Crop pairing can serve to boost the growth of certain plants, and it can also help keep pests away or protect your fruits and vegetables from diseases. Not all pairings are equally effective, but they remain an excellent entry point for a natural, pesticide-free garden!
Companion Plantings That Help Your Beans
For pesticide-free gardening, practicing crop pairing in the vegetable garden, also called companion planting, can be decisive. Which vegetables make good neighbors or, conversely, are detrimental for green beans?
Which vegetables to pair with green beans to help them grow well?
Beans can grow better and faster if you pair them with other plants. There are actually many, such as sweet corn, potatoes, celery, spinach, carrots, cauliflower, dill, and eggplant.
The Right Pairings to Fight Bean Fly
The bean’s greatest enemy is the bean fly (Delia platura). This fly mainly targets young bean seedlings as they emerge from the soil, causing irreparable damage.
To limit the impact of the bean fly and thus its presence in your crops, the best friend of your beans will be savory, whose scent will repel this pest.
Not only does savory deter a foe of the bean, savory will also enhance the flavor of your beans: a superb pairing for a market garden!
The Companion Plants That Beans Help
If beans can be helped by certain vegetables in your garden, they can also boost other plants without getting anything in return!
The list is fairly long here as well, starting with beets, bok choy (Chinese cabbage), and cauliflower (but not the other cabbages), pickling cucumbers, zucchini, lamb’s lettuce, turnips, and tomatoes.
More interesting still, some garden vegetables that help beans are also helped by those same beans. This is the case for spinach, sweet corn, and potatoes.
Companion Plantings to Avoid: Bean Enemies
Companion planting, logically, can also be counterproductive. So you need to be careful not to plant or seed varieties that will penalize your beans and vice versa.
Vegetable pairings that dislike beans
Here you should avoid garlic, all types of cabbage except Chinese cabbage and cauliflower, Alliums (leeks, scallions, onions, etc.), peas, and radishes.
Vegetable pairings that beans do not like
Certain crop pairings in the garden are not friendly to beans, such as planting fennel nearby. Beans also don’t like being too close to tomatoes, even though, as noted above, tomatoes benefit from their presence.
Finally, in reciprocity, beans do not fare best beside peas and Alliums which benefit from such an arrangement.
