companion planting merit?

i ordered a few books on biointensivity and they all include a section on "companion planting" or planting plants iwth bio-relationships to attain higher yield/lower pests. I looked at a few websites online and they suggest there is no scientific merit in companion planting, just some folklore collected from unfounded tests in the early 1900s. What is all your personal experiences with companion planting and should i give it any thought in planning my garden?

scott

There are folks who believe in it and others who find it a pretty useless concept. I have never found the idea to have merit, but you need to test it for yourself.

it is better suited to small gardens and micro farms. the studies you read might be out of date, as i have read plenty that refers to actual research that supports it, published starting in the 1980s. companion planting is a vital part of organic gardening, and an absolute in biodiversity growing (the original European term for organic)

i thought it would be fun to test it when i first started, because so many, including myself, were skeptical. then i started finding actual research and understanding how and why it works. my "experiments" had the same results, many of which were unfortunate. so now i will live by the old adage of learning from other people's mistakes rather than continuing to make my own LOL

there are many threads on this discussion in at least three forums: Veggie, Organic, and Garden Talk. go to the search page to narrow down your search, limiting it to one forum at a time. otherwise you may be overwhlemed by the number of threads returned on that subject (i.e., it gets mentioned a lot, but you are looking for threads that discuss it)

best of luck, and remember, the only unanswered questions are the ones that are never asked!

tf

Do you really think that it's all hooey, FarmerDill? I don't know if it works or not but found the idea of planting flowers together with vegetables quite interesting and charming. So, I tuck some marigolds and basil close to my tomatoes and such.

How about planting according to the phases of the moon? Does that method have merit?

now you've opened a different can. i believe it does, and it is common practice for biodiverse gardeners.

again, do a search here at DG, you will find many links and discussions in just the past year!

there is more to moon planting than just phases!

tf

Quyen. Flowers and vegetables do well together from an aesthetic standpoint. I just have not found any particuar merits as to insect repellant properties which are often claimed. Marigolds in particular attract more insects than they repel. Under certain conditions that makes them an excellent trap plant especially for Japanese beetles. Of course (legumes) like beans and southern peas do fix nitrogen for nitrogen loving plants like corn. So I would not go so far as to say it is all " hooey". Just that many of the claims are excessively hyped.

As for moon planting; I am very prejuciced. My paternal grandfather was a moon planter. His family darned near starved. The only place he ever grew a good crop was sitting around the stove in the general store. He could tell some good stories, but never had any results to back it up. There were a half dozen moon planters in my neighborhood growing up, and not one of them ever grew a decent crop.

dill

I'm not writing-off "moon planting" as hooey......but, I do agree that it is excessively hyped as Farmerdill stated. I DO know that my maternal grandparents who migrated to the Southwest from WVA & KY were "moon planters". They had decent yields but about the same as other "non-moon" planters, as I recall. In those (pre-irrigation) days, as NOW, the soil, weather patterns & rainfall were much more important than in which phase of the moon one planted.
LD

Companion planting needs more study, IMO. There are plants that definitely do not associate well with others, the black walnut being about the most notorious offender. Substances exuded/exchanged underground are largely beyond the gardener's control except for spacing. I've had instances of squash growing next to kohlrabi being stunted while the squash at the other end of the bed did fine. I've read several of Louise Riotte's books - some of her results panned out for me and others did not. We need to remember that there are always many forces at work all the time, in addition to the concepts we are focusing on at the moment. What works for me this year might not work for you or even for me next season. Keeping a journal is helpful and I wish I could train myself to keep more complete notes!

These concepts are worthy of consideration but are by no means the only answers. If you have room for some "trial" beds, you can experiment with some of the suggestions that seem promising for your climate/area. Checking those other forums as TamaraFaye suggested will be quite helpful. And as Farmerdill points out some plants such as marigolds are good "traps". My motto is: Keep trying!

When I lived in Northern Ca, I always planted marigolds around the veggies. They seem to be slug and bug magnets here and I will not have marigolds on the property now. Trial and error, like much else in gardening.

I think the thought about being a magnet or trap plant is just that, it attracts the bugs to itself and they eat it instead of the vegetables plants. The french gardeners have always done "companion planting" try this link to an interesting french gardening site.
http://www.frenchgardening.com/tech.tmpl?SKU=31091285647395
-Juli

I love the idea of companion planting and have done a heck of a lot of it this year. But it's only one tool in the shed, so to speak; on its own (without other forms of pest and disease control) I think it doesn't do a great deal. If it did, I wouldn't have had problems with potato bugs and cucumber beetles. The garden looks and smells lovelier for it, though, and I'll continue to do it.

As far as gardening by the moon, I saw no difference in my "moon" crops and my plant-when-I'm-able ones.

i learned right away that one reaason moon-planting fails is that poeple refer to the farmer's almanac, which just isn't accurate. there are many calendars available which give correct info for your time zone. the moon sign and phase doesn't always change at midnight, but that is how the ephemeris is read into thre almanac!

the ifrst year when i used the almanac i had massive failures!

this year, using correct data, my seedlings and plants have been wonderful, even without enough companion planting

rodale press put out a book buy anna carr that references lots of studies. it is a basic book that separates reasearch findings from folklore and other facts

from what small notes i've collected:
blue flowered borage atracts many beneficial insects and the oil repels tomato worms (allegedly)
collard greens draw diamond back moths from cabbage in trap cropping.
african marigold releases thiopene, a chemical that repels nematodes in the soil, plant it near potatoes.
corn planted in and around squash takes advantage of spatial relationships, as well as shallow-rooted and deep-rooted crops interplanted.
Asparagus repels tomato pests like aphids and worms by releasing "asparagin" (allegedly)
apparently most cmpanion planting practices were adapted from tests done earleirthis century useing "crystallization" practices, which really didn't signify any real; relationships.

moon planting, from what i gather, has some merit in the water table rising and sinking below the dirt's surface and creating gravit pulls on either the roots or the epicotyl in the seeds. i give some heed to moon planting but i don't let it control my planting schedule.

As far as I'm concerned as long as you like all the plants you are planting in companion planting, the worst you can do is have a couple of them fail, and you have a more diverse collection of crops so it's less likely they'll all die due to the same thing. I look in askance at some of the companion planting promises, but there is nothing I could say couldn't work.

You also have to look at where they are getting their companion planting ideas. I've seen two basic categories. One is by viewing nature, for instance pinon pine and juniper often grow together along with Gambol's oak, and mountain mahogany, but they also draw jays in their natural environment. So, maybe one of the plants attracts jays, and the others thrive on jay droppings. Without tests there is no way to know what the connections are, and most of the books I've read also state that the relationships shift as they change areas, climates, or even undefined ranges, so this information in my opinion isn't much use, unless you are reading a gardening with native plant life, for your specific area.

The other is based on at least trial and error by the author, and the possibility that the change in conditions will affect the way the plants interact is still a possibility, but at least it's something that the two plants do together in certain conditions. Though I've seen a few studies, this is still a infant science, and as such in my opinion should be viewed as a trial and error endeavor, at least until something has worked for you a couple years in a row.

Has anyone messed around with permaculture?

try this: free publications from
www.attra.org