Rotating Vegetable Beds

• Vegetables for
  Sale
• Improving the
  Soil
• Rotations
• Recipes

Why bother rotating garden beds when growing vegetables? Isn't it easier to grow the same things in the same place each year? It may be easier in some ways, but it's not as good for the plants and the soils.

Each crop has something in the world that likes it very well indeed. Potato bugs eat potato plants, and squash bugs eat squash plants, and may well do so to the end of the world. It's not pleasant to see the results of one of these infestations.

Bugs and diseases can winter over in the soil where their main course was growing. When that plant starts growing again, these pests and problems have a head start. Dinner is being served, in the same restaurant they're already comfortable in!

Until the onset of commercial chemicals to kill bugs and diseases, people moved their vegetables around when they could. Over the course of three or more years without their favorite food nearby, many pests will die out entirely. Some will manage to migrate to their new locations, but not as many.

Rotations can also be managed to maximize the nutrients needed by various types of plants, without adding nitrogen-based fertilizers. Here's the rotation plan I follow:

1. In the first year of my rotation plan, I plant legumes: beans and peas. These vegetables take nitrogen from the air and 'fix' or store it in their roots. This naturally enriches the soil with this important nutrient.
2. Following legumes, I plant leafy green vegetables that need lots of nitrogen. Lettuces, spinach, broccoli, cabbage, etc, all thrive in the soil legumes have fertilized for them.
3. In the third year, fruiting vegetables are planted. Tomatoes, winter and summer squashes, eggplants, peppers, melons all do best when the nitrogen is not particularly high. Too much nitrogen causes them to produce lots of leaves and stems and fewer flowers and fruits.
4. Year four sees the root crops--onions, leeks, carrots, radishes, turnips, beets, etc.
5. And in the fifth and final year before a return to legumes, I plant corn and potatoes. I give these vegetables plenty of compost to make sure the soil is not too depleted for good growth.

You've probably noted I don't leave the ground fallow for a year. I would do that if I had space, but I need all the ground I can grow on for my market garden. Instead, I use cover crops to continue enriching the soil and protect from weeds at strategic points. For example, before I plant the warm weather fruiting crops, their area is sown with clover or buckwheat or some other green manure. Just before time to plant, at the end of May, we till the cover crop under. Likewise, when the cool weather plants such as peas are finished, we sow a cover crop on those areas. In some cases, we leave that crop til the following spring, in other cases we till it under and sow something else for the fall and winter.