Some crops can be a bit allelopathic. That means they tend to suppress the germination and growth of other plants around them. Walnut is particularly infamous for this, but there are many other species that do it to a less extreme extent.
One of those families is the sunflower family.
So, here are a few things I’ve learned about sunflower allelopathy!
#1: It doesn’t seem to bother legumes. Some of my peas are happily using my sunchokes as living trellises. Yesssss!
#2: It does seem to bother bindweed. I’ve had very little bindweed in the sunchoke patch. Unusually little. So little that I started to suspect the sunchokes were killing them. I figured I’d look it up and see, and . . . yep! Sunflowers are known to be allelopathic to morning glories. Yessssssssss!
#3: . . . Which means I probably shouldn’t plant sweet potatoes near them, seeing as sweet potatoes are a morning glory.
So, just a thought . . . if you have a spot in your yard that is particularly full of an obnoxious weed, why not stick a perennial there that is known to have allelopathic effects to that plant family?
Maybe report on any awesome anti-companion plantings you’ve discovered here!
I’ve noticed so far that garlic seems to be bad for legumes. Or at least, it seems to make the peas planted in a great big patch of garlic rather unenthusiastic about sprouting.
This is disappointing, when the legume is something I enjoy. But there happens to be a great big, deep-rooted, thirty-year-old everlasting pea plant on my fence that my next door neighbor’s grandma planted as an ornamental. We both dislike it because it’s highly invasive and hard to kill and grows seed pods that look like delicious peas, but are poisonous.
Soooooo . . . (steeples fingers) . . . after I dug the roots out a foot down last fall, I planted a whole ton of garlic on top of it!
Sadly, the everlasting pea plant is still coming back, so I’m continually ripping out its sprouts. It’s definitely slower than in previous years, but that may just be because I got so many roots. Still, the garlic may be helping, and it certainly seems happy where it is, so there’s no harm done even if it doesn’t work.
Maybe if you have a weedy legume you want to get rid of, you may want to try pulling out as many of the roots as you can, and then planting garlic all over that area?
Ah so that’s why few peas popped up in my garlic bed.
I thought it was the sunchokes i planted. Maybe both.
Green asparagus and rocket salad dont mind it.
