Carrots Love Tomatoes: Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening

This book is a comprehensive guide for understanding what plants help or hinder growth of other plants and repel insects. Very informative, useful, and practical.

Overall, this was a good reference book on companion plantings and had a lot of useful gardening information. As an experienced cook and someone with some gardening background, I found some of the information pretty simplistic. However, there was plenty of detailed information on companion plantings and other gardening topics to make this a book that is well worth reading.

As an avid gardener for home use, I'm good enough at it to know I'm not as good as I should be. In the last few years I've been making a concerted effort to change my gardens into something more closed loop, sustainable, organic and productive. Not a small feat, I know, and so references of all sorts have been making their way through my hands.

Carrots Love Tomatoes was at the top of my list as it is considered "the" guide to companion planting. Companion planting, for those who don't know, is a way of planting things of different types together or apart based on whether or not they will assist each other, keep a certain pest or disease away, or if they are antipathic towards each other. The concept of interplanting folds nicely into companion planting and is a way of maximizing a limited garden space. So I read this book avidly when it arrived from Amazon.

I won't say that I was disappointed, but it wasn't all that I expected. For the beginner, there are questions that might have been better answered. Such as the advice to keep certain plants away from each other but not how far. Or the advice to plant a certain herb, say borage, near some types of plants for pest control yet not saying what the general range is per plant so one might know how much of a garden to dedicate to it.

It is a cute book in that it has lovely old fashioned snippets and hand drawn images. It is a relatively quick read, but easily referenced later for information you may want to double check.

As others have pointed out, there are some factual problems in the book. In particular, the fungi section can be misleading and I wouldn't suggest that anyone harvest any mushroom unless they are with a group of mushroom hunters and they've got experience.

Overall, despite the ongoing research into what plants really like to be planted next to other plants, this is a valuable little book to have in the truly complete gardener's reference shelf. It introduces concepts that increase the efficiency of home gardens and improves the ability of the home gardener to fill their pantry with the fruits of their labors...with less labor!

As for whether carrots love tomatoes or not, I can say that this year, my first year interplanting carrots and tomatoes, the carrots were smaller.

While my husband and I didn't read the book yet, just want to say that the delivery time was fantastic and the book arrived in the condition it was supposed to be in. Thanks for a great job!!! JP

Hi there gardners, this book I discovered at a book sale, this is mostly black and white with a few drawings of different plants BUT makes up for lack of pictures with straight forward info on what likes what and what doesnt like what. Example, dont plant broccoli next to Tomatos, they HATE each other. The book is alphebetical in flowers and vegetables and easy to find what you are looking for. Basil fights off bugs for tomatos, oregano does the same for broccoli type of info. I highly recommend getting this for your library, there is sooo much info I find myself going back to it over and over!~