 Hello and welcome to Hands in the Dirt. I'm Megan Humphrey, executive director of Hands, and we are a nonprofit in Burlington, Vermont. Our mission is to get food to adults 50 years and over. We provide these Hands in the Dirt gardening workshops with the famous Charlie Nardosi and Meal and gift bag delivery on Christmas Day all over the county. A nutrition education program called Hands in the Kitchen and also Support Buddies, which is a program in partnership with Heineberg Senior Center and lots of other organizations to get healthy groceries and meals to seniors. And we want to give special thanks to AARP Vermont and Hannaford for their sponsorship of Hands in the Dirt. So thank you so much for joining us. And Charlie, please take it away. Today, what we're going to be doing is companion planting. And companion planting is one of those topics that everyone has heard about and everyone's talked about. But they really are really kind of confused about does it work, does it not work, what works. So I'm going to try to tackle it pretty quickly here. And then we'll talk a little bit more about it as well. So let me share my screen. And we will dive right in to the presentation. So companion planting is something we, as I mentioned, we've all heard about, you know, the books by Louise Riotti, Tomatoes, Love Carrots, that kind of thing. But most of that information that was in that book and many other books and many other websites is more folklore information, kind of personal information, individual experiences gardening. It isn't something that necessarily has been scientifically proven across a broad spectrum. But that is changing. And more and more researchers are looking into this idea of companion planting. They're not calling it that so much. They're calling it by a lot of different names. But really, it's the same idea that you're planting this plant next to this other plant for a benefit of both of the plants. And what we're going to do is kind of dive a little bit into this and find out some of this new research that's out there around the idea of companion planting. So the new ideas behind companion planting are scientific. They have been studied by state universities, international universities and research institutions. And so they have a broader base to them, a little more critical eye on them than just it worked in my garden. It should work in your garden. They also are more of an ecosystem approach. And this is really more of like an ecological approach to gardening than just simply this plant should be planted next to that plant. It's really much more of a broader approach that a lot of these researchers are looking at and a lot of the gardeners are looking at where we're taking a look at your garden, not as a separate system as opposed to everything else in your yard, but something that's integrated into the shrubs you have, into the flowers you have, even into the lawn areas you might have and grassy areas you might have. All of those play an important role in the health of your garden and the health of your plants in your garden. And the emphasis is on relationships. So how are these plants working together? And this I can do a whole talk just on this. And I think I've mentioned it maybe in past talks about soils, for example, and how the relationships of plants in the soil really benefit a number of different plants and a number of different microbes and other kinds of species. So this new idea with companion planting is really going beyond just a simple plant this and not plant that, but really looking at the whole garden as an ecosystem. So to that end, we really want to diversify our plantings in our garden, especially if you're thinking of it just in terms of my vegetable garden. And that's really how a lot of us have garden for many years. We have the vegetable garden, we have the flower garden, we have the shrub border, you know, we have some trees, we have the lawn, everything is separate, right? But this is a photo, an old photo from friends of mine used to live up in Craftsbury had a perennial flower garden. And this is their kitchen garden. This is a vegetable garden. And this is what it looked like when in the middle of the summer, you look at it, you think of it as a flower garden, right? But because they love flowers, they integrated flowers throughout that garden. If you look closely, you'll see beans and cauliflower and Swiss chard and onions and things of that nature. But this idea of having a diversity of plantings in the garden. So you're attracting beneficial insects, you're attracting all kinds of critters, and you're keeping an ecological balance in the soil and among the plants is going to help your plants grow better. Because it's all about plant relationships and certain plants do do better next to each other or help each other, not just in the sense that it's going to repel an insect, but maybe help each other in other ways too. Some of that might have to do with the plants themselves as far as fitting better in the garden together, you know, not competing with each other. And some of it might be one plant helping another plant in that garden. And of course, by integrating flowers and herbs into your garden, you're going to be attracting pollinators and beneficials. And this is really a critical thing that we're all very concerned about is helping our pollinating insects. And the way to do that to not only help the pollinating insects, but help your garden is to grow a variety of perennial and annual flowers in that garden. So you could bring them in these umbil type flowers, like you're seeing here that yarrow, that pink flowers, a yarrow, some yellow one there too, actually. That's a really good example of a flower that's a real nice pollinator plant. Pollinators love those flat umbil kind of flowers, and they tend to frequent there. If they're going to be in your garden, then they're going to be pollinating your squashes, your cucumbers, your melons, your pumpkins. They're going to be doing other kinds of benefits for you and your garden. A lot of this information is in a book that you might want to take a look at. It's called Plant Partners. It's written by Jessica Walliser. And this is a book that just came out this year, and she's a gardening colleague, garden writer colleague of mine. And she did a great job highlighting all the science-based companion planting strategies that she found by doing an extensive research all around the world, from all around the world. So that's a cool book to check out called Plant Partners. So what are we going to do today? So we're going to talk just kind of a slice of this companion planting topic because it could go on and on. But I'm going to talk about companion planting and the idea of sharing space, so your plants that can live together because they grow a little bit differently. And the same with nutrients, sharing nutrients in the garden, maybe helping each other out. And then finally, we'll talk about controlling insects. And I'll highlight some of that research that I've been talking about that's out there as far as what plants are going to help you control insects in your garden. So we were sharing space, you know, often we don't really think about plants as holding different spaces in the garden, but they really do. Some plants, of course, are creeping. Some of them are more upright, like all these kales and Swiss chards here. Some of them will grow vertically, like a pole bean. These plants can be planted together much closer and much more integrated than you would normally think about. And what's nice about that is that these plants are not going to outcompete each other, but they're going to complement each other and you'll need less growing space. And we all love that idea as we're trying to minimize the amount of gardens we have to take care of, the amount of beds we have to take care of. If we can grow more intensively and grow the right plants next to each other because they're sharing a space, that's going to help us in a lot of fronts. One thing, of course, is we can grow vertically and certainly peas, we have ours in the ground already, pole beans would be ones, but there are other plants such as summer squash like this zucchini here. This was a shot from France on one of my garden tours. And what they did is they trellised it up a fence, a vertical fence. They trellised it up, of course they attached it with ties to hold it up and they have their zucchini. So you can get varieties of zucchini that naturally will run a little bit. I grow an old Italian heirloom called trombocino. Trombocino. And trombocino is a vining summer squash. So I grow it like this. I grow it up the fence around our garden and it produces these big long fruits. But you can even use things like the old-fashioned heirloom early crooknecks, the yellow squashes. They kind of run a little bit too. Any squash it runs a little bit, you can trellise vertically. You could do this of course with cantaloupes too. With small watermelons it'll work as well. So taking advantage of the vertical space in your garden is one way to maximize that space. Of course the three sisters garden is probably one that's most common. Most people are familiar with where they're growing corn, beans, and squash. This is actually two sisters. I think they don't have the squash in there. But anyway you get the idea that they're growing beans up those corn stalks. So that idea of using plants that are already vertical as a support for existing plants is a good one. Sunflowers. It's another great one to grow. So you can plant your sunflowers. This is a little sunflower house on the left there. A great little activity to do with kids and grandkids. Because you plant a ring of sunflowers around a little area inside. Then maybe you create a little sitting area in there for a little privacy. And as those sunflowers you want to use like the Russian mammoths, the big ones. As they get big they're going to flop over a little bit and create this beautiful kind of little ceiling and roof over the kids. And you can add to it by planting pole beans on the outside. Or like that plant on the right there in the trellis. That's called Malabar spinach. That is a type of spinach that loves the heat. And it's a beautiful plant. You can see the red stems to it. And beautiful delicious leaves that you can eat right through the summer. Because it wants, it actually needs the heat. It's not something that's going to grow well in cool weather. But you can grow some of those around those sunflowers. Maybe up to the sunflowers or up a couple feet tall. Plant your beans around them, your Malabar spinach, anything. Cardinal flower, morning glories, whatever it is. And they'll just climb up as those sunflower stalks grow. And they'll create this beautiful kind of colorful area in your garden. Maximizing again how much of what you're growing in a small space. You can also do a thing called interplanting. And interplanting really takes advantage of the plant's growth characteristics. So for example, and here you see that cabbage down there in the bottom left. It's surrounded by cilantro and by nigella, which is an annual flower. Those have very ferny foliage to them. They don't get very big. So you can really pack them really very closely. The tall burgundy colored plants are amaranth. And those are going to get tall. So they can kind of stretch up higher. So you can use plants that have different heights and different characteristics as far as the leaf goes to really work to your advantage in the garden. Another way of doing this is what we call succession planting. So there's no reason to just grow one crop in your garden or in your bed, unless it's a long season crop, like a tomato or an eggplant or a pepper or a squash, like a winter squash, not so much summer squash. But if you're growing most any other things, if you're growing leafy greens, if you're growing beans, if you're growing some annual herbs, you can do this in a succession. So for example, this person had lettuce growing there. And you know, as they harvest the lettuce, they're making space to plant other things, some herbs in there, some broccoli or cabbages. You can do this with cool season, warm season and cool season crops. That's a typical succession, meaning this time of year, you're planting lettuce, you're planting spinach, you're planting kale and Swiss chard, mizuna greens, arugula, all those greens in your garden. Then when they're done, say in by June, then you can plant bush beans, put a nice little crop of bush beans in there. After a few months, they're done by late August, you can plant in some fall crops like kale and maybe come back to some of these greens like spinach, for example, and have those going right into October, November. So by doing that, you get three crops in that one spot in your garden. And if you do that for multiple places, you can see how you can maximize the production. Or you can do something a little more intensive called polyculture. This is something we did in one of our beds last summer. This is one of our tomato beds, has those vertex gardener supply tomato cages around it. And you can see I have about four tomatoes in there. And of course, when you plant tomatoes, you're planting them about three feet apart. So there's all the space in between the plants when they're young. I had this old salad mix that had a mix of lettuces and spinach and mizuna and Swiss chard, beets, and even had some basil, I think in it. So I just took the seed and I just sprinkled it all around the tomatoes, all around them. And this is what it looked like a month later. And you could see we have all these greens that we've been harvesting and eating. The tomatoes don't look any worse for the wear. They're growing really strongly. And it's protecting the soil too. So it's kind of like a cover crop. So you don't have to weed anything, right? You're just going to eat what's growing between those tomatoes. What we ended up doing is that I left those plants, those salad plants in there, as those tomatoes were growing because eventually they got so big that they've shaded everything out. Some of them died off. Some of them flowered, which was a nice thing and brought more beneficial insects in. But the best part is I never had to weed that bed because I had all these other edible plants in there. This is called a polyculture. And there's lots of ways to do this. Another way is to match the foliage. Like I was talking about here's a bed of ours that had celery in the foreground and that tall, ferny stuff is all dill. So I let some dill kind of self sow in there. Actually there's some fennel in there too. And you can see those, the ferny foliage kind of hangs above the celery. Doesn't really shade it, but you don't have that competition there. The celery grows well. The dill grows well. So it's the idea of mixing and matching plants together that have complementary growth characteristics. Another way of approaching this is to share the nutrients. So this is all about where the roots are going. So for example, that kale plant and that plant on the right, which is Brussels sprouts, they have pretty deep extensive root systems. If you plant them next to a Swiss chard or a Kohlrabi, that little red knobby thing in the bottom there, that's a Kohlrabi. Those have shallower roots. So what happens is that the deep roots mine the minerals, mine all the nutrients deeper in the soil. When I say deep, I mean, you know, eight inches, 10 inches. Whereas a Swiss chard and a Kohlrabi might only go down four inches or so into the soil. You can do this with a variety of plants so that they're not competing with each other. You can do it in a way also so that they're sharing nutrients. So this is an example from our garden last year. We had our peas growing nicely on that trellis and peas, of course, are a legume and they fix nitrogen. And I used to think that you have to let the plant go to maturity and die before that nitrogen is released in the soil. Now the research is showing that in fact it's released into the soil even as the peas are growing. So that makes it an opportunity for any kind of leafy green plant that you're growing around that to harvest that nitrogen in the soil and grow well, just like that red lettuce that we're growing right next to those peas. So that idea of sharing those nutrients back and forth, you know, I did something similar to this with beans and onions. I forgot to take a picture of it of course. You get busy in the summer. So I had bush beans and in between the two rows of bush beans, I put a whole crop of onions, or I think I did it with leeks one year too. And the idea is that you have that ferny foliage, you know, the leek or the onion foliage kind of above the beans, not really shading that. The beans are shading the soil, keeping the soil nice and moist, and they're fixing nitrogen so that those onions and those leeks will be taking up the nutrients. The other thing I just thought about of course is the roots are at different levels. Beans have a deeper root than an onion would. So that kind of intercropping allows you to plant more plants in a smaller space and you can plant them close together and they don't out-compete each other. Last year I did it with edamame and fall greens. So I had rows of edamame, edible soybeans, green soybeans, and in between that I put transplants of kale. Now for the first month or so, the edamame of course grew big and the kale got a little shaded and I had to push them apart a little bit. I think I might space them a little separate, a little more wider apart next time. But the kale survived and it did okay. But by the time I chopped down all that edamame and just let the kale come up, well the kale just took over. So I had the edamame that we ate in August. After I took that down a week or so later you saw the kale just explode with the cooler weather of September and we had that all fall. So the idea of mixing and matching plants and again that's a legume and a green that works really well. So that sharing of nutrients is a nice thing to keep in mind. It also happens when you use cover crops on plants like tomatoes and egg plants. So this is a study in California where they grew cow peas, you know black eyed peas, things of that nature. They grow here. They grow very well here actually. But you can do this with other plants. You can do this with beans probably too. They planted those around the tomatoes around the egg plants which are heavy nitrogen feeders and they saw a dramatic difference in the growth of those tomatoes and egg plants. They grew much better, grew much stronger. They did it with peppers I think too. So the idea behind this is that you're fixing that nitrogen for the plants that are next to it and they still got the cow peas because the peas of course mature later into the fall. So sharing spaces and sharing nutrients are really great. How about controlling insect pests? That's really what we think about when we think about companion planting and planting different ones together. There's a lot of misconceptions. So for example, the marigold misconception. I should write a book on that. Marigold misconceptions. Because a lot of people think and they always ask me, can I plant marigolds next to my, you name it, tomatoes, peppers, whatever it is to keep the insects away? And the answer is no. You can plant them and they're going to look beautiful and there'll be a nice piece in your ecological garden but they're not necessarily going to keep insects away. In fact, the only thing that they found that marigolds will do is that their roots will exude a substance that will inhibit nematodes from growing. We don't really have to deal with nematodes where we live. So it's really not that beneficial. I still grow them. I still put them in our garden. They're beautiful. They attract beneficials but they're not going to be taking care of insects in there. But there are combinations that do work. I want to share those with you now. So the companion planting methods are not just about planting one flower to repel an insect. There's lots of ways to do it. You can do companion planting methods where you're trapping with other plants. So you can plant something that is really attractive to a certain insect more so than the other plant you're planting. So they go there instead, right? I'll talk about that in detail. Luring pests. You can lure pests in so they get trapped, like I was just saying, or you can lure them away from your garden with other kinds of plants. Masking plants versus repelling insects. So we mostly think of flowers or companion plants as something that's going to repel an insect that's coming in. But really how it mostly works is it's going to mask the scent of the plant that they're looking for. So there's been a number of research studies about ways that these plants can mask the scent of another plant so that when a fly is coming over or a butterfly, they can't sense it. They can't basically smell it even though it's not the more of a pheromone thing. But they can't really sense where that plant is so they don't find the broccoli plant. They don't find the potato plant. So it's really about masking the scent more than repelling the insect. So with trap crops, let's talk a little bit about this. So the idea about trap crops is that, again, you're planting something that's more desirable than the other plant you have. And a great example of this would be something like squash. So you can plant certain varieties of squash on the outside perimeter of your garden that are going to attract squash bugs and squash vine borers because they really love that variety. And the ones you have in the middle of your garden, they may not even find or even bother with. So you will be planting it on kind of the edge. Another way to do trap crops, depending on the insect, is planting them really side by side. You know, you can plant some trap crops right in a row right next to the other crop. And because that insect doesn't really spread very far, they'll stay on that trap crop. The key thing with trap crops though is timing and size. So you want to make sure that your trap crop is there growing and is attractive, all dressed up, ready to go out the town, at the right size before your desirable crop. Because if you put them in at the same time, and they're both growing at the same rate, then they're probably going to go to your plant as well as the trap crop. So you want to have the trap crop in a little bit earlier. And it's a push-pull thing, like I was mentioning about luring plants in or luring pests away. So some examples of them, and I'll go through these in a little more detail. Squash bugs and vine borers on squashes, I mentioned that, flea beetles, everyone knows flea beetles, with radishes and bok choy as a trap crop, and pepper maggots. And I'm so sure people have too many problems with those, but we'll talk a little bit about them for with hot and sweet peppers. So squash bugs and squash borers, vine borers, one type of squash that they really like, and they will go after time and time again, is blue-hubbered squash. This makes an excellent trap crop. If you have problems with squash bugs and squash vine borers on your butternut squash, acorn squash, even on your zucchini squash and your summer squashes, you know, yellow summer squashes, for example. If you put in some blue-hubbered squash plants, again, you want to make sure they're in there a good week or so before your other plants, so that they're up and growing, they're in a more mature stage, you put them on the perimeter of your garden. Don't put them right next to your other plants, because they'll move around. Put them on the perimeter, you'll see that they'll feast on that. They will go there. Then you have a choice. You know, once you see that the plants are getting decimated by squash bugs or squash vine borers, you can just pull that plant right out and then, you know, put it in a black plastic bag, sit it on a tarmac or somewhere where it's going to get really hot and it'll kill not only the plant but all the bugs that are in it too. So that would be one way to do it. Some people just leave them there, let them do their whole life cycle there. It's probably not a great idea, because then they will overwinter and you'll have even more of them next year. But it's a great way to pull them away from the garden. Now, flea beetles are a little bit different. Flea beetles, you probably will see these if you put out seedlings of broccoli or bok choy or if you have little radishes germinating already, they're probably already out there munching on them. There's those little black beetles that hop around. That's why they call them flea beetles. They love a lot of those plants. They love anything in that broccoli family, but they also love like egg plants. I've seen them on pepper plants. I've seen them on flowers, even my marigold got decimated one year by flea beetles. They'll go after a whole bunch of plants, but they really like radishes and bok choy. And there was a study that they did, I believe it was in Iowa, where they planted rows of these. So they had rows of like broccoli plants, which they like or egg plants. And then in between, they planted this trap crop row of bok choy and radishes. And again, they put them in early so that the bok choy and radishes were up and growing before the other plants. And what they found is that the flea beetles flocked there and, excuse me, decimated those plants, but by the time those other plants that they wanted to have come up came up, they were fine because the flea beetles were kind of right focused on the bok choy and the radishes. What you can do in that situation, if you're really nervous about it, because they're so close, is you can get some diatomaceous earth. And this way you're just going to be spraying the diatomaceous earth just on the bok choys and the radishes and not on everything around there. And that way you'll kill the flea beetles that way. So flea beetles are a little bit different because they don't move around like a squash bug wheel or a Colorado potato beetle wheel. And so you can trap them really close to the plants that you're trying to grow. And then the pepper maggots is another one that's out there. So if you have problems with pepper maggots, pepper maggots on a sweet pepper will basically look like somebody drilled a hole in the fruit. And then inside there may be a little worm that's in there. You'll see them definitely towards the end of the season. Grow some hot peppers. Grow hot peppers right next to your sweet peppers. So we get so regimented with how we plant our vegetables and flowers. We put all the peppers here. We put all the tomatoes there. We put the hot peppers here. We put the sweet peppers there. Mix and match them because they're going to help each other. In this case, the pepper maggot is repelled or is actually the pepper maggot tries to come in and go after the hot peppers. They don't like it so they just kind of leave the area and they don't bother your sweet peppers. They did this study in Connecticut and it showed that they had less problems with pepper maggots when they integrated this hot pepper with the sweet pepper. So another way that this works as far as controlling insects is masking the smell, which prevents egg laying. It's not so much masking the smell for the adults that they're not going to smell them. Or once they have the larvae feeding on them, they won't stop eating. But it stops the pest from laying eggs. And that's really kind of an important thing. And one of the best examples of this, which a lot of people are excited about, this was an Iowa State study, is squash bugs on zucchini. So you probably have seen squash bugs not only on zucchini, but on, I know that was the study they did was on zucchini. But I'm assuming it's going to work just as well on summer squash, on melons, on winter squash. They planted a bunch of trailing nasturtiums around those plants. And what they found is that the smell on nasturtiums, nasturtiums have a smell. We know that. They're edible flowers too. They have a taste and a smell. The smell of those nasturtiums confused the squash bugs. So when they were trying to find the squash plants to lay their eggs, they wouldn't find them. They found they had far fewer squash bug eggs and squash bug bugs on the zucchini if they grew the nasturtiums in there. Now a caveat, of course, with this is that you again have to have the nasturtiums established earlier before your squash plants are growing. So you might want to delay your squash planting a little bit. And also it's got to be in an area of garden where you haven't had a lot of squash bugs. If you put it in a place that's been infested with squash bugs and you haven't cleaned it up well, they're going to still be there regardless of the nasturtiums. But this is an exciting thing. I think I'm going to try in our garden this year, just planting a bunch of nasturtiums around the squash and see if we can kind of delay the squash bug infestation. Another one we always see now, this type of this year, in the mid-summer, mid-to-late summer, you know, used to be we rarely had a lot of tomato hornworms. But I think with climate change, some of these more exotic pests are becoming more regular in our gardens. So the tomato hornworm, of course, will come in overnight, will decimate the tops of plants. And what they found in one research study is that by growing basil plants around your tomatoes, so we're talking tall basil, like the Genevieve say basil, planting, you know, four or five plants around, basil plants around each tomato plant, letting them grow up, giving them enough space, of course, especially if you're growing big tomatoes, you're going to have to train those tomatoes a bit so they don't get too big and floppy because they'll just shade out the basil. But letting them grow up in there, they have again an odor, a pheromone, a scent, that the tomato hornworm adult moth that's going to come in and try to lay its eggs gets confused, can't find the tomato. So in this study, they've had far fewer problems with tomato hornworms just by planting basil around their tomato plants. So there's a number of different examples coming out of that plant partners book that I mentioned earlier, this idea of masking the scent, thrips, which is probably something most people don't even realize they have on tomatoes and in basil. That tomato-basal combination works really well to repel thrips, too. Colorado potato beetle, if you can grow tansy or cat mint around your potato plants, they do not like the smell of those. You know, tansy actually is a good one to keep ants out of your house. If you have some tansy plants in your garden, you cut the foliage of them and just lay that around areas in your house where you have ants. I did that one years ago in our house that was loaded with ants and repel them. Within a day, they're all gone. It just doesn't like the smell. So the same thing is happening with the Colorado potato beetle adult. As it comes in looking for the potato plants or looking for an eggplant, they love eggplant, too. If it has that tansy smell or a cat mint plant next to it, that's going to repel them so they don't lay their eggs there. Now, of course, this leads to a question you might be thinking about. So Colorado potato beetles are on potato plants that you dig up at the end of the season. Tansy and cat mint are perennials. So how do you do that? And you have to be kind of clever about it. You know, you might have rows of tansy or cat mint, and then in between the rows is where you put the potatoes, then you carefully dig up the potatoes in the fall, not bothering those perennials. You have to be a little more careful with it, experiment a little bit to see if it works. If you have a bunch of cabbage worms, any of the thyme, dill, chamomile, any of those really aromatic types of herbs, the cabbage worm butterfly doesn't like the smell of those. So having those growing around your broccoli, your kale, your Brussels sprouts, your cauliflower, your cabbage, anything in that family, these might help repel those insects so they don't lay as many eggs again because of the scent. So you're also trying to lure these beneficials in. We talked about pushing away the bad guys or driving them towards a trap crop, but how about luring in beneficials? Well, there's been some studies for this as well. So aphids, which are a big problem on lots of different plants. If you can grow some sweetalism, some dill or some fennel around your plants, you're going to have less problems with aphids. So here they did it around some parsley. You know, one of my favorites is letting some fennel grow up. That's the fennel flower, the yellow one there. The fennel is the bulb fennel. And I always grow extras of it so that when it grows up, I let some of those go to seed like this to flower. And they attract a whole host of beneficial insects. A lot of those will attack things like aphids because that's one of their foods. And it'll clean up your garden a little bit. With Colorado potato beetle, if you can have dill and cilantro around them, that again is another one, letting them flower. That's the key, especially with the cilantro and dill. Letting them flower, that's going to attract the different kinds of flies, different kinds of insects that will parasitize these larval stage of the Colorado potato beetle. So it's going to reduce it. The whole thing with this whole companion planting and ecological gardening is that we're not going to eliminate things 100%. That's not natural. That's not what happens in nature. We shouldn't expect that in our garden. But we are going to reduce the damage to a place where it won't be as bothersome and it certainly won't be cutting back on production. So having dill and cilantro in the garden or some dill flowering is a good way to attract beneficials for the Colorado potato beetles. And for general caterpillars in general, carrot and mint family plants. So carrots are like, well, certainly carrots and parsnips and queen ants, lace, aminages is another one. Anything that has that umbil kind of shape, great plants, I was mentioning the fennel and the dills, great plants to attract beneficials. And anything in the mint family. So even the salvias, agastaches, any kinds of mints, anything in that family of plants, we have salvias growing in our garden now. They're going to mimic, not mimic, but they're going to cover the scent of those caterpillars, those caterpillars as they come in to attack your plants. And they'll kind of keep going, moving on. So it looks like something froze on my computer. There we go. To try to keep those caterpillars from feeding on your plants. So we want to preserve these beneficials as much as we can. And another cool thing that was in that book that was very exciting are beetle banks. This is something you may not have ever heard of. Beetle banks are literally a little bit of raised bed where you're growing ornamental grasses that's going to provide perfect habitat for ground beetles. And why do we want to have ground beetles, those black beetles in our garden, because they feast on everything from slugs to caterpillars to larvales of a whole host of different kinds of insects. So how you create a beetle bank is simply you raise up the soil in your garden, maybe in the center or close to where a lot of plants are growing. It could be an 18 inch diameter circle. It doesn't have to be very big. Excuse me, 18 inches high, about a three to four foot wide circle. So it does have to be big. It has to be big enough that you can grow three or four big bunching ornamental grasses. So things like blue stem grass or switch grass. You want to get the native grasses for this. So you have this three to four foot diameter circle that's raised up about 18 inches. You put four or five plants in there and then you just let them grow. That's all you have to do. The grasses are very attractive to ground beetles, especially the root systems. So they will move in and as they move in, of course, they're going to be wanting to eat. So they will start feeding on all those slugs and other plants that you have in that garden. It's kind of a cool idea. And it's an attractive one because you have these beautiful ornamental grasses in the middle of your garden. In the fall or in the spring, I guess you would do it. You would just cut down those grasses, leave the stalks there as a nice shelter area for those ground beetles, and just let it grow up again. So kind of a fun way to preserve the beneficials. Growing low growing perennials and annuals, these are hiding places for those flies and those bees and those other kinds of insects that might be feasting on those problem pests that you have in the garden. So everything from creeping flocks to calibracoas to mints to thyme to oregano, all kinds of different creeping plants. Having those integrated into your garden is really key because those are hiding places for beneficial insects. And in the other extreme, having a hedgerow, having some evergreens around, some cedar trees or just an informal hedgerow, some shrubs is a good place for a lot of these flies to kind of hang out as they're looking for something to eat. They need a hiding place. They need a place to hang out. So that's another nice thing to integrate into your garden. And of course, with a lot of these perennials, you don't want to be so quick into cutting them down in the spring. You want to leave them there until we've had at least a good four or five days in the 50 degree range. That's when the beneficial insects will kind of wake up and they'll move out and then you can clean up your garden at that point. Don't be cleaning it up in the fall or late winter, wait a little while. It might be messy, but it's going to be good for the beneficial insects. So all of this is there to show that you can have an ecologically sound and a productive garden by integrating different kinds of plants in there and integrating some strategies and using a little knowledge, using a little of your smarts as far as what plants can grow well together, sharing nutrients and sharing space. So thank you very much. I really appreciate you coming out and learning a little bit about companion planting. And of course, we're here every month, so please join us again.