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.
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.”