Plant Lots of Herbs & Root Crops with Your Cabbage

Ask not what your cabbage can do for you—ask what you can do for your cabbage. I think it went something like that, right? Well, the best thing you can do for your cabbage is to plant it next to lots of its friends.

Cabbage's best friends are what we call good companion plants. Companion planting means strategically filling your garden with plants that like the same season and work together to create a healthy growing space. Good companion plants for cabbage will attract beneficial insects, fix nitrogen into the soil, repel cabbage pests, shade the soil, or all of the above.

Think of companion planting as creating a little ecosystem inside your garden so that the plants can take care of themselves without you having to resort to pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. Now, doesn't that sound good?

Let's look at the best plants to grow in your garden alongside your cabbage plants.

How Cabbage Grows Best

Before making your garden planting plan, study up on the temperature, sunlight, watering, nutrient, and space preferences of cabbage. That way, you can match this brassica with companions that share similar preferences.

CABBAGE TEMPERATURE PREFERENCE

Cabbage loves cool weather (temps between 45°F and 75°F) and can handle some frost. In fact, the leaves actually taste a little sweeter after a light freeze. This is why you'll see cabbage growing alongside other frost-tolerant and frost-resistant plants like spinach, carrots, and beets before the last frost date has passed in the spring and long after the first frost date of fall.

If you try to grow cabbage when it's too warm outside, the leaves may become more bitter and lose that crispness. Your plant will also struggle to form a head and become stressed, which makes it more susceptible to pests and disease.

CABBAGE SUNLIGHT NEEDS

Cabbage only needs about 4 to 6 hours of sunlight a day to produce leaves. As you're planning out your garden beds, you don't really need to worry about putting cabbage plants somewhere they might be shaded by taller plants. The cabbage may actually prefer it, especially if it's still a little warm out.

CABBAGE WATERING PREFERENCES

Large leafy greens like cabbage are best started by seed indoors, and you'll want to keep the soil consistently moist while you're waiting for the seeds to germinate. Once you transplant cabbage to the garden, you'll need to water every day or every other day for the first couple of weeks. After that, you want to ensure the soil never dries completely out.

CABBAGE NUTRIENT NEEDS

While many different vitamins and minerals are necessary for growing cabbage, the main nutrient to focus on is nitrogen. Nitrogen helps your leafy greens produce lots of healthy green leaves. I like to push some fresh mushroom compost around the base of my cabbage plants throughout their growing season to make sure they have everything they need to keep growing.

CABBAGE SPACE REQUIREMENTS

Cabbage plants can grow pretty large. To keep your cabbage plants more manageable in size so that you can grow lots of friends around them, harvest regularly from the outer leaves. Your cabbage plants will still form a head, even if you're taking some of those older leaves here and there. This also prevents your cabbage from casting too much shade on its neighbors.

The 20 Best Cabbage Companion Plants

Here's a list of the 20 best plants to grow with your cabbage this cool season.

• Beets
• Calendula
• Carrots
• Celery
• Chives
• Cilantro
• Dill
• Garlic
• Green onions
• Leeks
• Lettuce
• Marigolds
• Nasturtiums
• Onions
• Oregano
• Peas
• Rosemary
• Sage
• Spinach
• Thyme

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

The Best Herbs to Grow with Cabbage Plants

Fragrant herbs make wonderful companions for your cabbage plants and other leafy greens. Their strong scents can either outright repel certain pests or, since some pests use smell to locate certain crops, mask the scent of your leafy greens.

I like to plant these herbs around the border of my raised beds, intermixed with seasonal flowers. That way, they act as little bodyguards to protect the plants growing in the interior of the bed, cabbage included.

Oregano & Cabbage

Oregano's strong scent can repel aphids and cabbage worms. Oregano is a super hardy perennial plant in the Lamiaceae family. It's frost hardy, so it'll hang in there right alongside your cabbage plants.

Rosemary & Cabbage

Pests like cabbage worms, cabbage loopers, and slugs are repelled by the slightly medicinal, woodsy smell of rosemary. This scent is also strong enough to confuse other pests using smell to find your cabbage plants. Rosemary can handle a light freeze, which is enough to take your cabbage plants through the months when cabbage bugs are most active.

Sage & Cabbage

Sage gets its scent from compounds that disrupt the sensory receptors in insects. This works to deter pests like cabbage moths (which lay cabbage worm eggs), snails, and slugs. Like oregano, sage can handle some frost and will pop back up each spring.

Thyme & Cabbage

Thyme is a great herb to grow near leafy greens like cabbage to repel aphids. Like the other aromatic herbs in the Lamiaceae family, it can also repel cabbage moths.

Cilantro, Dill, & Cabbage

You can grow cilantro and dill near your cabbage plants in the fall, but it's most important to grow these herbs in the Apiaceae family near your cabbage in the spring. As the weather warms up, cilantro and dill will bolt, or start flowering in preparation for seed production. Cilantro and dill flowers attract tons of beneficial insects, including parasitic wasps, which can take care of pests that are attacking your cabbage plants now that they might be getting a little stressed by the rising temps.

The Best Leafy Greens to Grow with Cabbage Plants

I love growing large leafy greens like cabbage alongside plenty of smaller leafy greens. These other plants may not offer benefits like pest protection, but they produce leaves in a fraction of the time. So while you're waiting on your cabbage head to form, you can start filling your salad bowl with these fast-growing plants.

Small plants like lettuce and spinach have the same growing preferences as cabbage: they like cooler temps, shorter days, and plenty of moisture in the soil.

Lettuce & Cabbage

Lettuce isn't quite as frost hardy as cabbage, but you can still grow lettuce a couple weeks before your last frost date and after your first frost date. You'll be able to take your first lettuce harvest about 30 days after sowing seeds and then you can continue harvesting lettuce while you're waiting on your cabbage to mature.

Spinach & Cabbage

Spinach is frost hardy and can go in the garden as soon as your soil can be worked in the spring. Like with lettuce, you can start cutting leaves in just 30 to 45 days and then come back and cut more next week.

Neither spinach nor lettuce is in the same family as cabbage. (Spinach is in the Amaranthaceae family, while lettuce is in the Asteraceae.) That means these plants won't attract the same type of pests as other brassicas.

Celery & Cabbage

Celery and cabbage make excellent friends. They both love cool weather and need about 75 days in the garden to reach maturity. You can start them indoors 10 to 12 weeks before your last frost date and transplant them out to the garden around the same time.

Celery is also thought to repel cabbage moths.

The Best Alliums to Grow with Cabbage Plants

Plants in the Allium family are my go-to companion plants for pretty much anything you might want to grow in the vegetable garden but especially for leafy greens. Chives, garlic, onions, leeks, and shallots all have a strong scent that repels pests like aphids. If you can only plant one other thing with your cabbages, let it be an allium.

Chives & Cabbage

Chives can repel pests like teeny tiny aphids, rabbits, and everything in between thanks to their strong scent, which pests find unappealing. Chives are slow to get started, but after that, they're super hardy perennials. You'll be able to harvest the edible leaves throughout a large part of the year, and in the spring, you'll get beautiful chives blossoms, which are also edible.

Onions & Cabbage

Onions also have a repugnant smell that can repel pests like the moths that lay cabbage looper eggs and more. If you don't care about growing a full onion bulb, try planting green onions. They're not perennial like chives, but they're cold tolerant and will give you lots of leaves you can cut and use in your kitchen.

Garlic & Cabbage

Garlic is closely related to chives and onions, so it offers all the same benefits. Garlic bulbs tend to be a bit smaller than onions. You'll plant garlic in the fall, and then it'll hang out in your garden all winter long and continue to grow throughout the spring. That's as close as you can get to a built-in pest deterrent in your garden.

The Best Root Crops to Grow with Cabbage Plants

Root crops make natural companions to large leafy greens like cabbage because they take up a different kind of space—most of it underground. This allows you to use your garden space most efficiently. The shallow roots of your cabbage won't get in the way of the taproots expanding under the soil, and the leafy canopy of the cabbage can help shade the soil, locking in moisture and deterring weeds.

Other than their growth habits, they're very similar in preferences. Root crops like nice, cool weather and soil that's consistently moist.

Carrots & Cabbage

Carrots are frost-tolerant, which means you can have carrots and cabbage growing in your garden well before your last frost in the spring. Unlike cabbage, you'll sow carrot seeds directly in the garden. Make sure you mark your planting rows so you can move your cabbage plants out while you're waiting on carrots to germinate. When the roots of your carrot plants are swelling underground, your cabbage plants will put on their leaves aboveground.

Beets & Cabbage

Beets also take up way more space underground than they do above. If beet greens ever grow so wide that they're crowding your cabbage, you can always harvest the older, outer leaves and treat them like Swiss chard.

The Best Fruiting Plants to Grow with Cabbage

Plenty of fruiting plants grow well with cabbage, though they'll only share your garden space during the transition from the cool season to the warm or vice versa. If you're planting cabbage in the fall, it's a great idea to use the leaves of large fruiting plants like beans to cast some shade on your cabbage until the weather cools off a bit.

Peas & Cabbage

The best fruiting plant to grow in the same beds as cabbage is peas due to their similar temperature preferences. Pea seeds can be planted as soon as your soil is workable in the spring. The peas will fix nitrogen in the soil, which will help your cabbage plants produce tons of healthy leaves.

The Best Flowers to Grow with Cabbage

What would companion planting be without adding some flowers to your garden beds to attract beneficial insects? Some of my favorite frost-tolerant flowers include calendula, chamomile, snapdragons, pansies, and violas. Once you've passed your last frost date in the spring, you can add nasturtiums and marigolds to your cabbage bed.

Bonus: These flowers are all edible!

Calendula & Cabbage

I love growing calendula flowers in the spring and fall. Calendula has a strong scent that can repel cabbage pests. It also acts as a trap crop for aphids, which means it lures aphids that would otherwise attack your leafy greens to itself.

Marigolds & Cabbage

Marigolds repel pests like aphids, cabbage moths, and whiteflies while attracting tons of beneficial insects. That's one of the reasons marigolds are a staple in companion planting lists.

Nasturtiums & Cabbage

Like calendula, nasturtiums can act as a trap crop to lure aphids away from your cabbage plants. They also repel cabbage worms. Both nasturtium leaves and flowers make a wonderful addition to your salad bowl.

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

The simple planting plan below is for a 4' x 4' raised bed. There are violas in each corner to add some color. The middle of the bed consists of two rows of cabbage plants. The rest of the bed is devoted to growing garlic.

What I would do is swap some of the garlic for a perennial herb border around the entire outer edge of the raised beds. I'd alternate herbs like oregano, sage, and thyme with pansies and violas for a beautiful and practical border to protect the cabbage growing within.

No matter what you plant around the edges, this bed makes use of every square inch of growing space.

Can You Grow Cabbage with Other Brassicas?

You might have noticed that some of my favorite plants—kale, arugula, mustard greens, and broccoli—are missing. These plants are all in the same family as cabbage, the Brassicaceae family. While you can certainly grow other brassicas with your cabbage, keep in mind that they do attract the same pests because they're so similar. They also compete for the same nutrients in the soil.

If you want to grow cabbage and some of its cousins, I recommend spreading them out so that they're not right next to each other. That being said, you may have also noticed that we planted kale right next to cabbage in this client's garden. I've found that if you have great soil, you can get away with interplanting things that would normally compete for nutrients.

Fill Your Garden with Leaves, Roots, & Fruit!

I hope this helps you fill your vegetable garden with lots of things that grow well with cabbage. Growing leafy greens like cabbage with your favorite herbs, root crops, and flowers keeps your garden productive and interesting because there's always something to harvest and tend, even while you're waiting on your cabbage to produce.

Thanks for being here and helping to make gardening ordinary!