Greengirls » Blog Archive » Greengirl: It’s not a garden, it’s an ecosystem.

Greengirl: It’s not a garden, it’s an ecosystem.

Posted on June 13th, 2005 – 3:56 PM
By Jaime Chismar

Have you ever seen carrot seeds? They’re smaller than grains of sand. So small that I lost them in the folds of my gardening gloves. As they slipped through my fingers, I knew I did not have the chutzpa to place each teeny tiny seed in an evenly spaced, orderly row.

OK, I’ll admit that I’m a perfectionist. When I’m designing a web page, I’ll spend hours agonizing over layouts and margins. I’ll nudge an element ten pixels to the right, obsess about it over lunch, and move it move it ten pixels to the left as soon as I get back to my desk.

I knew that trying to perfectly plant carrots would be the death of me. Brian would find me lying face down in the garden, half-bald and clutching tufts of my own hair.

But then I thought about it a little. In nature, nothing organizes itself in ruler-straight lines 18 to 24 inches apart. Why should my garden be any different?

That’s when I started to research companion planting, which goes beyond just burying seeds in the soil. In companion planting, veggies are clustered together in little neighborhoods that take into account plant families, life cycles and survival strategies.

It works like this: Beans fix nitrogen in the soil. When planted with heavy feeders like tomatoes or corn, beans help regulate soil nutrients all season long. The malodorous members of the onion family can mask the smell of cucumbers and carrots from hungry predators. Herbs provide ground cover for spiders that prey on harmful insects. And when flowers like cosmos, bee balm and nasturtiums are planted in the garden, they attract more bees and increase crop pollination.

After reading up on companion planting, I learned that to grow healthy veggies, I needed to create a healthy ecosystem of flowers, herbs, insects and animals. My companionly planted garden beds would take some planning. Time for the graph paper!


	Garden 1: In the morning, all three beds get the same amount of light. As the direction of the sun changes, neighboring trees cast different amounts of shade on each bed. I chose the sunniest bed for the tomatoes and scattered basil, oregano, cosmos and borage in between the plants. I also lined the bed with marigolds. All these years, I’ve loathed the marigold for its pungent aroma and psychadellic 70’s yellow blossoms. As it turns out, other unwanted pest hate it for the same reasons, too.

	Garden 2: Native American peoples often grew corn, beans and squash together in groups, sometimes planting all three seeds in the same hole. Each plant helps the others grow. Instead of rows, the corn seeds are planted in a circle each a foot apart. As they grow taller and stronger, the corn stalks provide support for the beans. The bean plants fix nitrogen from the air into a more useable form in soil feeding the corn and the squash. The squash is planted in between the circles of corn. The prickly vines grow along the ground preserving soil moisture, decreasing weeds and discouraging animal pests. The Haudenosaunee people named this beneficial trio the Three Sisters.

	Garden 3: The third bed is shaded by four in the afternoon, so I saved it for more heat-sensitive plants like carrots, greens and cilantro. To deter preditators, I lined the bed with more merigolds and staggered some onion bulbs between the carrots. For additional peace of mind, I broadcast some chive seeds and crossed my fingers. Alright, teeny tiny seeds. I’ve given you good soil and plenty of water. The rest is up to you.

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11 Responses to "Greengirl: It’s not a garden, it’s an ecosystem."

Kathy says:

June 13th, 2005 at 4:48 pm

Greengirl - you are off to a great start. Next year, when you want to plant the carrots, take some paper towel (biodegradeable/recycled paper type) dampen it slightly, and sprinkle the seeds on it. You can then cut or tear it into strips and plant those in straight lines.

Another method is to snip the corner of the seed packet - just a little snip, mind you! Control the flow of the seeds out of the corner with your fingertips.

Personally I mix them with radishes knowing that as I pull the radishes the carrots will automatically thin. And that’s the magic phrase now for you. Keep them thinned or your production will be low.

Greengirl says:
Kathy, these are wonderful suggestions. I have printed it out and added it to my Greengirl tips-n-tricks three-ring binder. Thank you!

Sabrina says:

June 14th, 2005 at 6:45 am

About knowing how much water you are spraying out, just put an empty glass near water spray or if it’s one of the dribble hoses, under it. After a while stick a ruler in & measure how deep the water is; or do the same but with a rain gauge.
Good luck.

Kelley Leaf says:

June 14th, 2005 at 10:02 am

Oooooh carrots. Yum! We don’t get enough sun in our gardens for carrots, and I guess bunnies don’t fall into bowls of beer like slugs, so THAT won’t work. I am having great luck with the herbs I planted in my windowboxes, and I am going to try the tip about planting in containers and moving around the yard in the sun. That should help.

My husband got some onion sets at the coop, and he planted them when I wasn’t home. Even inexperienced as I am, I know you aren’t supposed to plant them all in a bunch like chives. I cracked up. My first gardening “in joke”.

Folkgirl says:

June 14th, 2005 at 3:38 pm

Chives are the inexperienced gardner’s best friend. You pretty much can’t kill them and they will come back year after year, after year…talk about a esteem builder!

Ours got so big so fast this year that they fell over. I had to tie them up against the fence before they shaded a tiny pepper plant to death.

Andrew James Riemer says:

June 14th, 2005 at 3:57 pm

I usually dig a very shallow trench for carrots, and then just seed generously. In a few weeks, I can come back and thin the line of carrots.

cyn smith says:

June 16th, 2005 at 2:56 pm

Hi Greengirl,
Becuz your garden is small in size, I suppose it DOES matter to you which are weeds. I have a HUMONGOUS flower
garden, so I don’t care too much. I let things go until I
can truly identify if they are a weed - or not. And some weeds are pretty attractive, so I let them stay but pull before they set seed, of course. Just today, I called our
extension offices to find out what the name of a horrid invasive plant was that decided to trespass on my hillside.
So now that I know it is common ragweed, I’d better go pull all of it, and give the hostas a fighting chance!

Cat says:

June 23rd, 2005 at 9:04 am

I hate to be a spoil sport, but when I first started gardening, I also put marigolds by the tomato plants to keep away pest. When I got NO tomatos, I talked to someone at a garden center that said that my marigolds had also kept away the bugs needed to polinate the tomatos. So you might want to check and makes sure that won’t happen to you too!

salosam says:

July 7th, 2005 at 2:34 am

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Sally says:

July 8th, 2005 at 1:21 pm

You can also buy carrot seeds–and usually any other teeny, tiny seeds–encapsulated. They are sometimes more expensive, but at least you don’t waste any. Look for them in the many seed catalogs you will undoubtedly receive just after Christmas!

» Blog Archive » Greengirl: I am getting a little sentimental, thank you very much. says:

October 4th, 2005 at 11:29 pm

[…] h here.” As I work through our modest corn patch, I remember my enthusiasm for the three sisters method of interplanting beans, corn and squash. It was an abysmal failure. My garden […]

Bonifacius says:

April 7th, 2006 at 11:28 am

Great article. I am just sad I dont know how to reply properly, though, since I want to show my appreciation like many other.