Do Carrots Love Tomatoes?

What's the deal with companion planting anyway?

The problem with companion planting is that it’s such a romantic idea. The idea that two plants can work together to produce an outcome better than if they were grown separately is just so dang attractive. But the science is extremely complicated and it’s unclear if any cultivated plants actually work in this way. Every cultivated vegetable has space requirements and most companion gardening books have zero respect for this. This causes all kinds of problems in the garden if you try to actually execute the plan in ‘Carrots Love Tomatoes”.

If you plant carrot seeds and tomato seedlings on the same day, you probably won’t harvest a single good carrot. Tomatoes are just faster out of the gate, the roots spread and they take up all of the water and nutrition before carrots are out of the starting gate.

But can we make it work?

Yes, if you plant carrots and radishes in the early spring (4-6 weeks before frost free date), three 12” rows on a 30” bed, with the middle row of radishes, and the outer rows of carrots; then the carrots will be established and the radishes will have been harvested before the tomato seedlings are due to be put out. Now you can place the tomato seedling out between the two rows of established carrots. By the time the tomatoes need that space, the carrots should be ready to harvest.

Is this companion planting? not really. What it is, is a clever bit of succession planting based on the knowledge that, while a tomato plant needs about a square yard to produce correctly, it doesn’t need all that space immediately.

The theory here is that you can be aware of how the root system of a crop grows and manage your garden accordingly.

Application

There are crops you can plant at the same time with the expectation of harvesting one before the other needs that space. One I like is mini-head lettuces and kale. You can put three 12” rows of lettuce with 6” in-row spacing OR you can put one row of full-size kale down the center of the bed with 18” spacing. Kale takes about 50 days to reach full-size while the mini-head lettuces are out of there in 25-30 days from transplant. We don’t want to let all that space sit empty while the kale grows up, so we plant three rows of mini-lettuces and in the middle row, place a kale every third plant.

In this way, we can almost double the value of garden bed space that would have sat empty otherwise.

The best lettuce varieties for this are Newham, Volcana, and Celogaine

Endless possibilities

Once you understand the rules for this game, there are near endless possibilities. I also like three rows of beets with two rows of spring radishes between them: the radishes are out of there before the beets are larger than salad mix.

You can also do Radicchio and Brussels Sprouts with three rows of radicchio and a brussels sprout plant in every other location in the middle row.

Week #48 Agenda

We had rain all last week and it looks like more this week. I have mini-lettuce and kale seedlings ready to go into cold hoophouse beds as soon as space opens up, perhaps there will be radishes ready to go by Friday and I can sneak them in then.

There is a little bit of hand weeding to do, but the main thing I need to do is sand woodwork and finish a few commissioned pieces.

I hope this helps you to plan your garden for next season,

Todd