Companion Planting, by Margaret Roberts

Companion Planting, by Margaret Roberts. Briza Publications. Pretoria, South Africa 2007. ISBN 9781875093489 / ISBN 978-1-875093-48-9

How it looks inside: Companion Planting by Margaret Roberts.

Companion Planting, by Margaret Roberts. Two ordinary words with so much power and so much passion in them, so much to think about, so much to do about the concept and so much to gain from it.

We should be using them every day to everyone, to make, without doubt, our little bit of world a better place! It's time for action. We cannot delay any longer. Linked to these two words is another even more powerful word - organic. If you grow companion plants you will not need harmful sprays, dangerous chemical poisons or chemical fertilisers. With catch crops and green manure crops, you'll be growing and making your own natural composts and fertilisers that will be so inexpensive and fascinating to put in place, you'll be farming or gardening organically! In my full and busy long life I have been passionate about a few things (besides my children and grandchildren!). Plants are one of my greatest interests, but my passion is growing plants that have a purpose, a use, to perfection. The second, all-absorbing passion is never to use chemicals or sprays that could harm my other passions - health and the environment. I have practised these enduring passions for my whole life. My dream is to make it all exciting enough, interesting enough and inspiring enough to have everyone growing organic vegetables, vines and even flowers, and never using harmful sprays. I first learnt about companion planting from my grandmother and her sister, who lived at Gordon's Bay, when I was about seven years old. My sister and I spent several months of the year with them, as my father was in parliament for the session. Then we would return home to Pretoria for the rest of the year. We had "home schooling" for those months we spent in the Cape and I loved it! Among the things we were taught in the afternoons was to make vegetable and flower gardens in the terraces overlooking the sea. The winter rain watered our plantings, and we made charts and notes and pressed flowers to remember what plant enjoyed the proximity of another, and how we could let nasturtiums trail over the rocky walls to "catch" the aphids so that they did not eat the new cabbages and broccoli. We learned that slugs will creep under the grapefruit skin shells that we saved from breakfast. The next morning we could lift the shells up and crush several slugs. We also learned that if you made a blanket of oak leaves, no snails or slugs would come near the lettuces. So we circled the lettuce plantings with a thick mulch of oak leaves. We rubbed handfuls of the leaves from our tomato plants on the windowsills to chase the flies, and we went for long walks into the mountain to collect pelargonium sprigs, those beautiful Cape scented geraniums, to plant in our gardens so that we could crush them and rub them on our blankets and pillows to chase mosquitoes. One very lemony-scented one which I grow so far from the sea, I still use today. We planted radishes near cucumbers and around the peas, and ate radish sandwiches with homemade mayonnaise for tea every day - thick slices of homemade brown bread, so soft and moist we never got tired of that teatime break. In the evenings my grandmother sat in front of the fire knitting us socks (in fine white crochet cotton on four needles - I was so impressed!). Outside the southeaster howled. My great aunt told us stories of the allotment garden she had worked in in England, and how people were able to rent little pieces of land in a large communal garden so they could grow their salads, vegetables and flowers for the house. [...]

This is an excerpt from Companion Planting, by Margaret Roberts.

Title: Companion Planting
Author: Margaret Roberts
Publisher: Briza Publications
Pretoria, South Africa 2007
ISBN 9781875093489 / ISBN 978-1-875093-48-9
Softcover, 16 x 22 cm, 144 pages, throughout colour photos