A healthy garden makes a happy home, and if taken care of, it can sustain you throughout every season (curious about food preservation? Read about it here!) We discuss symbiotic gardening practices in a previous article and wanted to create a more comprehensive list of great pairings to make in your fruit and vegetable garden.

After hundreds of years of observation, humans have made a wise effort in attempting to understand plant relationships, and learning from them about how to live in harmony. Symbiotic gardening practices are thankfully becoming more well known, and the efforts are apparent whenever it comes time to harvest.

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The Big Guns

Here we’re going to go a little bit more in-depth into a few plants, to describe in detail what pairing them with another plant will look like.

Orange Nasturtium: a lovely perennial flower that attracts whiteflies. This plant is quite the martyr, as it deters attention from your precious cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbage, and lettuce and onto itself. Sacrifice for benefit of the whole.

Rosemary: This is a wonderful herb to pair with carrots, sage, cabbage, and broccoli. The other herbs and vegetables thrive, while the scent of the rosemary repels pests like cabbage moths and flies. (It also goes great in sweet and savory dishes alike.)

Marigolds: not only are they a fantastic color, but these are also the ultimate pollinator attractors! And it doesn’t end there. Marigolds attract hoverflies. Why is this good? Because hoverflies are predatory to twitch grass, plant lice, and greenflies.

Garlic: better known for shielding us against vampires, it actually does the same with pests! Grow garlic with tomatoes, kale, and strawberries, and you’ll never see a spider mite again.

The Big List

There is an almost infinite number of successful fruit and vegetable pairings that can be made. So here is a compacted list of 27 veggies and herbs and what they get along with under the soil.