Thyme Companions

Thyme Companion Planting

(tips on growing thymes in your garden)

If you are a beekeeper or just wish to attract more honeybees to your garden, you should include growing thyme in your garden design plans. Thyme companion planting, along with attracting pollinators, will help a number of other garden favorites thrive.

Thyme Companion Plants.

Cabbage, eggplant, salad burnet, potatoes and strawberries will benefit when companion planted with thyme.

Lavender is also considered by some to be a great thyme companion plant. From my research, I think that planting lavender and thyme together does not truly offer any specific benefits. They do, however, like similar soil and water conditions. If not anything else, planting them together would make a pretty flower bed.

Thyme & Insects.

Thyme companion planting is credited with repelling cabbage worms, corn earworms, tomato hornworms and flea beetles. And, as has been mentioned, thyme makes a good companion plant because its flowers attract honeybees and beneficial predator insects.

Honey

Even the Ancient Greeks were aware of honeybees’ affection for thyme. They also believed that honey had a finer flavor when hives were placed near garden or wild thyme. One old English writer wrote, “Thyme, for the time it lastesth, yieldeth most and best honie and therefor in old time was accounted chief.”

Additional Thyme Information

(Thymus vulgaris, Linn.)

To learn more about growing thyme be sure to check out our thyme fact sheet.

Thyme has a long and interesting history including love potions, Biblical references and knights in shining armor. Learn more from our article on the History of Thyme.

Be sure to also check out the rest of our Companion Planting With Herbs Guide before laying out your garden to ensure maximum yields.

Companion Planting Guide

After reading Our Herb Garden’s thyme companion planting guide and any of our other herb-based companion planting guides, you might be interested in learning more. There is probably a library full of websites and books that discuss companion planting. Of all of the ones that I’ve researched in creating our guide, I think this book available on Amazon takes a most ingenious approach to the presentation of information.

The Mix & Match Guide to Companion Planting: An Easy, Organic Way to Deter Pests, Prevent Disease, Improve Flavor, and Increase Yields in Your Vegetable Garden is a cleverly designed book with a spiral binding that allows the reader to truly mix and match plants. Along with a great deal of information on gardening in general, Josie Jeffery takes the reader through planting different fruits, vegetables, flowers and of course herbs together to maximize outputs and provide insect control. Each page is split into thirds where each third can be independently turned. The concept is that you select the crop you would like to grow from the middle page. Then you page through the top and bottom sections and look for plants that are indicated as good companions. She uses a series of color codes to make the matching of companions easy.

It looks way cooler than I’m making it sound. Trust me. Take a peek on Amazon and you can see for yourself.