Or the case of the Terrible Tea.
You have probably heard of companion planting. Plant the marigolds with your tomatoes, your squash with the corn. But have you ever thought about the fact that if some plants can be good for each other, the opposite might also be true?
I had a bit of a vague idea that this was so, but as a beginning gardener even the idea of companion planting made my head spin. I started the way that most people do, just planting things as I went and researching or adjusting in the future if something didn’t thrive. (An excellent method by the way. Absolutely just go for it when it comes to gardening! Don’t let overthinking stop you from making a start.)
As you would expect, most things chugged along just fine. A few didn’t, and were moved or treated differently. The odd thing just never did well. I fought with carrots for years, but they just don’t like my soil. (Not really worth the work it would take to fix that since they are one of the easiest vegetables to get elsewhere.)
The carrots were very obvious in their displeasure though. Sometimes planting something in the wrong location is a bit sneakier…
There is a lovely large pine tree in my front yard. I enjoy having it there, but the area around the trunk always looked patchy and full of weeds. I was looking for more places to sneak in food gardens, so I decided to get creative. I bought two tiny little chamomile plants and picked up some landscaping rocks for free. One rock ring around the tree, a bit of extra soil, and my itty bitty plant starts later, a lovely patch of flowers would eventually grow where my ugly ring of patchy grass had been.
It didn’t take long for that small investment in time and money to turn into a mass of tiny cheerful little flowers. I carefully harvested them at their peak all season, drying them in my dehydrator, filling small glass jars for a pantry full of winter tea. Finally, one day I shook some out into my tea pot and was ready to taste the results of my hard work…
It was revolting.
Bitter and just all around awful. Turns out that the ways plants influence each other makes for fascinating science, but very bad tea.
I chose to leave the chamomile where it is, simply because I like looking a them, but you can absolutely research what a better combination of plants would be in cases like this. I was given canes from a type of black raspberries that do just fine under black walnut trees for example, which are notorious for killing everything in their radius. There is almost always something that will grow in a certain area, or near a certain plant, it just might not be what you were hoping to put there.
So experiment! Don’t be afraid to just try something out. Research when things go wrong, but absolutely don’t feel like you need to over think things. The amazing wealth of information out there can make gardening feel overwhelming. but it is more than ok to just dip your toes in while you start.
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