Plant Herbs, Garlic, & Root Crops with Your Swiss Chard

Swiss chard has long been one of my favorite plants to grow in my kitchen garden. It's super easy to grow, it looks gorgeous, and it doesn't suffer any major pest or disease issues. That being said, it wouldn't be a good idea to plant an entire bed with nothing but Swiss chard. That would be a pest's dream!

My gardening philosophy when it comes to pests is to play offense. In other words, prevent problems before they even arise. And that's what companion planting does. You plant strategically so that you're setting up a healthy growing space that can maintain itself without a bunch of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

So make sure to include some Swiss chard companion plants in your planting plan. Good companion plants for chard can attract beneficial insects, add extra nutrients to the soil, repel pests, and give your plants some shade on hot days.

Let's look at the best plants to grow with Swiss chard in your garden.

How Swiss Chard Grows Best

Good companion plants will not only increase the resiliency of your Swiss chard and your overall garden space, they'll also share similar growing preferences. Let's look first at Swiss chard's preferences.

SWISS CHARD TEMPERATURE PREFERENCE

Swiss chard loves cool weather (temps between 45°F and 75°F) and can handle a light freeze. In fact, the leaves actually taste a little sweeter after a touch of frost. You can put Swiss chard starts in your garden well before the last frost date has passed in the spring, as soon as your soil is workable.

Swiss chard is a biennial plant, so it doesn't have just one growing season. It actually wants to hang around for several seasons. If your plants are established and kept watered, they may be able to push through the heat of summer, though this is when they'll face the most pest pressure.

Chard plants will pick their production back up in the fall, and if you have mild winters, your plants could very well produce leaves throughout the coldest months.

SWISS CHARD SUNLIGHT NEEDS

Swiss chard only needs about 4 to 6 hours of sunlight a day to produce leaves. In warmer weather, these plants appreciate a little shade cast by larger fruiting plants.

SWISS CHARD WATERING PREFERENCES

Leafy greens like Swiss chard need to be watered consistently.

SWISS CHARD NUTRIENT NEEDS

The main nutrient to focus on when growing leafy greens is nitrogen to help them produce lots of leaves. You can give your chard plants nitrogen, plus other nutrients, by pushing some compost around their base every couple of months. I typically don't fertilize my Swiss chard plants beyond this compost, and they produce tons and tons of leaves for me.

SWISS CHARD SPACE REQUIREMENTS

You should give each Swiss chard plant a full square foot to spread out at the top. You can still plant lots of smaller things around the base of each chard. This is one way companion planting helps maximize space in your garden. Make sure to harvest the older, outer chard leaves frequently so that its neighbors have plenty of room to grow.

The 18 Best Swiss Chard Companion Plants

Here's a list of the 18 best plants to grow with your Swiss chard this cool season.

• Beans
• Cabbage
• Calendula
• Chamomile
• Chives
• Cilantro
• Dill
• Garlic
• Lavender
• Lettuce
• Marigolds
• Onions
• Oregano
• Peas
• Radishes
• Rosemary
• Sage
• Thyme

Now, let's look at how these plants make great companions.

The Best Herbs to Grow with Swiss Chard Plants

Planting aromatic herbs near your leafy greens is a big part of playing offense in the garden. These herbs get their strong scent from chemical compounds that can repel certain pests and mask the scent of Swiss chard from those pests that use smell to find food.

Here are some of the best herbs to grow near Swiss chard (and all your leafy greens).

Perennial Herbs in the Mint Family

If you plan to grow leafy greens in a raised bed, I recommend planting a border of perennial herbs like lavender, oregano, rosemary, sage, and thyme. Lavender repels large pests like rabbits and deer, oregano and thyme repel aphids, rosemary repels snails and slugs, and sage repels flea beetles. Mint is also helpful, but it's best to grow mint in its own container near your raised beds since it spreads.

These are hardy herbs. Oregano, for instance can be planted well before your last frost date. These herbs will also hang in there during the summer months to protect your Swiss chard from kale when pests like aphids are most active. Let these herbs flower to attract tons of beneficial insects to your garden space, including ladybugs to take care of any aphid issues.

Swiss chard does like to be watered much more often than these perennial herbs, but if you follow my recommendation to plant them around the border of your garden, every plant will be happy. The soil around the edge of your bed will dry out must faster than the middle, where your Swiss chard will be.

Annual Herbs in the Carrot Family 

In addition to perennial herbs around the border, I'd also do some taller annual herbs like dill and cilantro closer to your large leafy greens. These guys like the same amount of water as Swiss chard but won't really compete for resources.

Like chard, these herbs grow best in cool weather. As soon as the weather starts warming up in the spring or summer, they'll bolt, or produce flowers in preparation for seed production. The umbel-shaped flowers of herbs in this family are like magnets for beneficial insects like predatory wasps and hoverflies.

I love that these herbs flower just in time to attract the "good guys" that can help you take care of pests just when they're becoming most active. Their scent is also strong enough to outright deter other pests like flea beetles. Win win.

The Best Leafy Greens to Grow with Swiss Chard

Growing smaller leafy greens alongside your Swiss chard may not offer pest protection, but it does offer benefits like shading the soil, retaining moisture, and preventing weeds from popping up—all good things for your Swiss chard.

The cool season is really the time to fill your garden with leafy greens that, like Swiss chard, prefer shorter days, cooler temps, and plenty of moisture in the soil. If you focus on smaller, faster-growing leafy greens, then you'll have plenty of leaves to harvest every week for your salad bowl or smoothie.

Lettuce

Lettuce is a cool season favorite that grows really well alongside Swiss chard. These plants have shallow root systems and stay low, so you can plant them around the base of your chard. When the weather starts warming up, your lettuce plants will appreciate any shade your chard leaves can cast on them.

You'll get to take your first lettuce leaves in just 30 to 45 days, which will tide you over while you're waiting on your chard transplants to be large enough to harvest.

Cabbage

Cabbage is another large leafy green, like Swiss chard, but they take up space differently. Your Swiss chard plants will grow up before fanning out, while your cabbage plants will spread side to side. That means your cabbage plants can act as ground cover to keep the soil cooler and retain moisture, while your chard plants can provide some shade on the cabbage leaves as the weather warms.

The Best Alliums to Grow with Swiss Chard

In addition to planting lots of herbs, you can stay on the offense in your garden by planting things in the onion family. Onions, garlic, chives, shallots, and leeks help protect your garden from pests with their strong scent that many pests can't stand. They're so effective that if you can only plant one other thing with your leafy greens, make it an allium.

Chives

Add some chives to the border of your beds along with those perennial herbs from the mint family. These easy-going little plants repel everything from aphids to rabbits with their strong odor. Chives also produce gorgeous little blossoms that are beloved by beneficial insects.

Onions

Onions have a particularly strong odor that pests like cabbage worms really don't like. Onions thrive during the cool season. I plant some bulbs right in the middle of any beds where I'm growing leafy greens to protect them from caterpillars.

Garlic

Garlic offers all the benefits of onions when it comes to pest control. Plant garlic in the fall and let it hang out in your garden all winter. It'll really take off in the spring, just in time to protect your Swiss chard plants. Garlic is so effective at repelling pests that you can buy a garlic extract to spray on your leafy greens as an organic treatment.

The Best Root Crops to Grow with Swiss Chard

Root crops and leafy greens make an excellent pair in your vegetable garden. And that's because they take up space in opposite ways, like yin and yang. Swiss chard will grow up and out, while a root crop does most of its growth under the soil. Planting some roots around leafy greens like this allows you to use garden space efficiently.

Like chard, root crops also grow best in nice, cool weather and prefer the soil to stay more consistently moist.

Carrots

You can have frost-tolerant carrots growing alongside your Swiss chard well before your last frost date in the spring. Direct sow your carrot seeds in the garden, and make sure to mark your planting rows since they take a while to germinate.

Radishes

Growing large leafy greens can mean delayed gratification (though your rewards will come in the form of so many fresh, nutritious leaves). Growing radishes, on the other hand, is the closest thing you can get to instant gratification in the garden. Radishes will produce in just 30 days for most varieties. You can tuck radishes into any little empty spots in your garden beds, anywhere they'll get at least 6 hours of sun.

Note that radishes can attract aphids. Some gardeners use radishes as a trap crop to keep aphids off their leafy greens. The aphids will stay on the radish leaves, so you can still get a root harvest.

The Best Fruiting Plants to Grow with Swiss Chard

Swiss chard grows well with pretty much any fruiting plant you might want to grow in your raised beds, tomatoes included. It can share space with cool and warm season fruiting plants, and you might even have some Swiss chard stick around for your hot season plants, as well.

If you're planting Swiss chard when it's warm out, it's a great idea to use large fruiting plants like tomatoes or cucumbers to shade your chard until it cools off a bit.

The two very best fruiting plants to grow with chard are beans and peas from the legume family.

Beans

In the warm season, you can plant low-growing bush beans around the base of your Swiss chard plants or train some pole beans up a trellis to cast some shade on your chard. Beans fix nitrogen in the soil in a way that your leafy greens can readily absorb. And guess what? The most important nutrient to grow lots of healthy chard leaves is nitrogen.

Peas

Peas grow in the cool season, when your Swiss chard plants will be at their best. You can plant pea seeds as soon as your soil can be worked in the spring and then again when your temps drop in the fall. Like beans, peas add nitrogen to the soil so that leafy greens can enjoy a slow release of this nutrient. If you grow legumes around your leafy greens, you shouldn't need to add nitrogen-heavy fertilizer, which can actually attract pests to your garden.

The Best Flowers to Grow with Swiss Chard

Flowers are an essential component of companion planting (and staying on the offense against pests). Flowers attract beneficial insects like ladybugs and even parasitic wasps to help you take care of not-so-beneficial bugs.

When you first plant Swiss chard in the early spring, make sure to add frost-tolerant flowers like calendula, chamomile, snapdragons, pansies, and violas. Once there's no longer a threat of frost, you can add nasturtiums and marigolds to your vegetable bed.

Calendula

Calendula, aka pot marigold, grows great during the spring and fall. Calendula is actually a beautiful flowering herb with a scent that can—you guessed it—repel pests. It also attracts aphids, but don't let that stop you from growing calendula. Like radish greens, calendula can distract all the aphids that would otherwise find their way to your leafy greens and fruiting plants.

Chamomile

To humans, this flowering herb has a mild, pleasant fragrance. To pests, the chamomile smell is strong enough to confuse them so they can't find any leafy greens to attack. I love planting German chamomile (the annual type that's better for making teas) in my raised beds in the cool season.

Marigolds

Marigolds are pretty much the gold star of companion plants thanks to their repulsiveness to pests. They deter nematodes, cabbage moths, and whiteflies, to name a few. They also manage to attract tons of beneficial insects. Stick with French marigolds or another low-growing variety in your raised beds.

What Would a Raised Bed Filled with Swiss Chard & Good Companion Plants Look Like?

The simple cool season planting plan below is for a 4' x 4' raised garden bed. I placed pansies in each corner of the raised bed for color. I bookended them with some chives, and then I added rows of radishes on each side of the bed.

The middle of the bed features three Swiss chard plants, surrounded by tons of fast-growing lettuce plants. I added a row of green onions for pest control on either side.

This bed is exactly what I mean when I say playing offense against pests, and it'll also produce a ton of delicious, super nutritious things to harvest throughout the season.

Can You Grow Swiss Chard with Beets?

Beets and Swiss chard come from the same plant family (the Amaranthaceae family) and are very similar to one another. Because of this similarity, they tend to attract the same kinds of pests. The same goes for spinach.

Knowing this, you can certainly still grow Swiss chard, spinach, and beets in the same beds. Just keep in mind that instead of offering each other certain advantages, they could potentially increase pest presence. Be extra diligent about checking for pests to nip any problems in the bud.

You'll want to also make sure that your Swiss chard leaves aren't casting too much shade on your beets. You don't want to slow the growth of your root crop or end up with lots of beet leaves but not much of a root.

Fill Your Garden with Leaves, Roots, & Fruit!

I hope this helps you grow lots of good neighbors for Swiss chard to maximize your growing space and keep pests away. Growing leafy greens with your favorite herbs, alliums, root crops, and flowers keeps your garden productive and exciting because there's always something to harvest and tend.

Thanks for being here and helping to make gardening ordinary!