Cucumbers and dill with garlic, onion and beets, everything for a crock of pickles from one bed.
Chosen for the kitchen. None of these plants is known to help another. They're harvested together for the pickling crock: cucumbers and dill with garlic and onion, and beets for a second jar. They share a bed because they share a recipe.
At least 1.5 m²16 ft². If your bed is smaller, the planner grays this plant team out, says why, and offers the nearest adaptation that fits. It never swaps in something else without telling you.
Nothing is left living in the bed over winter; the whole planting is re-established.
Rotation history belongs to the ground itself, so this is what the planner records about this patch after the plant team comes out.
The planner won’t plan around this claim. What is known instead is below.
What is known: Some plant teams rest on a real way one plant acts on another. A kitchen bundle says only that you'll want these things in the same bowl. Both are good ways to plant. Only the first has plants working on each other.
Evidence: settled without a trial (definition).
How it works: Soilborne inoculum and overwintering pest stages disperse across the bed. A plant team dominated by one family forecloses that ground for that family's rotation interval.
Evidence: checked against 2 sources in the research-based literature.
Rotate the whole bed the plant team occupied, including rows that family never grew in.
How it works: Bulbing fires when daylength crosses a cultivar's critical threshold (short ~10-12h, intermediate ~12-14h, long ~14-16h). A short-day cultivar grown too far from the equator crosses its low threshold early and bulbs prematurely on small plants, so bulbs stay small. A long-day cultivar grown too close to it never reaches its high threshold and fails to bulb. Changeover is around the 35th-38th parallel, north or south.
Evidence: checked against 2 sources in the research-based literature.
… onions will not form bulbs until daylength reaches the cultivar's critical threshold. Short-day onions bulb at approximately 10-12 hours of daylength ... Intermediate-day onions bulb at approximately 12-14 hours ... Long-day onions bulb at 14-16 hours of daylength.
Long day varieties are for northern growing areas (above the 35th latitude); short-day varieties are for southern. If short-day varieties are grown in our zone, they won't do well. They will not form bulbs of any decent size. And since the long day onions need more daylight, they will not do well
Choose long-day onions far from the equator and short-day near it; the planner picks the group from your plot's latitude.
