Grower's Groundcover
SKU:
$4.20
$4.20 - $52.00
per item
We’ve spent 11 years formulating, testing, and refining this mix.
The original goal was to develop a regenerative understory for large plants like tomatoes, cannabis, and corn that enhances soil life, and protects the crop from leaf-eating and sap-sucking insects by
- Attracting beneficial insects like pirate bugs and lacewings that eat mites and thrips
- Attracting tiny parasitic wasps that kill aphids and caterpillars
- Repelling the ants that place aphids on crop plants
- Repelling or confusing other pests such as budworms that target by smell
- Providing a trap crop for leaf-rasping pests like cucumber beetles.
Then we realized there was another benefit: terpene enhancement. Plants interact with each other by sensing smells, pheromones, and other compounds in the air, then sending out their own chemical signals in reply. When we surrounded crop plants with fragrant (high-terpene) plants, they produced more of their own terpenes in response.
The plants in this mix had to meet these criteria:
- Annual habit: Nobody wants to pry out perennial roots that overwinter in the beds. Everything in this mix dies over the winter, leaving the bed ready to cultivate and replant in spring.
- Height: Low-growing plants are easily held to 12’ with minimal clipping.
- No tangles to trip you at harvest
- Strong, but pleasant fragrances–Honey, lemon, floral, and spicy scents
- Long bloom keeps beneficial insects on site all season
- Disease-resistant: The mix has not hosted powdery mildew, fusarium, or other diseases in any of the trial gardens. (Not recommended for areas prone to downy mildew)
- Non-weedy:: Doesn’t spread or persist by either seed or runners
- Not a mix of cheap, common seeds–We include rarer, more expensive varieties like exotic basils and Nemophila menzeisii, a native wildflower that attracts a wider range of predatory insects, and feeds native pollinators.
- White, yellow, and blue flowers that pollinators’ eyes see most easily.
Only a few left!