Companion Plants for Peas
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Carrots love tomatoes but all veggies don’t grow well together. Companion planting is growing things that thrive together and help each other. Here are some companion plants for peas.
Peas are a great fall and spring plant. In Oklahoma, it’s too hot to grow them in summer and they can be susceptible to freezing. Sweet peas, English peas, snap peas, and snow peas all have similar needs and benefits.
Companion planting is the art of finding out what plants grow well together. Some plants put off chemicals that harm other plants, such as sunflowers. But more likely, they will share the same soil, nutrient, sun, and water needs. Some plants also release chemicals that encourage plants to grow faster and produce more.
Companion planting can also benefit when one plant repels the pests of another plant. Plants with a strong smell can help deter pests from coming to your peas. Certain plants can also improve the flavors of other plants they grow near.
And another great benefit of companion planting can be pollination. Planting certain plants together can encourage better and more thorough pollination of one or both types of plants. And not only can some plants draw pollinators to others, but they may also draw other beneficial insects that eat the pests from that plant.
Diversity in the garden helps stop pests and diseases in the garden.
Pea pods can grow from smaller plants or tall plants, but rows of peas have many pests such as Mexican bean beetles, colorado potato beetle, spider mites, and cabbage moths, as well as other uninvited guests that require pest control. Using your garden space to plant different plants that make good companion plants for other crops is a great way to have a productive garden. See what plants make the best companion plants for the vegetable garden and why it’s a good idea to plant them in close proximity to your garden beans.
In my personal experience, specific plants help my crops produce better. When you plant your plants in early spring, add some different types of plants to your pea crop for the mutual benefit of both and higher yields from your vegetable garden.
Best Companion Plants for Peas
Good friends to your main crop can be a good partner to deter real problems such as harmful insects, weed growth, and nutrition and water issues.
Peas grow well with aromatic herbs such as mint and cilantro. These strong scents will repel pests that otherwise love to destroy peas such as aphids. The strong scent of basil repels thrips which are an enemy of peas. Peas also do great with carrots, celery, and parsley. These are all in a similar family. And they are spring and fall plants.
What to plant with peas
Peas grow great with beans. Green beans and drying beans work well. Peas are a legumes so they have similar nutrient and water needs.
You can also plant peas with tomatoes. Nightshades include:
All of these plants have a strong smell and help repel pests from pea plants and make great companion plants for peas. Nightshades are heavy feeders and peas and other legumes have a nitrogen fixation benefit. The roots of these plants have nodules that help fix the nitrogen levels in the soil.
Peas will thrive with other summer plants too like corn and cucumber, which are heavy feeders. The peas will burn up in the heat but the nodules will still be in the soil when the plants die off if you leave the roots, then they can continue to feed the summer plants throughout summer.
Radishes and turnips are a few more great spring and fall plants that thrive with peas. They repel aphids from the peas while enjoying the nitrogen benefits that peas provide. In addition, pea roots grow super slow and turnips and radishes are super-fast growers, so peas don’t compete for their root space.
Pea companion plants
Another of the great companion plants for peas that I find kind of interesting is strawberries. They are perennial, but you could seed your peas in among them in fall or spring or both.
Leafy greens are good companions for peas such as lettuce and spinach as well as brassicas like:
- broccoli,
- cauliflower,
- cabbage,
- kohlrabi,
- brussels sprouts.
Nasturtiums are a great flower to plant with peas. They attract aphids which would much rather feed on the nasturtiums so they leave the peas alone to grow.
The symbiotic relationship of plants to one another is so interesting. I love studying about how they help or harm each other and what grows best together. There are plants that are harmful to grow together as well.
Never plant peas with onions, chives, leeks, scallions, walking onions, bunching onions, shallots or green onions. They don’t like each other at all and won’t thrive in the same area.
I like to interplant onions in many places along my garden because they repel a lot of pests, but I plant peas in a bed without them. Peas also don’t grow well with garlic, another allium plant.
In Oklahoma, zone 7, we plant peas in January or February and again in August or September for our fall crop. In Oklahoma the spring and fall are short, so you never know if you are going to get any peas. I usually have better luck in the preschool garden in spring.
They prefer fertile, well-drained soil. For more information on growing peas, click here. And for What to Do with Excess Snow Peas if you grow a ton of peas, check this out!
For more ideas on companion planting, check these out:
