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Re: Tomato/onion compatibility

On Fri 26 Jun, Mary McGee Wood wrote:
> 
> I checked onions in Bob Flowerdew's "Companion Planting" (excellent
> book!) - he says onions won't mix with legumes, but are good with 
> beets, tomatoes, and lettuce: they may help to deter the slugs.
> I have a raised bed full of shallots interplanted with tomatoes and 
> catch-crop lettuce and they all seem happy. There's also the old
> advice to interplant carrots with onions as each masks the smell of 
> the other so you don't get either carrot-fly or onion-fly.
Sow the carrots in end of Juneto avoid carrot fly. 
> 
> 	best,
> 		Mary
> 		near Manchester, England 
> 
> 
> 
It's a rum business this companion planting. On the one hand we found by
accident that the onions were affecting one row of tomatoes in the
polytunnel, on the other did you hear Gardeners Questiontime from Ryton
when the head gardener there poo-poo-ed the whole idea. It's a bit like
UFO's, the Loch Ness monster, water divining (which I did successfully
at the tender age of 12!) , ghosts, homeopathy, the bumble bee who ought
not be able to fly, etc. It's so hard to get at the facts. Perhaps we
ought to start our own group evidence and be very careful about
authentication. There is too much in gardening where one person says and
does something and almost everybody else copies without question.

I have looked it up in Gardening Which  (June 1992 & earlier)and here is
a quote from the final paragraph
....These contradictory conclusions for similar experiments show how
difficult it is to pinpoint any specific effect of companion planting.
The weather, the level of pest attack the previous year and the variety
of plant may all have an effect on the success of a companion planting
scheme. So it seems that companion planting can work under certain
conditions but success cannot be guaranteed.

Which did a trial, including the carrots and onions and found that in
all cases the crops were equally attacked by pests.
There is a traditional system of planting pumpkins in between sweetcorn.
I would not do it myself as you would have great difficulty then in
accessing each crop, and we have more land available than we could
possibly manage. 

The only companion planting we seem to do all the time is weeds with
everything!
-- 
Allan Day  Hereford HR2 7AU allan@crwys.demon.co.uk
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