Plant Lots of Herbs & Leafy Greens with Your Carrots
We've all seen raised beds filled with nothing but row after row of carrots. I get it—I love growing carrots as much as the next gardener. But what I wouldn't love would be for something to happen to that crop and then have nothing to show for my efforts.
I prefer to grow herbs and fast-growing salad greens with my carrots. That way, I can harvest some delicious leaves while I'm waiting for my carrots to grow (because those roots always take longer to form than I anticipated). It's also a great idea to plant some flowers with your carrots to attract lots of beneficial insects to your space.
Planting this way is basically creating a little ecosystem inside your garden. The idea of companion planting is to strategically plant things that grow in the same season and work together in terms of their size and duration.These plants then support each other and create a healthier environment inside of the garden space.
Let's look at the best companion plants for carrots.
How Carrots Grow Best
Before making your garden planting plan, take a moment to study up on the temperature, sunlight, watering, and nutrient preferences of carrots. That way, you can match these delicious roots with companions that share similar preferences.
CARROT TEMPERATURE PREFERENCE
Carrots love cool weather (temps between 45°F and 75°F) and don't mind some frost. In fact, their taproots actually sweeten a bit with a light freeze. This is why you'll often see carrots growing alongside other frost-tolerant and frost-resistant plants like cabbage, kale, and Swiss chard before the last frost date has passed in the spring and long after the first frost date of fall.
CARROT SUNLIGHT NEEDS
Carrots need about six hours of direct sunlight a day for good root formation under the soil. Definitely keep this in mind when you're planning out your garden beds. Carrots are overall smaller plants whose greens don’t grow very tall above the ground. So you want to avoid growing your carrots in the shade of taller plants like peppers or kale. You might still get some growth from your shaded carrot plants, but that growth will mostly be above the soil instead of below, where we want it most.
CARROT NUTRIENT NEEDS
For best results, avoid adding nitrogen-heavy fertilizers to the spots in your garden where you're growing carrots. Too much nitrogen means you'll end up with lots of green carrot tops and very small roots. It's phosphorus and potassium added early in the carrot growing cycle that will encourage carrots to form thick roots.
CARROT WATERING PREFERENCES
Root crops need lots of water in the early stages. Carrots take their sweet time in germinating (sometimes up to two weeks), and during those days of waiting, you cannot allow the carrot seeds to dry out. If you've got leafy greens growing in the same bed, they won't mind all this watering one bit, which makes them ideal neighbors. Once the green carrot tops appear, you can cut back to giving your carrot bed one inch of water per week.
My Favorite Types of Plants to Grow with Carrots
To me, the very best time to grow in the garden is the cool season. Carrots are so easy to tend once they're planted and thinned out, and then you can also enjoy all these delicious herbs and leafy greens growing alongside them. Here are my favorite things to plant with carrots.
CARROTS AND HERBS
I like to plant carrots along the edges of my raised beds, next to low-growing perennial herbs that won't block sunlight. These herbs—sage, rosemary, oregano, thyme, and mint—have really strong smelling leaves (that's why we love them, right?) that can mask the scent of carrots from pests like carrot root flies, which use scent to locate their next meal.
My favorite herb to toss on roasted carrots is rosemary, so it's also great to have fresh rosemary leaves on hand when I harvest my carrots.
CARROTS AND LEAFY GREENS
I love growing carrots with leafy greens like lettuce, spinach, arugula, kale, cabbage, mustard greens, and Swiss chard. These plants all like shorter days, cooler temps, and plenty of moisture.
Small leafy greens like lettuce and spinach have complementary root systems with carrots, which allows you to use your growing space more efficiently. Basically, carrots grow mostly underground, while these leafy greens grow mostly above ground. That means their shallow roots won't get in the way of the carrot taproots, and their leafy canopy can help keep moisture in the soil and deter weeds.
Carrots are perfect for growing with frost-tolerant greens when it's too cold for most other veggies. You could have a carrot and spinach bed growing well before your last frost in the spring.
CARROTS AND FRUITING PLANTS
The best fruiting plant to grow in the same beds as carrots is peas, mostly because they have similar temperature preferences. Peas, like carrots, can be planted as soon as your soil is workable in the spring.
Other fruiting plants like tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers grow well with carrots, but they'll typically only share your garden beds while you're transitioning from the cool season to the warm season and vice versa.
CARROTS AND ALLIUMS
Alliums are my go-to companion plant group for pretty much anything you might want to grow in the garden, carrots included. I always recommend planting chives, garlic, onions, leeks, or shallots next to your carrots and leafy greens. The reason being, these members of the onion plant family have a strong scent that repels pests like aphids and carrot flies. Chives are also said to improve the flavor of carrots growing nearby. And chives have shallow little roots, so you don't have to worry about underground bulbs competing with carrot roots underground. When in doubt, add some chives to your garden.
CARROTS AND FLOWERS
Don't forget to add some flowers to each and every one of your garden beds to attract beneficial insects. Some of my favorite flowers that can handle cool temps are calendula, chamomile, and pansies. Once you've passed your last frost date in the spring, you can also add beautiful nasturtiums and marigolds to your carrot bed. Marigolds are well-known for their ability to repel a wide range of garden pests, including nematodes, aphids, and whiteflies.
What Would a Raised Bed Filled with Carrots and Good Companion Plants Look Like?
Carrots can take a while to germinate and grow, so I like to give them a large portion of a raised bed all to themselves or plant them along the outer edge.
The planting plan below for a 4' x 4' raised bed has violas and parsley in each corner, and then rows of carrots around the bed with some garlic mixed in for organic pest control. Six broccoli plants take up the middle of the bed. You could probably do two rounds of carrots around the outer portion of the bed while you're waiting on that broccoli to form a nice head.
Here's a planting plan that devotes most of the 4' x 4' raised bed to carrots. You still have some herbs and flowers so that you're not committing the sin of monocropping (having just one thing all to itself in a bed). But this will get you over 100 carrots from this one small garden bed.
Keep in mind that you don't have to plant all your rows of carrots at once. You can save some space and plant more carrot seeds every two to three weeks for a more continuous root harvest. You can pull carrots all season long if you plan it right. Just make sure to label the spaces where you've planted rows of carrots so that you don't forget and double-plant while you're waiting on the sprouts to pop up.
Can Carrots and Radishes Be Grown Together?
I remember reading that carrots and radishes grow well together when I first started gardening. The theory is that radishes germinate much faster than carrots. The radish greens will shade the soil and prevent it from drying out during the critical period when the delicate carrot seedlings are trying to push their way through to the surface. Then, by the time the carrot taproots need space to grow, the faster-growing radishes will already be ready to harvest.
I thought that made a lot of sense, but it did not work out accordingly in my own garden. The radish tops were so large that they shaded the carrots way too early in their growth. I did end up getting a great radish harvest, but the carrots, unfortunately, never recovered from their days living in the shadow of their radish companions.
Lesson learned. Now I plant each of them separately in their own bed or space them apart in the garden so the carrots don’t miss any of that sunlight they need for speedy growth.
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Can You Grow Carrots Near Tomatoes?
Carrots and tomatoes make okay bedmates as long as you keep two things in mind.
The first thing is to plant a buffer between your carrots and tomatoes. The roots of tomato plants can stunt the growth of the carrot taproot. Medium-size plants like mustard greens, collard greens, kale, and Swiss chard would make great buffers.
The second thing is that these plants prefer different temperature ranges. Carrots, again, like things nice and cool, while tomatoes like warm and sunny days. They'll usually only share the same space in the spring when you're waiting on your carrots to be ready for harvest and are planting out your tomato seedlings. And then again in the late summer or fall when your tomatoes are finishing up and you go ahead and sow some carrot seeds in preparation for dropping temps.
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Can Carrots and Celery Be Planted Together?
Here's the thing: carrots are the in same family as celery. That's the Apiaceae family, also called the carrot family. This family also includes dill, cilantro, and parsley (which, believe it or not, have a little carrot-like taproot). Some gardeners say it's a big no-no to plant these family members near each other. The problem is they can all attract the same pests, namely the carrot fly.
My take is to just make sure you have lots of other plants from other plant families around them.
Do Carrots and Potatoes Grow Well Together?
These gals don't make good companions. Even though potatoes are technically tubers, I lump them into the much broader root category when it comes to their nutritional needs. Like carrots, they'll need lots of phosphorus and potassium to form all the good stuff underground. That means they can compete for essential nutrients in the soil in a way that might affect one or the other.
I actually prefer to grow these two crops in completely different places. Carrots love the nice, loose soil in my raised beds, and potatoes are unfussy and grow great right in the ground. That way, I don't have to take up a lot of my raised bed space growing just a couple of potato plants.
Fill Your Garden with Leaves, Roots, and Fruit!
I hope this helps you fill your garden beds with lots of things that grow well with carrots. Growing root crops like carrots with your favorite herbs, leafy greens, fruiting plants, and flowers keeps your garden productive and interesting because there's always something to harvest and tend.
Thanks for being here and helping to make gardening ordinary!
