Vegetable Garden

We've been waiting to plant our vegetable garden since February. We have 3 5' wide x 25' long raised garden beds. Last year we went easy and only planted one of the beds. This year we decided to go whole hog and plant all three beds, using companion planting to deter pests. So one snowy day in February we sat down with our books, a list of vegetables we wanted to plant, and spent a couple hours planning out the beds.

General rules we learned about companion planting are:

• the Brassica family does not play nice with nightshades
• Legumes do not play nice with solanums or brassicas
  

So, basically, beans or any of their friends cannot be planted with tomato, peppers, onions, broccoli or kale. And broccoli and kale cannot be planted with tomatos, peppers or eggplant.

So, in Bed 1 we planned to include kale, broccoli, red onion, and squash.


Bed 2 would be tomatoes, peppers, shallots, yellow onions, and jalapenos.

Bed 3 would include lettuce, beans, spinach, cucumbers, eggplant, and zucchini.

Carrots would be "filler" in Beds 2 and 3.

We managed to get most of our vegetables today. We're still missing spinach, shallots and carrots. I added collard greens and swiss chard to Bed 1. And I swapped out a tomato plant for a tomatillo plant (I make a mean tomatillo salsa).

All of the plants we included are:

• Kale
• Collard greens
• Swiss Chard
• Broccoli
• Butternut Squash
• Acorn Squash
  
• Onion, Red
• Onion, Yellow
• Jalapeno
• Peppers
• Tomatos
• Tomatillo
• Zucchini
• Eggplant
• Cucumbers
• Beans
• Lettuce

I'm still hoping to find carrots, spinach and shallots because we eat a lot of those. It would be nice to grow them rather than buy them.