The Easy-To-Grow Garden Vegetable Cauliflower Loves Growing With

When planning the next crop for your vegetable garden, you want to ensure that you make the best use of the space you have available. You can do this easily by intercropping plants that grow well together. This is collectively known as companion planting and is a time-honored tradition that gardeners have been following for centuries. Even though there's not a lot of scientific evidence to back this up, there are plenty of seasoned gardeners that will acknowledge the virtues of growing certain vegetables alongside other ones. Although cauliflower is one of the most difficult vegetables to grow in your garden, it is a lovely cool-season vegetable that demands a fair bit of space in your patch. Therefore, you want to plant it with a suitable companion that is more space-saving and happy to co-exist with your brassicas, as well as help them thrive. One of the best allies for your cauliflower plants is an easy-to-grow garden vegetable you'll love: beets.

Both cauliflowers and beets like similar conditions in the garden, and they don't tend to compete for water and nutrients because they have different root systems. You'll also find that both cauliflowers and beets can take anywhere from 60 to 80 days to reach maturity, which means you can leave them undisturbed in the yard until they're ready to harvest. In the meantime though, you can cut a few of those lovely beet leaves and use them in a similar way to Swiss chard or spinach in your cooking.

Both cauliflowers and beets prefer a nice fertile, loamy soil and cooler weather to produce the best harvest. While cauliflowers need plenty of space above the ground, beets need very little, and are quite happy growing alongside the taller crops without too much fuss. Another benefit that beets provide is that their leaves are rich in magnesium. Cauliflowers need adequate amounts of this micro-nutrient to prevent buttoning, which is the growth of small, immature flower heads. You can even use surplus leaves or ones that have browned off as mulch around your caulies. As a side note, did you know that beets are the best vegetable to grow if you're a lazy gardener?

Even though cauliflowers are generally quite large plants, they have a shallower root system than beets, with their roots reaching down to a depth of around 18 to 24 inches. On the other hand, beets are generally deep-rooted even though the swollen part of the tap-root (which is the actual beet) sits quite close to the surface. The roots of this vegetable can travel down to a depth of 36 to 48 inches. This means that these two companions aren't likely to compete for water or nutrients because they can access what they need from different levels of the soil. Finally, to add even more diversity to your patch, there's a savory herb that makes a great companion plant for your vegetables such as cauliflowers that you might want to add as well.