The Edge-and-Decoy Garden: A Companion Planting & Trap Crop Playbook for Raised Beds

This playbook is for home vegetable gardeners, especially those growing in raised beds in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. You plant good crops, then watch aphids, cucumber beetles, Japanese beetles and hungry deer and rabbits take them. Meanwhile your beds feel crowded, and a single crop like garlic can take up a whole bed for nine months. Inside are seven plays. Each one tells you when to use it, walks you through the steps, and gives a worked example. You'll learn to plant garlic and other alliums along borders and corners instead of filling a whole bed with them. You'll use calendula as a sacrificial crop for aphids. You'll set up a decoy squash to protect cucumbers. You'll draw in beneficial insects, use living mulch and soil-building companions, and arrange the whole bed so tall crops, mid-height crops and edge plants work together. The goal is a garden that is productive, lower in pest pressure, and good to look at. The playbook comes from Resh Gala, a New Jersey garden designer behind @hundredtomatoes and author of Vegetable Gardening Made Easy. She designs and grows stylish organic vegetable gardens in NJ and PA. The tactics here are the ones she shares on her Reels, such as border garlic, trap crops, decoy plants and her layered planting strategy. In this playbook they are organized into plays you can run bed by bed, season after season. You don't need special products or a bigger yard. You need a plan for where each plant goes and why.