Gardening for beginners: combining plants (2024)

FAQs

How to combine plants in a garden? ›

You can use contrasting colors, textures, leaf sizes and plant forms to make stunning plant combinations for your garden. The easiest way to combine to plants is by choosing contrasting features. Some of these features are color, texture, leaf size and plant form.

In general, plants with known positive relationships should be planted within two or three rows of each other. Plants that have negative or detrimental relationships, should be planted at least two to three rows apart. Infestation of pests or disease can occur more quickly if you plant all the same crop close together.

Sometimes this is positive and sometimes negative. Companion planting is the art of growing plants near each other, because of their ability to enhance or complement each other.

Grafting and budding are horticultural techniques used to join parts from two or more plants so that they appear to grow as a single plant. In grafting, the upper part (scion) of one plant grows on the root system (rootstock) of another plant. In the budding process, a bud is taken from one plant and grown on another.

If you have enough space, group them in an equilateral triangle. This looks particularly good with mounding or vertical plants. Be sure to leave some space between the plants, especially if they are three different kinds. You can even use a garden ornament, like a birdbath, to count as the third item in a set of three.

Planting in groups of three leads to a more natural feel and is very pleasing to the eye. There are several ways to incorporate an odd number of plants into your design other than in a simple straight line. Although that is a great option since an odd-numbered group gives a natural center.

Size of Garden

Pick 3 to 5 of your favorite vegetables and buy 3 to 5 plants of each one. If planting in a raised bed, a 4' x 4' or 4' x 8' is a good beginner size. See our Raised Garden Bed Guide, which covers the benefits of raised beds, how to build a raised bed, and what type of soil to fill a raised bed with.

How to layout a garden? ›

As a general rule, put tall veggies toward the back of the bed, mid-sized ones in the middle, and smaller plants in the front or as a border. Consider adding pollinator plants to attract beneficial insects that can not only help you get a better harvest, but will also prey on garden pests.

By considering various attributes - plant type, size and habit; foliage shape; flower colour; season of interest - it's possible to create a harmonious, unified planting scheme. Contrasting, complementary and even, sometimes, clashing colours can all be harnessed to achieve particular effects.

The intercropping method of planting corn, beans, and squash together, commonly called The Three Sisters has been studied and described by scholars in anthropology, history, agriculture, and food studies for many years.

Creating Horizontal Layers with Plant Material

There are two basic rules when arranging plants in the beds: 1) space the individual plants so that they touch each other when they reach their mature size, and 2) overlap the masses of plants and connect them so that they flow without space between them.

It is achieved by combining the attributes of one plant with those of another; this is done by fertilizing one plant with pollen taken from another. This action is called a cross.

The main rule of successful cohabitation of different plants in one pot is that you can plant them together only if they have similar subsistence requirements. Pay attention to lighting, watering, temperature, ground mixture, and growth factors; they must be similar.