Pick and Write [Agricultural Word]👉#19

Good day to all my friends on steemit. This is my entry to a contest on steemit Agriculture community. The contest is called Pick and Write where participants pick out of words given for the week and they write what they know about it.

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With my entry, I picked the very first one I saw because I know something about it. What i picked was Companion Planting.

Even till now, farmers, both the experienced and the new, continue to pay for inputs that their crops do not need. The crops could have been fine without it had they known. The farmer goes out to buy chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other products, the purpose of which is to help plants deal with issues that they can easily resolve between themselves and I'll tell you how but the bottom line is that habitat is both inefficient and costly.

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Companion planting means cultivating various kinds of crops alongside one another in such a way that every one of them provides certain benefits for the other plants. You can only do this right if you know the things one plant produces that could benefit the other plant. It's a really simple, proven technology or concept, but it is also often overlooked by many farmers.

A classic combination is maize, beans, and squash grown at once.

What happens when you do that on that piece of land? The Maize supports the vertical growth of beans. The beans the. extract nitrogen from the air and release it into the soil in the form of fertilizer for all other plants. The Squash is spread all over the ground and maintains moistness and at the same time it's protecting plants from weeds. Three crops, three functions performed. Something that you know would have required fertilizerzl, actually didn't. There was no synthetic fertilizer necessary.

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In the event pest control, you can use the plants in a similar fashion. A plant like garlic and marigold produce scents too repugnant to insect pests to allow them to detect the desired plants. So you're protecting those plants by growing these ones. It's not going to overcome all situations, that I'll agree but it's a good way to let nature do the real work on its own.

There are other plants, that are planted as bait plants and lure pests away from the intended crops. All you need to do is provide the right conditions for them to grow and keep them around.

There's is an issue you create when you're using companion planting wrongly, you might cause more harm than good. Planting onions and garlic close to each other is guaranteed to stunt the beans' growth. Fennel is much worse, it produces compounds that actually inhibit growth of all surrounding plants. And few people know about that so they get surprised when plants start dying. That's why knowledge is the main thing here.

All this is possible only by you ensuring that plants have similar needs regarding soils and physical characteristics. Otherwise, they are incompatible with one another. And nitrogen fixing plants become an indispensable component of sustainable farming. If you can properly execute this strategy, you're bound to lower your expenses on chemicals and you'll have a more fertile soil.

What I know is that before we existed, nature had created the system on its own. What is left is to use it properly.

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Thank you all for reading. As required by the contest I'll invite three friends. @greece-lover , @syidah01 and @steemchiller are invited to the contest. Have a lovely day friends.

_{Posted using SteemX}