Welcome to another very exciting episode. In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about intercropping. There’s a lot of different forms of intercropping, and we’re going to talk about the different ways that you can intercrop different plants in your garden to get the most benefit. So let’s go!
**Pest Control:**
Alright, so the first type of intercropping is intercropping for Pest Control. All we’re doing is we’re planting a plant that pests don’t like next to a plant that pests typically will like. This could be things like Peppers; marigolds, for instance, will prevent things like rabbits (not all the time, but there’s been many studies that show that rabbits do not like the smell of marigolds, so there’s some evidence to prove that). So we can plant marigolds next to peppers if our peppers are getting eaten by rabbits.
There’s also been a lot of studies done with Marigolds in the soil, preventing things like root-knot nematodes. So your brassicas, things like broccolis, cauliflowers, cabbages, kale, and whatnot—those crops are plagued by a small little soil-borne insect known as a root-knot nematode. They’ll create these giant galls or basically tumors almost on your brassicas’ root system, preventing them from uptaking nutrients and growing. It’s a real big problem. Well, if you plant marigolds within about a one-square-foot radius of your brassicas, there have been many studies that show a positive correlation with marigolds and your brassicas. So, there’s a reason there for pest control with your brassicas.
It could also be something like Dill, for instance. Dill is a very fragrant herb, and a lot of insects will hone in on things like cucumbers. The Cucumber beetle hones in on a cucumber; the Colorado potato beetle hones in on its host plant, the potato; you might have tomato hornworms which hone in on tomato plants. There are these host plants that the pests typically prefer. How do they find those host plants? By the scent given off by that plant.
Squash vine borers are attracted to squash plants, and the pheromones—the scents being given off—can be masked with other plants. So, it doesn’t have to be marigolds; it could be something like lavender, onions (the very fragrant, potent smell of onions), Dill, oregano, basil, mint—there’s a ton of different crops that you could intercrop. The options are limitless when it comes to intercropping for pest control.
The idea is that we’re planting a plant that will deter pests next to a plant that is preferred by the pest. That idea of intercropping is very prevalent in polyculture. Polyculture is the idea of planting many plants closer together in kind of a small area, and that whole idea of polyculture is basically ingrained in intercropping. That’s one of the pillars of polyculture—intercropping. And there are a lot of benefits to that, not only from a beauty standpoint but also from a functional standpoint. They do provide a function.
**Environmental Benefit:**
The second type of intercropping is intercropping for an environmental benefit. That seems a little bit complicated, but what does that mean? Well, intercropping for an environmental benefit could be intercropping two plants together that provide a microclimate or some type of environmental impact. A prime example would be lettuce and sunflowers.
Lettuce does not like the hot sun, and sunflowers love the sun. They get nice and big, nice and tall, and they create shade. That shade can provide a microclimate, that protection for the lettuce to thrive under. If you have the sun beating down on the soil, and the lettuce is going to seed, well, if you plant lettuce next to a taller crop, it could even be things like pole beans—this trellis. As the trellis gets full with pole beans or even cucumbers, something like that, the shade that’s cast onto the garden can be a benefit to certain crops—things like cilantro, spinach, radishes, lettuce. Those plants can have a benefit.
So, there’s an environmental benefit given to those plants just through the shade being provided. An idea that a lot of you probably implement is the idea of planting your beans around your corn. There’s an old style of gardening called three sisters gardening. Three sisters gardening essentially is corn, squash, and beans being planted in close proximity. Now, we don’t use that method in our garden. I’m not saying it doesn’t work; I find it a bit difficult to manage that style of garden.
But there are those that have really good success with it. The idea is that the corn will provide structural support for things like beans; the corn also kind of protects the soil and keeps the soil cool for the beans and the squash. It also provides trellising. The trellising component of it is really important. It allows the beans to climb up something, right? The beans are climbing up to get the sunlight, but the soil is kept cool. So that’s the environmental component behind intercropping, and the three sisters garden is a very common example given when talking about intercropping just because, much like planting marigolds next to other crops, that’s another pillar of polyculture—kind of the three sisters method. That’s what a lot of people go to because it’s probably one of the best ways to showcase how three plants can grow so closely together, but they’re all benefiting from each other.
**Pollination Benefit:**
Alright, now we’re going to talk about intercropping for pollination benefits. We have just next to us our current plants, and those current plants are planted in close proximity. A lot of people have documented the benefits of having multiple plants of the same species next to each other.
What happens is that there’s actually an intercropping going on there because we don’t have just one type of currant; we have multiple types of currants. You can do this also with completely unlike species. You could plant lavender next to the currents, and you’re going to attract pollinators into your current patch. Or if you have fruit trees—your peaches, your apples, your pears—you could attract pollinators to those trees through the use of things like lavender, marigolds, nasturtiums, borage—plants that bring in the pollinators can help to pollinate your fruit trees.
So, there’s an intercropping for pollination. But also, like I touched on, you can have your currents. They’re not different plants; they’re different species of currants. We have red currants, white currants, pink champagne currants, black currants. Having all those currants next to each other provides cross-pollination between currant plants, which gives us better fruit set. So, there’s an intercropping component there as well. They’re not all red currants; they’re not all white currants. They’re different species of currants.
You see this as well with things like cherry trees, peach trees, apple trees, even blueberries. There’s a huge benefit to having multiple plants, and that’s why when you plant out an orchard, they will typically say, “Plant this one with a partner so that it can cross-pollinate and get better fruit set.” So, that is the third type of intercropping, and that’s another very common one. There are a lot of benefits to doing that one as well.
They all take different forms; they’re all different in their application, but it’s all still intercropping, which is what makes it really cool. Now, I want to talk about the fourth type of intercropping, and it’s one that a lot of people don’t talk enough about.
**Decoy Plants:**
Alright, the fourth type of intercropping, like I said, is one that I don’t see a lot of people talking much about, even though it is pretty well-documented. That’s intercropping for what’s known as a decoy plant. This kind of could be seen as pest control, but in my mind, it’s a little bit different because with pest control, you are essentially planting a plant that will deter a pest. What if you have a plant that brings in a pest into your garden or attracts it to that plant but kind of keeps it occupied or distracted from your other plants?
This is very, very common, and a lot of people will plant things like mustard crops because you’ll have things like your cabbage moths swoop in and attack your mustard crops. Or it could be aphids on things like flowering kale. Very, very common; it’s an attractant for aphids. What happens is that the aphids hone in on those crops and not on your other crops. So, you have pest problems in the garden but not on the crops that you want to harvest.
So, you’re almost basically sacrificing these crops as decoy plants, saying, “I’m planting these plants with the sole purpose of bringing pests into the garden so that, for the betterment of the rest of my garden, I can have a pest-free garden.” That’s a very, very common form of intercropping.
We have seen this with great success, especially on very, very large farms. Now, this is kind of where it gets a little bit away from the idea of polyculture because most people would say large farms can never be considered polyculture. However, we were at a U-Pick patch, and in between each row of blueberries, there was a row of—I don’t exactly know what they were called, but the farmer that was doing it basically said that it was for bird control because birds would eat all the blueberries, but they prefer these teeny tiny little red berries.
I don’t know what they were called, but he had basically hedgerows of them in between, and he was growing on probably 40 acres. He was a commercial blueberry grower, but he grew these little red berries, and they fruited around the same time that the blueberries did. He planted them with the exact purpose of saying, “These crops, I’m not even harvesting from these crops, but it’s protecting my blueberry crops, which we’re harvesting from.”
That idea of sacrificing this one plant for the sole benefit of getting the other plant to harvest is a great intercropping method. It can work on a small scale or a large scale, and it’s very, very effective. That’s what I don’t see a lot of people talking a lot about, and maybe that’s because they’re bundling it into the pest control method, but I don’t see how they’re quite a bit different in their application. One completely deters them; the other one kind of attracts them and keeps them occupied.
Now, let’s talk about the fifth and final form of intercropping, and I think it’s one you guys are really going to love.
**YOLO Intercropping:**
In the fifth and final form of intercropping—and this one is for all the Millennials out there—it’s what I call YOLO intercropping (You Only Live Once). Intercropping I find to be a very beneficial thing in the garden, but you get a lot of people in a certain camp that are what I call intercropping purists. There’s nothing wrong with being an intercropping purist if you are one, but I find that sometimes it can kind of rob the joy from the garden a little bit.
YOLO intercropping is basically saying, “Well hey, you only live once, so I’m going to throw whatever I want next to whatever I want.” Sometimes they don’t coexist all that well; sometimes they do trample each other, but you know what? You had fun doing it, right? If you wanted to do it—I’ve always said your garden is your canvas, and if you’re the painter, you can paint your canvas however you want. There’s nobody that can tell you what you can plant next to each other because at the end of the day, it’s your garden; it’s your art; this is your creation; you’ll make it what you want.
So, the fifth one is one that I kind of threw in here just because I see so way too often people shouting down people on online forums, saying, “Well, you can’t plant cucumbers next to your zucchini; the big zucchini leaves are going to shade out all your cucumbers, and they’re both in the Cucurbita family; you need to space them out.” I say, “Well, let the guy do what he wants to do; it’s You Only Live Once. Why live life miserably?”
So, at the end of the day, that’s kind of the final form of intercropping because I like to live life and have fun doing it. I like to live life to the fullest, and I do follow some loose rules to gardening for best success because obviously, I want you guys to— I know a lot of people watch my channel and they kind of carbon copy what I’m doing, whether it’s the spacing or what I’m planting next to what and stuff. I understand that I’m very influential in how I garden and I get that.
So, I don’t do a whole lot of YOLO intercropping, but you know what? You can, and that’s what’s one of the nice things about being you and not me. People always ask me, “Luke, what’s one thing you love?” I get to talk to millions of gardeners every single year. I love doing it; I have the time of my life doing it; I get to impact people’s lives. What’s one of the worst things? Realizing that every little word that I say will be used against me. They will absolutely take every word as the truth.
