About Veg Bed Planner
Veg Bed Planner is a free companion-planting reference. For every pair of crops it shows what garden charts say, what trials and research papers found, and the source behind each answer.
Why it exists
Companion-planting charts are everywhere, and they mostly agree with each other. That agreement is easy to mistake for evidence. Of the 981 chart entries we collected, 485 cite no source at all. We wanted to know which tips had ever been tested, so we went looking for the experiments.
The result is a reference that keeps tradition and evidence apart. A tip that only charts repeat is labelled as tradition. A tip that a field trial tested says so, with the trial. When the two disagree, the page says that too.
What is in the data
- 44 vegetables and kitchen herbs, the crops most people grow in a vegetable bed.
- Garden charts: 981 entries from Wikipedia's List of companion plants, each with the reference Wikipedia gives, or marked as uncited.
- Research papers: 319 findings from 212 papers found through Europe PMC. A language model read each title and abstract and recorded what the paper found. No person has reviewed these yet, so every finding links to its paper.
- Yield trials: 155 results from 95 published experiments, taken from the global intercropping dataset by Paut et al. (2024, doi:10.57745/HV33V1). They compare the harvest of two crops grown together with the same crops grown apart.
- Plant families: crops in the same botanical family often share pests and diseases, as Iowa State University Extension notes in Crop Rotation in the Vegetable Garden. We show this as a caution, not a verdict.
In total the site rests on 342 sources. Each plant and pair page lists the ones it uses.
What it cannot tell you
- A trial in one climate, soil and season does not guarantee the same result in your garden.
- The research layer is sorted automatically and can be wrong. If a finding does not match its paper, tell us and we will fix it.
- Many pairs were never tested. "No data yet" and "untested folklore" mean exactly that, not that the pair is safe or harmful.
Free, and staying that way
Every page on the site is free to read and needs no account. Reader comments need only a name.
Get in touch
Found a mistake, know a study we missed, or want to suggest a crop? Write to [email protected]. More addresses are on the contact page.