Can You Plant Tomatoes With Kale?
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GardenSays
Tomatoes + kale: No — keep them apart.
- Verdict
- Keep apart
- Evidence
- Traditional
- Pairs rated
- 41
A brassica like cabbage and broccoli — the traditional advice to keep brassicas and tomatoes apart applies, though kale's smaller size makes it the least-bad of the family.
Layout: If you must, keep kale at the far edge; better in its own bed.
Why
- ✓This is long-standing garden practice; the mechanism is plausible but hasn't been formally tested.
- ✓Companion planting tweaks the odds — spacing, rotation, and airflow still matter more than any pairing.
When this doesn't apply
- →Small gardens with no disease history can often get away with it — the rating protects against the bad year, not the average one.
How this was calculated
- 1. Pairing lookupKeep apart
Tomato × Kale: rated 'bad' (traditional) in the GardenSays pairing table.
- 2. Evidence standard
Confidence labels: 'documented' = mechanism supported in extension/research literature; 'traditional' = long-standing practice with plausible mechanism but thin formal evidence.
Data sources
- University of Minnesota Extension — Companion planting in home gardens — Some companion effects (trap crops, pollinator attraction, nematode suppression by marigolds) are documented; many traditional pairings lack formal evidence. (checked 2026-07-15)
- University of Minnesota Extension — Growing tomatoes in home gardens — Avoid planting tomatoes near potatoes (shared blight) or where related crops grew the previous year. (checked 2026-07-15)
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