The natural gardener: Rainbarrels and good neighbors

By George Zens

My garden is slowly taking shape. I know, considering that we are well into June and the growing season, this might not sound like much of a triumph, but it is a step in the right direction. Several steps, really.

The different types of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers and peas that I started from seed in my house a few months ago have progressed nicely and I put them out into a cold frame before planting them out completely.

The cold frame, by the way, consists of two old raised bed frames mounted over each other, and two storm door panels recovered after a remodeling job at a friend’s house. The storm door panels are nice because they still have the screens and sliding glass panels, which means that I can open and close the glass while the screens keep out unwanted visitors.

I had to change my plans for expanding my garden. The bit of lawn that I turned over by hand with the spade last fall works well, but using a rotary tiller to turn the rest over faster turned out to be more complicated than expected. Mainly because it needs some heavy-duty equipment to do sod. So I’ll go back to my original idea, which is to move along one step at a time, and keep using a spade. After all, my granddad never had power tools and he always had a nice vegetable garden.

So, this will take longer than anticipated, but I’ll get more exercise that way, too, I won’t be polluting the air with a gasoline-powered tiller, and it’ll be much less noisy.

This time next year I should have a nice big garden.

When planting out the tomatoes and cucumbers, I almost made a very basic mistake: I was going to put them next to each other. But then I remembered my own advice about companion planting and realized that tomatoes and cucumbers are a classic combination of vegetables that profoundly dislike each other.

The scientific background is often still unclear, but it has been empirically determined that certain types of vegetables (and fruit and herbs) make good neighbors, while others don’t. In other words, in some combinations vegetables stimulate each other’s growth or protect each other from pests and diseases, while in other combinations they do exactly the opposite.

Some classic ‘good neighbor’ combinations are:
early carrots and onions,
late carrots and leeks,
beans and red beets,
celeriac and leeks,
carrots, lettuce and chives,
tomatoes and parsley,
tomatoes and celeriac,
lettuce, radishes and kohlrabi,
cabbage and bush beans,
cucumbers and dill.

Some classic ‘bad neighbor’ combinations are:
lettuce and parsley,
fennel and tomatoes,
cucumbers and tomatoes,
cabbage and onions,
tomatoes and peas,
peas and beans,
potatoes and sunflowers,
potatoes and tomatoes.

I have also had two rain barrels installed through Sustain Dane’s Rainbarrel Project. The two 55-gallon drums are fed off one of the roof drains. A spout at the bottom of each one is designed to either fill a watering can or have a hose attached.

The rain barrels not only cut down on my city-water use, thus helping me save some money, the rainwater they contain is also better for the garden, since it is less hard than city-water, has the right temperature (tap water is usually too cold and shocks plants in the summer heat) and doesn’t contain chloride and whatever other chemicals they put in there.