Don’t Plant These Vegetables Close to Each Other
Most of us don’t live on farms with acres of land to spread crops around, but instead have a few boxes, flower pots, or a small plot to grow gardens. As a result, we tend to cram as much stuff into space as possible. This is called crowdscaping, and not only does it prevent plants from reaching their full potential, but it also risks an even bigger problem: cross-pollination.
Bees and other pollinators are promiscuous little flirts. It would be nice if they took the pumpkin pollen and made sure to visit the other pumpkins first, but they would move on to the next flower, be it a tomato or a dill. This isn’t usually a problem—pea pollen doesn’t affect tomatoes, for example—but that’s not always the case. Some crops can cross-pollinate, resulting in a plant with DNA characteristics from both parent plants. In other words: Frankenculture.
Let’s take corn, for example. Unlike most plants, which rely on pollinators such as insects, corn is wind pollinated. Corn plants grow tassels that contain pollen, and the wind blows the tassels and sends the pollen falling onto the same variety of corn plants. The same wind can carry corn pollen up to a half mile (but 20 to 50 feet is generally considered a typical distance to be safe). In a home garden, you need to have enough corn in a block for it to pollinate itself (a six-by-six-foot block is recommended), but you shouldn’t plant multiple varieties of corn in your garden because the resulting ears may have traits of both varieties, and these will not necessarily be the best features of each of them. You can also control cross-pollination by choosing two varieties that have completely different pollination periods, but this is not easy math to master since the pollination phase is the result of many factors, most of which are beyond our control.
How to prevent frankenseeding
Unlike corn, cross-pollinated squash will affect next year’s crop rather than this year’s. The vegetables produced by cross-pollination will not change, but the seeds will. If you save the seeds and plant them, next year’s harvest will have characteristics of both parent squashes. I’ve seen this in practice, and it can be both interesting and frustrating: Friends grew mammoth pumpkins for a year, each weighing over 100 pounds, but they were completely tasteless and watery.
The good news is that this only occurs within a single species; For example, cucumbers and zucchini do not cross-pollinate, although they are both cucurbits, for example. The following groups will cross-pollinate each other and should be separated by half a mile . Since this is impractical in most home gardens, it is wiser to simply not plant these crops:
-
Squash, yellow-throat, acorn, spaghetti, cutlet, deli, squash and squash, except snake squash
-
Butternut Pumpkin, Buttercup, Banana, Hubbard and Turban
-
melon, melon, Charentais; Nectar; Kasaba; Armenian cucumber; Snake melon (pumpkin)
Be careful with companion planting.
In addition to cross-pollination, you also need to consider which plants benefit and which do not from interplanting or co-planting (planting next to each other). Certain combinations can have a significant impact on how well each plant blooms. The term for these plants is “allelopathic”, meaning that they produce chemicals that are problematic in other types of plants. Planting members of the nightshade family (eggplant, tomatoes, peppers) next to cruciferous plants (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage) puts both plants at risk. However, some plants, such as beans, benefit almost all other crops when they are nearby.
When planning your garden, be mindful of how you place plants and what seeds you save. For some crops, like pumpkins, you need to make sure that every fruit, no matter how small, ends up in the compost pile so it can’t sprout. Even if you don’t intend to save the seeds, be careful not to spoil the harvest through cross-pollination or planting bad companions.