Companion planting: carrots and spring onions

As our whole garden has all but been removed, I’ve started the really rather enjoyable job of planning next year’s growing, albeit a bit earlier than I usually would. And one thing that I’ll definitely be doing again is companion planting spring onions in amongst my carrots. The RHS recently released trial information on carrot fly that makes for fascinating reading. Essentially you need to clothe your carrots in barriers. I didn’t put any insect-proof netting up at all yet suffered no carrot fly damage. We did it by the simple expedient of mixing the two types of seed in our palms before sowing. As the RHS didn’t trial companion planting in this instance (the scope of their study covered three types of netting), I am going to have to conduct my own trials next year. But for this year I was really impressed by the results I got with the organic companion planting of spring onions in amongst the carrots. Of course, it could be that my area is just lacking in carrot fly, or that nobody in my area grows carrots or any number of other reasons but I like to think that the gloriously onion-y smell as I pulled the carrots and spring onions together would have seen them off. I sowed the seeds with my oldest son which might explain the incredible concentration of carrots that required enormous amounts of thinning. But we still got a lovely crop of carrots, as baby carrots when thinning and a decent amount of larger ones too, not to mention spring onions, something we eat a lot of around here. All in all, the carrots and spring onions went well this year, and I’ll repeat them next year!