these seeds of Species B are used to growing together”) may be a great idea.
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This season we did a mix of corn, tomato and tomato/habrochaites hybrids, flax, beans and chia. It did well, in fact too well. The tomatoes and hybrids grew into huge plants. The corn and chia managed to get above them which, unstaked, got to almost 1.5 m (~5ft). They spread sideways too eventually locking the rows together making it impenetrable. The beans, which were half runners, and the flax had to manage in the obscurity below. It’s autumn now so I’m hacking my way in to retrieve whatever beans managed to dry down, pick tomatoes for seed and harvest the corn for further drying. We did manage to eat a few tomatoes but most were lost in the tangle of growth.
I think we’ll leave out the tomatoes and hybrids next time. They can have a patch to themselves, planted much further apart!
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Hi,
Check out the seed planting pattern for three sisters on “extra information” pdf at Native Seed SEARCH from Tucson. Many indigenous gardeners and growers d0 follow certain patterns for growing companion vegetable plants.
We grow nasturtiums with the tomatoes, it helps build the flavor…I don’t know why, just read the information from a companion planting book, “Roses Love Garlic”. Some of the companionships, with edible flowers give continuous blooms to keep beas and pollinators happy, and add yet another food source. We eat lots of flowers. Marigolds repel detrimental intects, look nice, and the petals can be eaten. I have grown sweet alyssium and they typically go to seed and resead themselves every year, bees like them because the blooms emerge early when there is still a chance of frost, and they taste like broccoli.
We are happy for volunteer plants and edible flowers. The true test of the seed to remain viable after sitting on the ground and going thru the seasons. It Has to be the soil microbes who are sensitive to all of the same conditions as a seed. Together they have a relationship to know when to sprout, grow and thrive. Think of the rain forest, lots of leaf litter, lots if rain, seeds fall where they may…all of it grows and thrives on top of a super mat of ground cover…with billions of microbes and insects synergistically interacting.
I must confess, I haven’t gardened with rows. I mix seeds that are companions and hand broadcast in patches. Sometimes with walking paths, sometimes without so I get the full forest look. As I harvest, I end up with a path so im happy walking over different areas each season. I suspect the earthworms are happy about that aspect of the garden layout…lol.
The more variety you plant and harvest, the more you can recognize whats growing, its way more fun.
The potatoes have arugula, radishes, lettuce celery growing around them…the salad veggies will be long gone, and have gone to seed before the potatoes are ready. As soon as I have an opening…I’ll dot in zuchini, cucumbers, okra, melons, orach, basil, eggplant, more herbs until its all full of vegetation again. It works for us, we always have veggies for our favorite recipes. Oh, sorghum too, and corn, I plant in circles, like small bunches…
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Yes, I love the idea of everything mixed and broadcast here and there. I struggle though to see how I could grow enough staples (grains and beans) this way. Of course, once the nut and sweet chestnut trees are producing regularly I won’t have to worry so much about annual staples but that’s 7 to 10 years away.
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I could not find the pdf on three sisters on their site. I did find this:
At what stage do you harvest the allysum?
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Yes, this is a free two page information and growing patterns for the three sisters companion growing. Its been updated from what was shared about eight years ago. Its great information to get started on planting patterns and there is multiple guides to get started. An earlier guide we started with defined using basins and placing beans, pole beans, by the corn so the corn stalk was also the trelis structure for the beans… and the squash was placed so the leaves would shade the ground around the corn and beans. The planting was staggered so each type of seed could be strategically placed… to either produce a trellis or provide shade. I’ll see if I can find a hard copy to photograph and share.
Yes, planting seeds for staples and determining yield are affected by planting patterns. I must mention that I do go back and poke a seed in a space that is left open after the broadcasted seeds have sprouted. … I just moved away from rows due to purple finch pressure because once they find carrot or leafy greens sprouting, they will eat every one by hopping down the row. Scattering mixed seed helped me get past feeding the wild finches. I understand every growing patch has its own unique set of conditions. We also grow nearly 100 different food vegetables and leaves, and had to learn new recipes to cook them or pair with grains. We aren’t 100% self sufficient and are on our journey to get there soon. Some years are better than others, I had four years of complete failure at first and didnt harvest anything for eating…my soil mix was way off for my small kitchen garden space. We had just utilized horse manure with the sand and in containers. We made lovely adobe brick that solidified and totally killed every plant.
We do eat edible flowers, sweet alyssium grows over the cool months here and we clip the flowers carefully so they keep blooming, cut and come again. Usually several blooms at the tops of the stems, a few leaves too, flavor is like broccoli. A packet of seed will grow a small patch like 3x4 feet or so and clipping off the blooms avery couple of days encourages branching of the little plants and they produce more flowers. If you stop clipping flowers, they go to seed. So during flower season I’m clipping daily, eating them and dehydrating the overflow, then powderize in the oster blender or Ninja. Powders can be used in soup stocks or cassarole dishes, smoothie and tea.
Holyhock leaves and petals, all violas, pansy and johnny jump ups, calendula petals, nasturtiums leaves and flowers, dandylion leaves, roots and flowers, snapdragon, dianthus, stock and so many more. All of these flowers bloom almost continuously during their growing cycle and keep honey bees and mason bees happy visiting the garden daily.
Uploading: IMG_20220425_201404_884.jpg…
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Those are such lovely pictures.
How long do those flowers tend to keep in the refrigerator?
They keep for a long time, over 15 days. Fridge must be cold, 36 degrees and flowers must be dry and clipped in the morningtime before outside temps go above 70 degrees. I also keep a damp paper towel inside the container. Best to use them up within a few days as salad toppers or whiz up in a smoothie. We like peppery nasturtiums in egg dishes and quiche.
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I’m thinking of interplanting strawberries and garlic. They’re both small perennial evergreens that spread easily and yet have short non-invasive roots. One grows all winter and dies down by summer, while the other wants full sun in summer. They’re both fond of water. It seems like they’d play nicely together.
Thing is, I’ve seen conflicting things about that idea online – some people say strawberries do poorly with garlic. Others recommend it. I’m unsure which people are repeating something random they’ve read or heard somewhere, and which are speaking from personal experience. I find that personal experience is usually a lot more trustworthy.
Have you guys tried it? If so, what have you seen?
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I have grown watermelon and garlic. I have not grown strawberries and garlic together. I would expect them to do well together in most supportive conditions, though perhaps particularly sensitive to the soil being a little more alkaline than optimal for either. I’ll hold off on saying why until after the voices of experienced companion planters have had a chance to speak
I’m planning to plant them in the section with my blueberry bushes, so the soil there will (hopefully) be more acidic than most of my soil, anyway. 
Actually, from what I’ve been reading this week, my soil is almost certainly alkaline because a) it’s sandy, b) it gets low rainfall, and therefore c) it’s got lots of calcium and low organic matter.
Apparently organic matter all by itself acidifies soil, which makes the minerals that are already there more available to the plants. Even though Steve Solomon has all these complicated things he recommends for every other soil type, he seems to think mine probably just needs tons more organic matter. Well . . . neat!
May explain why the Back to Eden method seems to be working so well for me so far. 
Paul Gautschi’s climate sounds pretty similar to mine, so that would fit with why it works so well for him, too.
Seriously, I’ve been reading this book by Steve Solomon:
And I keep being struck by how little he talks about my climate and soil type. When he does, he says it has lots of minerals (because the water isn’t leaching them out), and the problem is that the plants can’t uptake them because the soil’s too alkaline and has too much calcium. He still recommends this super-complicated regimen, but reading between the lines, that looks kind of ridiculous to me, because – according to his own charts – my soil levels should be great in everything except for organic matter. So all I need is local wood chips. (And rainwater capture, and returning anything I take from the soil back to the soil, in the form of food scraps, urine, and humanure composting.)
That’s my inference, anyway. He seems to be super in favor of extremely complicating things and spending lots of money. But when I look at the charts he’s using, I don’t think my soil needs any of those things.
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I have sown my corn between my faba beans 2 or 3 days ago, to try. On the lettuce lines. + Have sown red orachs in between.
Did the same thing, alternating sweet corn and orach between oignon lines (both seeds and bulbils lines)… More risky because spacings are shorter…
I like red orach because:
- you can sow it very early, around 1st of march in here
- it is distinguishable when weeding
- good to eat
- magnificent in our mostly “green” garden
- eventually producing so many seeds! I fill entire zip bags every year… Actually it is even self seeding in here: this has been happening for about ten years in my neighbour’s garden with a green orach…
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I listened to that book in audiobook format back in the late fall, and really enjoyed it, but it was very quickly obvious that I was going to want to be able to stop and look at the actual numbers he was spitting out to do some calculations and also to be able to sit and think things through and do some of my own conclusions. I ended up picking up a hard copy of the book but haven’t had a chance to sit down and do all of that yet with how crazy life has been in the time since.
I can definitely imagine something like what you mentioned being the case though.
It’s easy to get caught up in hunting down 7 frog hearts and 5 eyes of newt, but sometimes we can take the same information and draw more worthwhile solutions for our specific situations. (Though who knows, maybe those frog hearts and lizard eyes really are going to do something magical for your soil? )
Unfortunately, my soil is full of acid and clay (and rocks!!!), so I may want to hunt down at least a few of those newts… (Sorry, sometimes I get hung up on my own weird metaphors… )
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Along the lines of the 3 sisters stuff and just kind of broadcasting everything at once, I recently stumbled upon a program by the folks at Green Cover called the First Acre Program where they give away “Milpa Garden Mix” to people who are willing to donate at least half of the produce harvest to their community. You can also simply buy the seed for yourself if you prefer, but I thought the program was pretty cool. Apparently they’ve been doing it for several years now and have a couple of larger partnerships that have allowed them to really expand it in recent years - and it started in Oklahoma, which makes it EVEN MORE AWESOME, if you ask me 
Anyway, their mix has over 40 different types of plants included in it. Even though it was inspired by the 3 sisters, apparently for a while they didn’t include corn seeds because the other stuff would shoot up faster and shade it out, but now they are including it in a separate bag and recommending that it be intentionally planted a bit earlier or in rows between clumps of the mix or along the edges or something along those lines.
I love the idea of planting edible flowers as companion crops where possible.
I’ve been hoping to scatter quite a bit of wildflower seed in a number of areas I haven’t gotten around it doing much with yet and specifically making a point of planting several varieties of milkweed. But I really need to make more of an effort to learn more about which flowers I can mix into the areas where I am trying to pretty much only plant edible things. Obviously planting a wide variety in other areas will give more opportunities to learn to identify them, but the more I can start spreading them into the rest of the area and using them as companion plants the better!
I also like low growing clovers and other creeping spreading ground covers which can be used as living mulches and in some cases lawn replacements.
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"I’m thinking of interplanting strawberries and garlic. "
I have created a new garden bed w strawberries and garlic in the fall, so far so good as I don’t see any of the plants suffering.
M
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YAY! That’s great news! Thank you!
I’m personally discovering that I love edible winter cover crops to fill in an empty area in my grass where I’ve pulled out a whole bunch of weeds (a.k.a. foxtail grass, which has nastily prickly seed heads that I don’t like getting caught in my socks). Right now, I have a whole bunch of canola and turnip leaves merrily growing up through my lawn. I’ve started picking off the lowest leaves of the six-inch-tall plants to munch on while out in the garden, and they’re delicious. And I haven’t watered them or cared for them once. Yay!
I’m definitely planning to leave the largest and tastiest to go to seed, as I’m hoping they’ll reseed themselves for me and become nicely feral. If the plants are willing to handle it, I’d rather be walking on turnip leaves than inedible grass, any day.
Anyway, so far my wild mix of cover crops seems to have resulted in a lot of canola and turnips, with a teensy bit of lettuce, peas, carrots, and radishes. There were a few grains in there, too, such as oats – I wonder the grass growing among the brassicas is my normal grass, or a weed grass like foxtail, or an edible grain that I purposefully sowed? No idea!
Overall, I’d say in that polyculture, brassicas and grasses (maybe grains?) are very much dominant, and seem perfectly happy growing on top of each other. The peas, lettuces, and radishes don’t seem to be doing very much, and I haven’t seen the other seeds I chucked into the mix grow into plants yet at all.
In case you’re curious, here’s what went into the mix:
Dwarf Essex rape (Brassica napus)
Daikon radish
Purple Top turnip (Brassica rapa)
Forage pea
Forage oat
Crimson clover
Perennial flax
Millet
Quinoa
Chia
Marigolds
Golden beets
Lofthouse parsnip
Lots of lettuce varieties
African Crackerjack marigold
Lots of carrot varieties
Hamburg parsley
Alfalfa
Salsify
Dill
Creeping thyme
Mexican Mint Marigold
Lemon balm
Catnip
Spearmint
Cinnamon basil
Sweet basil
Lambsquarters
Cosmos
Borage
It’d be pretty awesome if one of the mint relatives chooses to take over my grass, but I hiiiiiiiiiiiighly doubt that’ll happen. Mint isn’t really all that invasive here unless you irrigate a lot, and I don’t. It doesn’t seem to be all that drought tolerant.
I’m seriously considering sticking garlic into all the empty spaces of my lawn this coming fall, since it grows soooooooooooooooo well here. Do I even need to stick it in a garden bed?
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