Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Companion planting charts

I have been busy reading over the winter and finding more information about Companion plantings, Inter-planting of vegetables and flowers, and rotations in the vegetable plants.
Companion planting is based on the idea that certain plants can benefit others when planted close to each other so that some cultural benefit like pest control, disease prevention, nutrient support and higher yields, can be utilized by the plants growing together. Knowing what plants can be planted together helps to utilize your beds better, because you can plant denser, the technique comes from the Bio-intensive garden philosophy. It also helps with the succession planting, because you use the space around larger or later plants, planting quick maturing and smaller plants between them. Granted it takes much more planning to do it successfully and to make the planning easier, I came up with the idea of making a chart. Which I will tape into the lid of my seed box to have it always available when planting outside.

There is a lot of information out there in books and the internet but I found many of the charts lacking for my use. Most of them gave you some but not enough information. Some of the information I didn't need. I just don't need to know when I am outside planting, why I plant them together, just give me what I can plant together and what I need to know for the task. Many of the online charts usually just cover the basic vegetables. Many didn't even give you all the kinds of vegetables one could grow together, keeping their information very basic.

For a gardener that goes for the unique and unknown vegetables to add to the common available ones basic just doesn't cut it. I am such an information hog, I just needed more!
So I decided I would learn as much as I could about companion planting and then put what I have learned into a chart, utilizing all the information I found.
The Kitchen Garden Grower's Guide: A practical vegetable and herb garden encyclopedia

 Some of the best information I found in the book I got last year
The Kitchen Garden Grower's Guide by Stephen Albert

This book is so full of the basic information to help you grow your garden and covers many more vegetables then most garden books I have come across and the best is it is all in a simple Encyclopedic format.

So here are the charts I made. They are large and I had to break it into 2 files. If you click on the picture it should pop up into a larger file. I probably will keep adding more information to the charts as I learn more about companion plantings of some of the newer vegetables I am getting. I also added some basic fertilizing and bed preparation information but didn't add the herbs and perennial vegetables into the chart, because I have my herbs in a separate herb garden area close to the vegetable garden and the perennial vegetables aren't planted in the raised garden beds in my garden.

Chart number one from Arugula to Eggplant


Chart number two from Endive to Turnips


                                                                      Enjoy!

6 comments:

meemsnyc said...

Ooooh, what an awesome list! Thanks for putting this together!

Anonymous said...

Thank you!

Gypsy Love said...

the charts have kinda disappeared. when you click on them you cant make them bigger anymore. and you can read them tiny :(

DieGartenFrau said...

@Gypsy Love
to see the charts you need to open the picture in a new tab. (right click) you then should be able to enlarge them by clicking on the picture

jpho said...

thank you for this fantastic chart!!! i always thought of putting one together and now i don't have to :) so handy when plotting and planning!

jpho said...

thank you so much for this chart! i always thought of making one up like this but here it is :) so great for the plotting and planning that is always happening in my garden-obsessed mind...

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