---
season: winter
section: who keeps good company
---

## good

- on paper now, set the tomatoes far from where they grew last summer, three years is the kindness they are owed
- beside each tomato spot, a place for basil and a place for marigold, plan it now while the lines are clean
- mark out a bed for the three sisters, corn at the center, beans up the stalks, squash spreading low between them
- give the alliums a row of their own, the brassicas can sit beside them but the legumes must keep their distance
- pencil in borage along the south edge, every garden is better for the bees it asks to come
- group the heavy feeders together so the cover crop next fall has somewhere honest to do its work
- draw the asparagus a permanent home, with parsley and tomatoes near, that bed will feed you for twenty years

## bad

- on the same paper, draw a line between the onions and the peas, do not let them meet again this year
- do not pencil in tomatoes where the potatoes finished, the blight is patient and remembers the soil
- never two seasons of brassicas in the same square, the soil keeps a grudge and the cabbage worms keep an address
- fennel marked anywhere near another crop is a mistake, give it a corner of its own or leave it off the map
- do not draw the strawberries next to the cabbages, the strawberries will quietly fail and you will not know why
- a walnut tree casts more than shade, no garden bed should sit inside its drip line at all