CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Planting your cucumbers with a friend to help it out.
South Texas Gardener, Gabriel Vega explains what is companion planting.
Companion planting is the close planting of different species based on their ability to enhance one another's growth, offer some form of pest protection or other advantages. Sometimes this is a matter of choosing plants with different growth habits that do not compete with one another, or it can mean choosing companions that have different nutrient needs in order to make efficient use of soil.
Strategic companion planting is especially important in small gardens or wherever careful space planning is needed.
There are many vegetables that make excellent companions for cucumbers. Peas, corn, and beans are legumes—a type of plant that has a root system that increases nitrogen in the soil. The mechanism by which this happens is that roots have the ability to colonize the Rhizobium bacteria and absorb about 20 percent of the sugar produced by the plant, which is then turned into nitrogen. Any of the nitrogen not absorbed by the legume is released into the nearby soil as the plant decomposes, thereby becoming available to nearby companion plants. This will benefit your cucumber plants, as well as many other garden plants. Other good vegetable companions include radishes, beets, carrots, and onions. Radishes also work with carrots because they are picked first, leaving more room for carrots to fill in.
Marigold flowers will help repel beetles, and nasturtiums are distasteful to thrips and other insects that feed on cucumbers. These flowers, along with sunflowers, make for good companions for almost all vegetables and herbs.
Oregano is an herb with a well-established reputation for repelling insect pests and is another good companion for cucumbers, as is dill.
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