Compromise and planning—You can see by now that
companion planting involves selecting the combination
of factors that works best in your soil and climate.
Fortunately, the myriad details fall into a pattern of
simple guidelines. Within the guidelines, however, there
are so many possible combinations that the planning
process can become quite complex. Be easy on yourself.
Do only as much companion planting as is reasonable
for you and comes naturally. What you learn this year
and become comfortable with can be applied next year,
and so on. An easy place to start is with salad vegetables,
since these are generally companions. Also, it is easier to
companion plant over time rather than in space. Since
you probably will not have enough area to use an entire
bed for each crop, you might create several heavy feeder,
heavy giver, and light feeder sections within each bed.
You may want to grow a preponderance of crops from 1
group, such as the heavy feeders. (It is unlikely that you
will want to grow one-third of each crop type.)
Therefore, you will need to make adjustments, such as
adding extra fertilizer and compost, when you follow
one heavy feeder with another. Because of lack of space,
you may have to grow some plants together that are not
companions. If so, you may need to be satised with
lower yields, lower-quality vegetables, and less-healthy
plants. Or you might try to alter your diet so that it is
still balanced but more in line with the balances of
nature. At any rate, you can see it is useful to plan your
garden in advance. You will need to know how many
brent
(Brent)
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