Alden Lane, our incredibly beautiful local nursery is built around and under several towering old-growth oak trees. It’s so beautiful it makes it on my local tour for foreign friends, together with our cursed Livermore totem pole (read the story here), and the Guinness Book of word records oldest lightbulb (see it in action here). Naturally the wine enthusiasts also visit some of our Livermore estate vineyards – but I like to keep it quirky with my personal tour.

I haven’t taken the kiddo to the nursery for a while because it’s hard to shop and corral a toddler at the same time. She’s finally gotten big enough to want to be helpful, so I figured I would gird my patience and give it a try. It was my lucky day! She played along while we picked out veggies, herbs, and flowers from my list, and some from the kid’s impromptu list as well.

Like I said, I arrived prepared with a list of plants that I wanted, and I managed to find about half of them before i began to worry the toddler bomb would go off.

I’ve been vaguely aware of companion planting for some time now. It comes up fairly often in square foot gardening, since the point is to pack many different types of plants in together. The classic example is the three sisters of corn, beans, squash, but my latest book perusal turned up hundreds of other combinations, and those helpful plants made up the entirety of my list.

It is definitely the right time of year to get started on a three sister’s garden, but the three sisters need sun and space, and the space that I have is the current home of all of those wire cages I made. I might get around to cleaning that up, and planting the sisters, but I have several projects that top my list of todos.

In the meantime, I planned for some square foot garden friendly companion plantings and learned a new gardening word along the way! Interplanting is where you mix and match plants to plant together instead of growing all the same plant in a row or a bed. Square foot gardening is a type of interplanting, but I thought it might look nice if I mixed things up even more, so I made a plan to interplant within my garden squares.

I picked up six-packs of carrots, marigolds, Spanish onion, and oak leaf lettuce. I had it bouncing around in my head that carrot doesn’t transplant well, but I bought it anyway. I’ll try to get some carrot seeds in too and we’ll see what does best.

Carrots need deep loose soil. So that’s a good reason for me to turn over some of my squares. I dug down almost a foot, to mix the soil in with the compost layer I’ve been planting in. I also harvested all of the peas from one or two squares to make room for more veggies. The Roots underneath were covered in pretty pink nodules so I chopped those up and left them in the soil. They’ll act like slow-release nitrogen fertilizer for the rest of the spring and maybe the summer.

Several of my nursery seedlings were badly rootbound: all of the carrots and almost all of the onions, as well as most of the lettuce. I loosened up the roots as well as I could, but I think these plants would have been happier if they hadn’t had their roots messed with so badly. It was a damp day yesterday and the plants all look pretty well today, considering the damage to their roots as I loosened them up.

To get the most companion planting game for my buck, I planted these new seedlings as close to my existing pepper and tomato plants as I could.

Here’s how these plants are supposed to help eachother :

Marigold: Attracts predator insects that kill aphids, repels insects, kills soil pathogens – also the flowers are edible. Considered especially helpful to tomatoes.

Carrots: Repel onion fly, can improve flavor of nearby peppers, help tomatoes grow, grow well with lettuce.

Onion: Deters most pests. Is thought to improve the flavor of peppers.

Lettuce: Repels some insects, shades the soil under taller plants.

Chives: Improve the growth of carrots and tomatoes, detter some insects.

I finished getting all of the veggies and marigolds planted this afternoon. I mixed these plants up into several different arrangements, all of which Emily some flowers. Next, I’ve got to get the herbs and more flowers planted, and then I’m off to collect the other half of my list from the nursery!