Companion beans, peas vs onions, garlic??????

[Kassaundra]

Okay all the companion guides say that combo doesn't play well together. Does anyone know why??? Do they attract the same pests, use the same nutrients??? Has anyone tried it w/ or w/o success?


I thought I had the perfect plan but it involves planting the beans and the onions / garlic next to each other.

 

[digitS']

I have done it, Kassaundra, without any plan for experimentation.

There were extra onion sets, there seemed to be room where some bean seed hadn't come up. (I'm always willing to slide an onion in somewhere.)

Didn't work well. The remaining beans didn't do well. Could have been the seed but the no-no for putting the 2 veggies together made sense to me when I read about it later.

Steve

 

[NwMtGardener]

Oh. Welllllllll crap. Guess who has her leeks and onion right next to the peas. Well, everything is next to each other in my little garden! We'll see what happens!

 

[897tgigvib]

Once my Peas had a good start, planted a bit extra apart, usually 2 seeds together about 10 to 12 inches apart, and the peas are going well, I plant bush beans between them. They grow well together like this.

Last year I planted 2 lone pea seeds between patches of pole beans at the same time as the beans. They grew great.

This year I just put some pole beans in between the Alaska peas, and some bush beans between some of the others. I think it'll work just fine.

 

[digitS']

I bet that's a good idea, Marshall!

Beans usually follow peas in my garden. Works just fine.

So beans & peas . . . onions & garlic -- lots of people have an "onion bed" with a number of varieties/species. Would that work Kassaundra??

Steve

 

[Kassaundra]

The edges of my individual pie shaped gardens are my asparagus beds, and they all have fencing to keep the chickens in or out, so I currently plant them in beans, figure the fixing of the nitrogen will do nothing but help the asparagus. This year I was going to add some walking onion / garlic to the asparagus beds, that would mean that the beans would be right in the same "bed" area as the onions and garlic, which is appearently a big no no for companion planting. (according to the books) so I was wondering if anyone had any personal knowledge/experience w/ how well it works or not, or why it is such a no no.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I have not noticed anything like this. I have beans about 3 feet away from onions right now and the beans are growing great, but it is stil too early for them to have started producing. Those onions are bulbing up better than onions in another location. I can't give you any help from experience.

I've tried Googling it and cannot come up with anything I really trust as to the reason. I found forums where people said that their beans and especially peas planted with onions dod not do well, but others said they had no problems. Some suggested that an established onion bed caused more problems than freshly planted onions. Maybe distance away has a big influence? Some said that onions put off a chemical that stunts legumes. Some said to plant onions or garlic throughout your garden and orchard to repel insects. One said that some of the companion planting charts are based on "crystal analysis" from many decades ago where someone looked at "crystals" from different plants when they were combined. If the crystals were clear, they were friendly to each other. If they were cloudy, they were not good friends. Not a sound scientific basis but the effects of this still linger in the recommendations. The internet is as reliable as ever.

You can't always go by scientific evidence. Sometimes you have to go by observation, even if you don't know why the results come out as they do. There is often a reason behind these recommendations, so I'd suggest you try to keep the onion family not real close to the legumes. I don't know why I suggest that. I don't have a sound reason.

Editted to add: Digits, I could not find anything reliable on any of the extension sites. You're better at searching those than I am. Maybe a challenge or a quest?

 

[chris09]

There is only 2 reasons I can think of why you may not want to plant Onions/ Garlic close as in the same bed/row to Beans/Peas and that would be that the Onions/ Garlic may give your Beans/Peas a off taste or the Beans/Peas will put extra Nitrogen in the soil that the Onions/ Garlic don't need.

Now I'm not all that big on companion planting myself so I may not be that much help.


Chris

 

[digitS']

It used to be that a simple "site:edu" search would provide quick answers from cooperative extension and the research universities. Lately, colleges have been allowing their students to have personal webpages hosted by the school. So . . . you have John & Mary talking about their backyard garden and showing pictures of Fluffy playing with Fido .

I once read a master's thesis on companion planting. Note, I said that was "read" not "wrote." I found the research sound and the writing good and enjoyed it. It's somewhere online - Massachusetts' scholar if I remember right. His conclusion was that good companions are plants that benefit and plants that are not seriously inconvenienced.

That seemed to make great sense to me .

There are plants that suppress other plants - they are all "trying" to do that since they are all competing for sunlight, nutrients, water. Some, exude chemicals from their roots in the effort - I was surprised to see oats listed as one of those with these allelopathic skills. We really should be aware that sunflowers do this but, of course, sunflowers are large plants with robust growth. Those big leaves shade any shorter plants growing near them. They are really tough neighbors for most anything but how far those roots travel horizontally, I don't know. I'm not going to worry if a plant is 6 feet away from a sunflower. I believe Thistlebloom has some experience with decomposing sunflower material interfering with a new season's planting.

Yes, that comes as anecdotal information. Like Ridgerunner, I'm open to information on experiences. - Somewhat Off Topic - I was just reading how "financial experts" have real problems understanding market irrationality. Isn't it odd how we turn to people who know their numbers and expect all the answers about a social institution?? Even the historians are usually ignored so we have trouble just learning from past mistakes.

Anyway, along with plants living together and "not seriously inconveniencing" each other, there are the benefits of "confusing the pests" . I think it could not be better proven that if you have LOTS of one plant - you risk attracting pests of that plant. If you have a mix of plants, the pests have trouble finding and moving from one host plant to another. Companion planting - as gardeners, I don't think we need a better reason to do it.

Those old notions about crystallizing and such, wow! I don't think we need to go back 80 years and base our beliefs on how much color comes thru a microscope when looking at compost tea . . .

Here is a short pdf file from Oklahoma State University that gives us a quick look at allelopathy and provides a list of companions. It doesn't much go into the "why's" but we can find a list just like this from NDSU, Cornell and other places.

Cultural Controls, OSU

Steve

 

[ninnymary]

Oh no!, this year I planted my onions next to my pole beans. In my small garden they are very close! They both seem to be doing fine so far.

Mary