Grow The Best Tomatoes By Planting This Easy-To-Grow Companion Herb Beside Them

Are the tomatoes you're growing not quite coming up like you'd hoped? They just might need a little help from a friend...a friendly plant, that is. If you're hoping to improve this year's tomato harvest and hone your tomato-growing skills, you might want to consider adding a companion plant. Companion plants have positive relationships with other plants in your garden and may be able to offer benefits like enhanced crop production. Leveraging certain companion plants can help your tomatoes thrive and keep insects away.

The best companion plant for tomatoes: thyme (Thymus vulgaris). Aromatic, versatile in how it can be used, and liked by pollinators (i.e. bees), it brings a whole host of benefits when planted. Growing common thyme in your garden is easy to accomplish, thanks to its low-maintenance nature. Thyme typically stays green throughout every season of the year, and it thrives in USDA hardiness zones 5 to 9 with plenty of sunlight.

When you place thyme near your tomato plants, you're doing more than adding an herb into your garden. A 2024 study showed that thyme can positively impact tomato plants by improving root growth. The presence of thyme nearby also played a role in increasing the number of flowers and tomatoes the plant produced.

Companion plants can, depending on the particular plant, also improve the soil your tomatoes are growing in and, to some, boost the fruit's flavor. When it comes to thyme specifically, the results are subjective; some say this companion plant can improve tomato flavor, but no research definitively confirms that the taste changes. 

Moreover, this fragrant herb can help your tomatoes survive common gardening woes. Pests don't like the essential oils that give thyme its strong scent, and as a result, the presence of the herb near your tomato plants can help keep pests like aphids, armyworms, leafhoppers, and wireworms at bay.