Companion Plants for Fruit Trees

Companion Plants for Fruit Trees fill ecological niches.

So, here you are with your new baby fruit tree, maybe you picked it up locally or received it in the mail. After all that winter planning, you picked out just the right spot so that it can grow into a beautiful fruiting specimen. Now, it’s finally time to plant!

You grab your shovel, maybe a pickaxe depending on where you live, a few soil amendments. Off to dig that mighty hole your new fruit tree will call home. With great care the soil is put back in the hole, gently you apply a thick organic mulch, water it in. Repeating the process until all your trees are in the ground.

But, when you stand back somehow it looks…rather disappointing. Just sticks with a few side branches sticking out of the Spring mud. You notice that 8-15 feet of barren ground between all those trees, it will take some years before the tree mature and their canopies fill in to fully soak up all that great sunlight. Surely, there must be some other way. Let’s fill up this empty space – companion plants for fruit trees to the rescue!

Which companion plants are the best has been hotly debated amongst gardeners for decades. There’s plenty of room to experiment. But, what is for sure is that good companion plants are the ones that are beautiful, ecology enhancing, soil building, pollinator attracting, drought tolerant, dynamic accumulating, pest predator attracting, and more. A list of beneficial plants could fill many a page, but we’ve come up with a list of our absolute favorites based on their ease of cultivating and their benefits to the young orchard.

Nitrogen Fixers

The first group of companions most home orchard and permaculture folks think of are the mighty nitrogen fixers. A special group of plants that are able to turn atmospheric soil nitrogen (N2) into a form of nitrogen that can be uptaken by plants (Ammonia – NH3 and Ammonium – NH4) through a symbiotic relationship that occurs in their roots with certain bacteria.

Many of the most known nitrogen fixers are in the Fabaceae or Pea Family. These associate with Rhizobia bacteria in root nodules. But, there are also many in other families, such as our native Red Alder, Garrya, Willow, Sea Buckthorn and Elaeagnus, or the Ceanothus genus that instead associate with Frankia and other bacteria to convert atmospheric nitrogen into a usable form. For our needs, it is one of the most useful adaptations in the plant kingdom . Prior to the chemical fertilizers, farmers and gardeners alike relied heavily on the nitrogen fixing powers of these plants. But instead of going down that rabbit hole, let’s list some of our favorite nitrogen fixers in the perennial garden…

• Baptisia australis, also known as Blue False Indigo, is like the Danny DeVito of perennial nitrogen fixers, growing only 3-4 feet in height but is incredibly deep rooted. This prairie native is so vigorous, more often than not, we have to cut the pot off the plant because it’s vigorous root system has made it impossible to get out of the pot otherwise! It is not the most multifunctional of nitrogen fixers but it can be used to make an indigo dye, bees love the flowers, and last season’s flower stocks and seed pods are beautiful in winter. Blue False Indigo deserves to be lifted from its benchwarmer status on the nitrogen fixers all star team to a full time starter.
• Lupines! Who doesn’t love Lupines? They hold the spring rain water droplets on their leaves like the precious jewels each drop truly is! Their large spikes of pea flower towers in mid-spring are a cause for pause and wonderment. Yeah, we love Lupines in all their various cultivated forms. Deep rooted, drought tolerant, and tolerating a wide range of soils, Lupines always deserve a place beneath your young fruit tree especially in drier climates.
• Ceanothus, also known as the California Lilac, is an impressive genus that comes in many forms from ground covers and tiny shrubs all the way up to a large shrubs, there is surely a Ceanothus variety out there that will fit the bill and it seems the nursery industry finds new varieties to introduce almost every year. This genus might be exclusively useful to all of us here on the West Coast as most are not hardy below USDA Zone 7 but there is not a flower more enticing in the entire Apiary Candy Shop than the Ceanothus flower. Its drought tolerance, compact evergreen foliage and variety of forms place it as a perennial starter on the Nitrogen Fixers All Star Team.
  • Vandenberg has dark green crinkled leaves and beautiful fragrant blue flowers in late spring and grows 3-5 feet tall by 4-6 feet wide
  • Julia Phelps Ceanothus has been one of the more popular Ceanothus for the past 50 years and continues to be one of our favorites!
  • Midnight Magic is the perfect Ceanothus for small spaces or a low growing hedge. Compact dark evergreen green leaves contrast beautifully with the fragrant blue flowers. Midnight Magic grows to only 3 feet high and spreads 5-6 feet.
  • Centennial Ceanothus  this ground cover is a multi-functional and extremely tough plant. Centennial Ceanothus explodes with blue flowers in late spring as hundreds of its tiny blue blossoms open up, much to the delight of bees that seem to cover every blossom. If that weren’t enough, Centennial is also a nitrogen-fixing and drought tolerant evergreen. A truly wonderful plant for a permaculture guild planting or as a companion plant to one of your young fruit trees.
• Sea Buckthorn! Yes, you can have your nitrogen fixer and eat it too. We have gone on and on about the abilities of sea buckthorn to heal degraded soils and grow in the most gravelly nutrient deficient of soils, but suffice to say Sea Buckthorn really is a mighty vigorous nitrogen fixer with incredibly nutrient dense fruit and leaves as well. Plant it between your fruit trees and reap a wonderful harvest of sea berries until the canopy closes in on them at which time you can cut them down and get that big old boost of nitrogen in the soil. Dig up the suckers and repeat on a new planting area!
• Goumi! The more humble and equally as handsome cousin of the sea berry in the Elaeagnaceae Family, Goumi is one of the more well behaved fruiting nitrogen fixers, can tolerate a wider range of sunlight conditions and has some of the most unique fruit you will ever taste. It tastes like it sounds, goumi-ish! The dormant twigs are a gilded and speckled Winter pleasure. In the early Summer, red fruit hanging from the shrub must have surely been placed their overnight like a hundred little ornaments hung by an army of fruit bearing elves and fairies.
• Autumn Olive is similar in some ways to goumi, but with a tarnished reputation on the east coast, Autumn Olive grows larger with a more slender leaf shape and produces smaller but equally tasty fruit. Amber is a personal favorite here at the nursery and is proof that gems do grow on trees…nitrogen fixing trees!
• Silverberry is the elegant evergreen matriarch of the whole Elaeagnaceae family, boasting evergreen, or rather ever-silver foliage year round. Silverberry is unique in that it flowers in October-November and ripens its fruit overwinter to be eaten in mid-Spring! How wild is that! Not as cold hardy as goumi, or autumn olive, but it makes a great hedge. Try alternating Pineapple Guava and Silverberry for the ultimate nitrogen fixing, fruit producing evergreen hedge!
• Crimson Clover– If all this perennial nitrogen fixing sounds like too much work or if you’re the type that can’t bear to cut down a plant in the name of ecological succession than perhaps the annual nitrogen fixers are more up your alley, Crimson Clover makes the top of the list for its ability to fix boatloads of nitrogen per acre and it’s incredibly ornamental flowers, and maybe most importantly how easy it is to manage. Unlike it’s cousin the Dutch White Clover that doesn’t know how to take a hint when it’s time for it to leave, Crimson Clover with gracefully bow out after its spring flower show if mown down before it sets seed. Or let it go to seed and repeat its beautiful dance next year. With anything in the Pea Family, try a Rhizobium inoculant boost to insure your young plants have their bacterial companions alongside them at the time of planting.

Dynamic Accumulator Companion Plants

What exactly is a dynamic accumulator? You can think of them as deep soil miners that send their vigorous deep root system far below the depth where most plants send their roots, bringing to the surface nutrients that have slipped down through the soil horizons and concentrating it in their leaves. Over time, these types of plants rejuvenate soil by pulling up more and more nutrients and creating humus around their root zone.

The most famous of these is Comfrey and has long been touted as the best plant choice for “chop and drop” mulching, where you simply chop its abundant foliage back a few times per year and use that as a nutrient rich, weed suppressing mulch. Comfrey also has many medicinal and therapeutic uses and is an incredibly multi-functional plant. It has gotten a bad rap for its ability to rapidly spread via seed, but the varieties we carry cannot produce seed and are much more manageable.

One such plant is the Bocking 14 Russian Comfrey which is a clumping variety which can only be spread if you till and spread the roots through the soil. For a more aesthetic garden look, consider the gold leafed Variegated Axminster’s Gold Comfrey. It looks like a soft leaved hosta, and though it is not as vigorous as the Bocking 14 Russian Comfrey, it still has all the same wonderful properties. If you wish to remove comfrey after your fruit trees are established a thick sheet mulch will easily do the trick and you can take great joy in knowing that your comfrey plant’s root mass will act as a deep soil compost for your fruit trees.

Chives and perennial onions are an often overlooked companion plant. They are not only easy to grow, but many are worthy additions to the kitchen. Carpets of these plants may confer some immune system benefits to surrounding plants. Their beautiful small flowers provide nectaries for many beneficial insects including tiny harmless parasitic wasps that hunt pest insects. Many onions often intermingle very well with other forbs planted in the understory.

Globe Thistles (Echinops ritro) and Green Globe Artichokes  and Purple Italian Artichokes are huge clumping plants that produces tons of biomass, habit for beetles, and are great insectaries – while pulling up nutrients from great depths with their huge taproots! All the power of soil building properties of thistles but with without the spines. Plant these giving them plenty of space to flop around.

Yarrow is our other most revered soil miner! This plant can be found growing in lawns and fields nearly all over the temperate world and the reason for this is that it loves growing in disturbed soils. Like a diligent soil repairman, yarrow sends its deep roots into even the toughest rocky soils. Many new cultivated forms have been selected for their graceful foliage and flower colors, so you can now customize your ecological plantings. Yarrow is also a beneficial insectary plant as well as a useful medicinal herb.

Time to Go Get Planting

This is a short coffee-fueled morning rambling of some of our favorite companion plants chosen for their multifunctionality, ease of cultivation, and beauty in the landscape, but many other species can fit the bill as a companion plant. Water needs for your site may increase but by planting a diverse array of ground covers, small shrubs, and herbaceous perennials you bring in all sorts of beneficials to your site which decreases weed pressure by filling up the empty spaces.

Go out and experiment, try all sorts of new plants between your fruit trees and other plantings. Plant up those edges and borders. If the hydrozones are managed correctly, drought tolerant and xeriscaping plants will thrive amongst your more water thirsty fruiting plants. Don’t be afraid to cut things out if they get overcrowded. Study nature and copy examples you see using analogous plants of your choosing. Try alley cropping with vegetables. Create different patterns, textures, and smells! And plant more Monkey Puzzle trees – they are long-term human companion plants. Your grandchildren will thank you!