About

GardenPairs started from a simple frustration: every companion-planting chart on the internet looks confident and almost none of them agree with each other. Search for what to plant next to tomatoes and you'll find five different lists, no citations, and no distinction between a relationship that has actually been studied and one that is simply repeated from gardener to gardener because it sounds plausible. We built this site to fix that specific problem, not to be one more chart.

What We Actually Do Differently

Every companion-pair page on this site names the mechanism first - nitrogen fixing, pest masking, trap cropping, allelopathy, root-depth complementarity, physical support, shade sharing, pollinator attraction, living mulch, or a genuine antagonist relationship like shared disease risk or nutrient competition - and then rates the evidence behind it as evidence-backed, traditional lore, or mixed. We would rather tell you honestly that a claim is folklore than dress it up as settled fact just because it is popular.

Who Writes This

Content is researched and written specifically for each crop and each pairing - real cultivation needs, real spacing and maturity windows, and a genuine explanation of why a pairing does or doesn't work, rather than a single template with the crop name swapped in. Frost and USDA zone data is sourced and dated on the Methodology page, and reviewed on an annual cadence, because that kind of climate data drifts and official zone maps are periodically revised.

The Tools Read the Same Data as the Pages

The Companion Pairing Checker, the Planting Calendar Generator, the Bed Layout Helper, and the Frost-Date Lookup all draw from one shared relationship dataset - the same facts that back the written pairing pages. That was a deliberate design choice: a tool telling you two crops are a good match while the written page next to it says something different would undermine the entire point of this site, so both are built to read from the same source of truth.

How We Make Money

The reference content, the zone guides, and all four tools are free and always will be. We offer a paid, personalized planting-plan document for gardeners who want a done-for-you season plan instead of assembling one from the free tools themselves, and we welcome direct support from readers who find the site useful. Neither changes what gets published or how a pairing gets rated - the evidence rating on a pairing page is never adjusted to favor a product we sell.

If you grow vegetables and something in your garden is already struggling, our sister site WhyMyPlant focuses specifically on diagnosing plant problems after the fact, which is a natural next stop once you've got something planted using the guides here.

What "Done" Means Here

We would rather ship fewer crop and pairing pages that are genuinely researched than a large number that are thin or templated. A page only goes live once it's been written specifically for that crop or that pair - not assembled from a reusable sentence frame with the name swapped in - which is why some crops and pairings you'd expect to find here are still being added rather than already live, and why a crop or pairing with no page yet simply isn't linked from its hub, rather than shipping as an empty placeholder.