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Originally Posted by tlcmd
Has anyone experience with the use of companion plants &/or biologicals (beneficial insects, mites, & organisms) in the protection of their garden and tomatoes? Especially regarding prevention of TSWV?
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Many years ago when companion planting first became "popular" my Mom and I tried some companion planting. The recommendation at that time was to plant potatoes in the same hole as your tomatoes. Unfortunately, that was the last garden that Mom & I did together. She died that winter and in all the hoopla of her last illness I have forgotten whether it worked well or not.
I do intend to try some companion planting myself this year. Ordered a couple of books recommended by one of the better-known organic seed websites from Amazon, thinking they would provide me with more information than is easily available online.
Carrots Love Tomatoes is a huge disappointment - nothing but a list of vegetables. I gave this one of the lowest ratings I've ever given out for a book in any field and would return it if it were not so much trouble.
The other book was
Great Garden Companions by Sally Jean Cunningham. That one is better, but really aimed at people with very small gardens & raised beds. The Hobbyist with a capital H. Sally Jean freely admits to purchasing all or most of her plants
and the descriptions and garden plans she provides lead me to believe that she grows something on the order of 8 tomato plants and a couple of peppers rather than the 100 or so 'maters and as many peppers that will find a home on my hilltop. My garden is big enough that my daughter is thinking about designating the place as a farm
Beyond that, I am not sure how valid some of her "companions" are for anyone other than herself. As an example, she claims that peppers and tomatoes make wonderful companions because "they are in the same family and like the same conditions." I raise mostly hotter chile rather than green peppers and I have not found them to "like the same conditions" as the tomatoes at all. Rather the opposite in fact. They like things much dryer than the tomatoes do .
I am also not entirely sure that I am interested in mixing a bunch of perennial herbs and self-sowing flowers into my vegetable patch, a core recommendation of Cunningham's - especially in light of the fact that we have plenty of natural habitat bordering the garden area.
All that said, I do intend to plant a basil between each two tomatoes and am starting a ton of marigolds & nasturtiums of the climbs/roams everywhere smelly sort. I'm also going to put the tomatoes a bit closer than I did last year. Last year I left 3 full feet between plants and 5 feet between rows because I intended to let the plants sprawl. That wasted a lot of space that I could have utilized had I done things differently. And I have seen an idea on the front of the Johnny's catalog that I intend to put to use - mixed lettuces broadcast planted into a strip that looks to be 1.5-2 feet wide, something that can be comfortably straddled. You put one foot on either side while you work down the row harvesting. I'm going to copy that for most of our greens.
Frankly, I am not the least bit sure that I saved either time or money by not staking or caging the tomatoes. All that newspaper & straw took nearly forever to spread around (I ended up having to call in the calvary for a few extra hands), I still had to hoe and had lots & lots of weeds, and the straw was not cheap. It also seemed to provide the ideal habitat for a bug nursery. The bugs truly enjoyed my tomatoes - they ate well over half of them.
This year I am going to give the new olive green film mulch developed over at University of New Hampshire a whirl. It supposedly raises soil temps as much as clear plastic does while simultaneously screening out the light wavelengths that lead to weed growth. I'm also going to use row covers. I want to try putting out the tomatoes around May 15 (last expected frost date in my neck of the woods) rather than waiting until June 1. For that matter, I might try a few of the cold-hardy sorts like SubArctic as early as May 1 with the film mulch, and row cover. (Yes, I intend to keep a full back-up set of baby 'maters around just in case!)
If I can convince people to drink anything out of 2 liter bottles I might go so far as to make home-made Wall'o'waters for some of the earliest plants. That idea did come from Cunningham's book. You take a dozen or so and duct-tape them together into a ring. (Tape goes on both the outside and the inside.) Put the thing over the plant you want to protect and fill all of the bottles with water. I suspect that idea would work every bit as well with 1-liter bottles instead of the 2.
Last - or maybe first - on the list is I am going to run up the hill to Ace hardware and drag home a gigantic roll of 6 mil black plastic to blanket a good stretch of the field with the second the snow is off, in hopes that I can kill off all of the weeds before planting time. Come the time I'm ready to plant I'll just fold that chunk of plastic back up and stash it in the shed for next year. The chunk of field I'm using for spring vegetables obviously won't get the black plastic treatment until next year, when I've moved them somewhere else.