Other flowers I’ll be including alongside nasturtiums and tansy in my garden are marigolds and calendula, whose flowers also draw in those pest-hungry beneficial bugs. It’s often best grown in a container to curb its garden-grabbing tendencies. This obliging bloom is a real draw to pest-eating bugs such as ladybugs, predatory wasps, and minute pirate bugs – which plunder not the sea but unsuspecting insect pests! At the same time, tansy repels many of the common baddies – what more could you want? Tansy is a perennial, which means you only have to plant it once for it to provide summer after summer of blooms, so it’s a yes for this flower in my garden! Do be aware though that tansy can be invasive, and is banned for this reason in some areas. One of the most powerful flowers is tansy. Tansy is irresistible to many beneficial bugs But flowers have benefits beyond attracting pollinators too. Any nectar-rich flowers will attract pollinators such as bees to the garden, helping to boost the pollination of flowering crop plants like tomatoes, beans, and squash: flowers such as sunny-side-up poached egg plant, ageratum and zinnia. There are plenty of other flowers well worth including in the vegetable garden. Nasturtiums often self-seed, resowing themselves from one year to the next, so this is one of those flowers that will pop up here and there – but it’s a welcome sight, believe me! Flower Power Several insects, especially cabbage family-eating caterpillars, just love the mustard oil that nasturtiums produce, so it makes sense to grow nasturtiums close to brassica crops such as kale, cabbage, and broccoli. For me, there’s one plant that stands head and shoulders above the rest for this purpose: nasturtium! Next up are those plants we can grow to take the brunt of a pest attack so that our more precious crops are left undisturbed. Nasturtiums make great companions for brassica crops Sacrificial Plants Researchers also found that interplanting tomatoes with basil resulted in less egg-laying by armyworms. One study by the folk at Iowa State University found that insect damage on tomatoes was less when basil was grown alongside them. Basil repels insects such as thrips and whiteflies, and if you’re in the US, basil has also been shown to disorientate the adult moths which produce tomato hornworms.Īs with garlic, there’s loads of research backing up these claims. Tomatoes and basil are not just natural companions in the kitchen, they’re best friends in the garden too. Tomatoes and basil: best buddies in both kitchen and garden I’ll also be saving some to plant alongside my lettuces, together with alyssum to attract aphid-eating hoverflies. With this in mind, I’ll be planting garlic around those crops that are most susceptible to attack, for instance by growing potatoes between rows of garlic to serve as pungent bodyguards. Its particularly destructive because it transmits more than 100 different plant viruses, which can severely crimp your crop! But there’s one vegetable, above all others, they just can’t stand: garlic. This aphid – which, despite its name, can colonize more than 400 different plants – is resistant to over 70 pesticides. My first companion planting combo should help to tackle the green peach aphid. Using Companion Planting to Reduce Pest Problems
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