Row Companion Planting by the Langerhorst Family

×

On this page I want to introduce you to companion planting by the Langerhorst family. It is based on row companion planting by Gertrud Franck and extends it with clover paths and a different rhythm for shifting the rows from year to year. Before working with this companion planting system, you should already be familiar with Gertrud Franck’s.

Margarete Langerhorst published the book Meine Mischkulturenpraxis (* Affiliate), which is available in regular bookshops. In it she describes her experiences with companion planting and explains in detail the changes she made to Gertrud Franck’s system.

Jakobus Langerhorst wrote the book Naturgemäße Bodenpflege, which deals extensively with composting. I have not read this book myself. It is no longer available in regular bookshops, but remaining copies can be ordered directly from the Langerhorst family.

The Langerhorst Family

Margarete and Jakobus Langerhorst ran a 3.4-hectare market garden in Upper Austria together with their five children, developing their companion planting system further along the way. Jakobus passed away in 2013. Margarete continues this work and gives talks and guided tours on various topics related to ecological farming. More information at: http://www.gugerling.at

The Clover Paths

The most noticeable difference from Gertrud Franck is probably the clover paths. After every three rows, instead of a spinach row, a clover path is laid out. It is twice as wide as a spinach row.

An example layout with Gertrud Franck:

An example layout with the Langerhorst family:

Here too, as with Gertrud Franck, there is no fixed rule about whether to start with an A row or another row. However, a clover path is always inserted after every three rows. This has various advantages.

Advantage: Room to Work

With Gertrud Franck, you can reach any crop row by stepping into the spinach row. It is tight, and if the spinach has not yet been turned into mulch, you may not want to tread on it. From the clover paths, every row is normally reachable from left or right with an arm’s length. With each clover path being roughly 40 to 60 centimetres wide depending on the plant, there is luxuriously plenty of room to work.

Advantage: Clover is a Legume

And as most people probably know, legumes – or rather the bacteria on their roots – fix phosphorus in the soil. So several roughly 40-centimetre-wide green manure strips move across the bed each year, in addition to other legumes such as beans and peas. You don’t need to worry about crop rotation with clover, as it is so distantly related to other legumes that there are apparently no negative effects from the plant family.

Subterranean Clover or White Clover

The following two varieties are recommended for clover paths:

Subterranean clover (Trifolium subterraneum) can only be sown from April. On the other hand, it is not winter-hardy and usually dies off on its own, though in mild winters a few clumps may remain.

White clover (Trifolium repens) (* Affiliate) can be sown as early as March. However, it is winter-hardy, so you should chop it down before winter. A hoe (* Affiliate) is the perfect tool for this. White clover attracts insects, which can of course be a nuisance if you want to walk or kneel on it.

Generally speaking, white clover is easier to source as it is more common.

I am still experimenting here myself and haven’t been fully happy so far. Next year I’ll try white clover. By the time I can sow subterranean clover, it has already become drier and I would need to water it – which I tend to forget.

Row Spacing

If you are now wondering whether the clover paths are worth giving up vegetable rows for, I can reassure you: you don’t have to.

The proposed row spacing with the Langerhorst family is only 40 centimetres instead of the usual 50 centimetres with Gertrud Franck. The idea is that since the rows don’t need to be stepped on directly, they can be closer together.

Year Change

In companion planting by Gertrud Franck, each crop row shifts to the next spinach row. With a row spacing of 50 centimetres (for example between an A and a C row), each row shifts 25 centimetres.

In the Langerhorst family’s system, a row does not shift by half but by three-quarters. With a row spacing of 40 centimetres, that means 30 centimetres.

This means that in the second year the bed is shifted 30 centimetres from the starting point. In the third year, the last row becomes the first row in the bed – but with a 20-centimetre offset from the starting point (30 cm from year one + 30 cm from year two – 40 cm row spacing). The last row is always moved to the front whenever the offset would amount to at least 40 centimetres. Unlike spinach, the clover path also counts as a row here; it is also broken up as soon as space allows.

Here as an example is a screenshot from the year-change assistant for my own bed. Our bed planner handles the calculation for you.

Recommended Books

As mentioned at the outset, Margarete Langerhorst wrote the book Meine Mischkulturenpraxis (* Affiliate), which describes this and much more in great detail. As with my article on row companion planting by Gertrud Franck, this article only scratches the surface of the knowledge in that book.

I can also wholeheartedly recommend the book Gesunder Garten durch Mischkultur (* Affiliate) by Gertrud Franck. It contains all the details of her row companion planting system, along with a great deal of additional knowledge, for example on composting, herbs in the garden and slug control.