10 Plants That Keep Pest Out of Your Garden No Chemicals

People spray their gardens, kill the bugs, and the bugs come back anyway. Because the bugs know where your tomatoes are. Those sprays are temporary. They will be back. So today I'm sharing 10 of my favorite companion plants that I keep in the garden year round. If you are new here, I am Toni. We are in Central Florida, Zone 10A, and what we talk about here is how to grow your own food in your own backyard. What actually works in this heat, our soil, and our season. So I like to keep it very simple, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do so. We drop videos once a week, and I don't want you to miss out on what's coming up next. Really quick, for anybody who is new to this concept, companion planting is not just squeezing plants together because you ran out of room. That is not a strategy. That is just crowded gardening, or sometimes I call it chaotic gardening. Sometimes it works because you got lucky, but I'm here to make sure you're strategically planting the right plants next to each other, because every plant you put in has a job. Some are there to confuse pests. Some are there to call in the other bugs that eat bad bugs, and some are there to take the hit so everything else survives. So number one is basil. This one is best known for tomatoes. That is what everyone tell us to do. Plant basil, nail tomatoes. Does it actually work? If done right, it will. It works well when planted near peppers or eggplants and tomatoes. All three of those crops get targeted by the same pest, hornworms, aphids, and whiteflies. What basil does, it floods the area around those plants with a smell so strong, it scrambles the pest's ability to lock onto the target. The mistake that most people make is that you think planting two or three plants is really gonna help it, it's going to work. It's not. You have to surround the plant all four sides, planting them close in, dense enough that the smell is coming from every direction. Listen, I am not a fan of hornworms. I just don't like looking at them. I had those worms near my tomato plant one year, and because I was treating basil like decoration, it just ignored it. So the year I went heavy and surrounded the plant, the whole bed, I really saw a difference. So you wanna think of this less as an herb and more like a smell barrier you are building around your crops. So what are you growing right now that you cannot keep bugs off of? Drop it in the comments, and hopefully I covered in this video today, I'll help you make sure you protect those precious crops that you worked so hard for. So number two is garlic and onions. Garlic and onions, they work best tucked around your leafy greens and your root vegetables. Those crops are aphid magnets, and then the sulfur compound that garlic release into the air is what aphids cannot stand. What I love about them is they work from day one. I like to tuck them underneath the plant right near the base of the plant so it can continue to protect them throughout the growing season. But this season, because I tucked my garlic and my onions right near the base, I had no pest pressure. You want to get them close enough to the base of the plant so the smell is right there in the zone where the pests are landing. And that is why these beautiful collards, look at this, have not a single hole, not one. I don't want to jinx myself, but they're doing pretty good. It's hot, so they're looking kind of sad, but I got onions and garlic right nearby. And it's actually working for my greens here, my kale right in the back of it. So it works. So number three is mint. We already know that you want to keep them in pots. They can take over any raised bed or any ground cover. If you don't mind that, then by all means, do what you please. But I say, keep them in pots. So what I really want to talk about is where to put it and what it actually does. Mint is one of the best things you can station right next to fruit trees. A strong smell that puts out confuses moths and aphids that goes after young citrus, your figs and your stone fruit. So those pests navigate by smell and the mint scrambles the signal completely. So I like to put the pots around the base of my citrus and right against any of my figs and any of my peach trees because you can really see the difference when you add a ton of mint around the base of the tree. Again, in pots. Number four is rosemary. This one is particularly good for beans and brassicas. Two crops that takes a lot of beetle damage. The strong woody smell rosemary puts out is deeply offensive to bean beetles and cabbage moths. And in Florida, it has the added benefit of being one of the few herbs that actually thrives in the summer heat. So you want to plant it at the edge of your bean bed or directly besides your brassica row and let it get established. This plant, you want to give it a full season to get a size up. Once rosemary is established, it covers a lot of ground with this smell. So you want to position it on the side of the bed where your dominant wind comes from so the scent can move throughout your whole garden area or bed. Number five is chives. These do their best work around peppers, your carrots, your roses, and any really ornamentals. Aphids on peppers are a particular problem because they spread fast and they'll stunt the whole plant before you even realize what is happening. Chives create a scent barrier around the base of the pepper plant that aphids do not want to cross. So around your carrots, they help deter carrot flies. Plant them close in around the base of whatever you're protecting, not off to the side, right at the base. They are small enough to tuck in without crowding anything out and let them flower because most people cut the flower off thinking they're keeping things tidy or keeping it from seeds, but the blooms are what actually pull in beneficial insects. Let them go and know your chives are repelling pests and calling in reinforcements at the same time. Number six is dill. Most people only think of it as something you threw in a pickle jar. What it is actually doing in your garden is attracting parasitic wasps, these tiny ones whose entire life mission is hunting caterpillars and hornworms. They find the pest, lay their eggs inside it, and that is the end of that pest. Dill also brings in lacewings and hoverflies, which eats aphids. So one plant is pulling in multiple hunters. So you wanna position your dill near your tomatoes, your peppers, your brassicas. Those are the crops that get hit hardest by pests that these beneficial insects are hunting. So let it go tall, wild, and leave it alone. It's going to help your garden, trust me. Number seven is zinnias. Zinnias is one of my favorites because I don't replant them each season. They reseed very easy, and every season they come back without you having to plant more seeds. So just know, if you're gonna put them down or wherever, you're gonna get a nice surprise next year. So these are your landing pads for every beneficial insect and bird that passes through your yard. Ladybugs, parasitic wasps, and birds that eat caterpillars are all drawn to zinnias. And once they land, they start patrolling the surrounding areas. Have you ever seen a bird land in your yard and they go diving for things? They are looking for food. So you wanna invite those birds to your yard. They're gonna take care of your garden. They work especially well positioned near your tomatoes and squash, where caterpillars and beader pressure tends to be the highest. So keep them blooming continuously by spent flowers. That's basically any dead flowers. You just pop them off and they're gonna keep flowering for you. As long as there are fresh flowers opening, there is activity, and you will see all of the work from these flowers. So this is gonna be hard to hear. Not every marigold do the same thing. French marigolds, not African, are different. There is an enemy in your Florida soil. It's called root-knot nematode. These are microscopic worms that live underneath in our soil and attack your roots. The plant above ground looks like it is struggling. You have no idea why. It's yellowing, it's wilting in the morning, it's not producing, and the whole problem is underground where you cannot see it. French marigolds release a chemical in their roots called thiophene, and it's toxic to nematodes. So what you wanna do is plant them throughout your vegetable garden, your vegetable bed, not just around the border. So you want those roots working in the actual soil. So work them in between your tomatoes, your peppers, and eggplant especially. One thing most people do not know, this builds over a full season. You plant them, leave them in the ground at the end of the season, and till them under so the roots keep breaking down in the soil. And every season you do this, the nematode pressure will go down. So let me know if you knew root-knot nematodes were even a thing before this video. Put it in the comments and say yes or no. I love to know. Number nine is borage. This one pulls double duty, and most people only know about one of the jobs. The flower brings in bees. That means for a better pollination of your tomatoes, your peppers, your squash, your cucumbers, any of your flowering fruits. So more fruit sets, they're bigger harvests, and you wanna plant them alongside those crops. So the bees working the borage flowers are already in a zone and moving across your vegetables naturally. The second job is the leaves. Borage leaves are covered in stiff hairs that are uncomfortable for home worms to crawl across. Those worms navigate by feel. So when you plant borage on the side of your tomato beds where pests are most likely to approach, it becomes one more obstacle they have to get through before they can reach your plants. So it is not a wall, it is a layer. So it's just an extra layer of protection. All right, we made it to number 10, but we have one bonus, so you wanna stick around for that. Number 10 is nasturtiums. This one works as a trap crop, meaning you are planting it specifically to attract pests away from everything else. Aphids are obsessed with nasturtiums more than anything else I grow. More than kale, more than peppers, more than anything. You wanna plant them on the outer edge of your garden away from your main crop and let the aphids find them. When the plant is fully loaded, that is when you pull it and throw it away. So you use this as a decoy so everything else stays clean. So position them as a border around most of your vulnerable crops, leafy greens, your brassica, your young seedlings. They draw the pressure away from the center of the garden and to the outer edge where you can actually manage it. So in Florida, nasturtiums go in the ground in fall or late winter. They do not tolerate heat very well, so you wanna just keep this in mind. When the season comes up, I plant mines around October and they carry all the way through spring. So get the timing right and they will take a bullet for everything else in your garden. So the bonus is radish. And this one surprises most people every time because radish is one of the best trap crops you can grow for flea beetles. Those tiny little jumping beetles that put little holes all through your eggplants and your tomato seedlings and your brassica leaves. Flea beetles will go straight for radish before they touch anything else. You plant radish as a border around those crops and let it take the hit. When radish leaves are loaded with the flea beetle damage, you pull them and toss them and replant more radish. So you are cycling out the trap while your main crop stays clean. Radish also does something on the ground. The roots break up compact soil as they grow. So what that means is it helps the roots or whatever it is planted nearby go deeper and access water and nutrients. So it is protecting above ground and improving conditions below ground at the same time. So plant them close to outer edges of the bed of eggplants, brassicas, or young tomato transplants. They grow fast, they sacrifice themselves, and they earn their spots the whole time they are in the ground. These are one of the most beginner-friendly plants. If you just want to win, radish will help you feel like you are a true gardener. I promise you. This one is good. And it takes about what? It takes them only like 22 days to harvest. So it's a good one overall to have. If you don't eat radish, again, just plant them to protect your garden. All right, now that was 10. These 10 plants are just a few of the ways you can protect your garden and saving you tons of money from spraying. There is a whole world of companion plant combinations beyond what I covered today. I put together a free guide on my website that walks you through a lot more of it, specifically pairing what to plant together and what to keep apart. All laid out for you. So go to rootedinjays.com and grab it. It's free and it will change how you plan and plant in your garden. So if this video has helped you today, please share it with someone who is thinking about starting a garden or another gardener. That way we're saving money and protecting our harvest all together. So again, thanks for subscribing. Thanks for watching. Until next time. Bye.