S2 Episode 10 – Plant Partners: Science Based Companion Planting

“The biggest target goal that anybody can do [to boost garden success] is to increase the biodiversity in your vegetable garden. I want everybody to stop planting everything in straight long rows, which are basically runways for pests.”

 

Jessica Walliser is a gardener and an author.  Her latest book (Plant Partners) updates Companion Plants (1966) by Helen Philbrick and Richard Gregg. This is a good thing, because the old book, long a part of my library, left me wanting. Not enough science, too much guesswork and so much fake news. With extensive research and science, Jessica changes all that.

 

Jessica really dug in to the research and found out there is some fact to the fiction on companion planting. Walliser tells us about trap cropping, cover crops and plant partners such as beans and potatoes, peas and lettuce and my favourite onions and marigolds.

 

“The one [study] that stood out to me the most as useful for home gardeners was combining marigolds with onions and marigolds with cole crops. And in both cases, what the presence of the marigolds did is to limit the egg-laying behavior of the onion root maggot fly for onions and the cabbage root fly for those cole crops. [The marigolds] mask the presence of the host plant so that those pests could not find them.”

 

For the most current and accurate info about companion planting get Jessica’s book, Plant Partners: Science-based  companion planting strategies for the vegetable garden (Storey Publishing 2020.)

 

 

Website: https://savvygardening.com/

 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jessica.walliser

 

Instagram: @jessicawalliser