While I was showing someone around the fields early this spring they asked me if I had ever tried doing companion planting. I said, “Not much, but I have always been interested in trying more of it.” The question was a good reminder at the beginning of the season to experiment with companion planting. For those who haven’t heard of it before, companion planting is the practice of planting certain crops near or intermixed with each other to provide beneficial properties. An example is the three sister idea of planting corn, beans, and squash together.
What I was interested in trying was minimizing the flea beetle pressure on the kale. I had heard from multiple sources that a way to do this was interplant marigolds in with them. I believe the idea is that the flea beetles do not like the smell of marigolds, though it is hard to imagine anything that small has a sense of smell. I was going to plant marigolds anyway because they are both good as a stem flower as well as an edible flower. So, I decided to put them at the end of the rows of kale with the hypothesis that the flea beetles would be noticeably fewer near the marigold end.
Unfortunately it didn’t work, the flea beetles paid no heed to the marigolds. The flowers are beautiful, however, and we have already harvested nearly 400 pounds of kale this year. Plus we learned that in our fields the marigold do not deter flea beetles. So I guess in one way everything was a success.
