If you’re new to growing vegetables in your garden you might have heard of ‘crop rotation’ but are perhaps unsure of what exactly it involves. Put simply, crop rotation means growing different vegetables in a new position on your vegetable plot each year. So, instead of growing the same thing in the same place, you rotate the position of your vegetables each year so that you grow different things in different spots.
Why it’s important to rotate veggies
The aim of crop rotation is to keep the nutrients in your vegetable garden balanced while helping prevent the build-up of pests and diseases. The principle is that different plants affect soil conditions in different ways and each plant is susceptible to its own diseases and pests. Therefore, if you keep the same crop in the same position year after year, it can result in a build-up of diseases and pests while also leading to lower quality soil. However, if you rotate your crops, you can maximise the nutrient values of the soil and help ward off pests and diseases.
Get it right
The first step to crop rotation is to look at your vegetable plot and decide what you would like to grow. Then grab a pen and paper and sort the different plants into types of crops. A four-year crop rotation is ideal for most home gardeners and one that many gardeners choose. For this, you could choose to group your crops as
Brassicas such as cabbages, kale, cauliflower and broccoli
Legumes including peas and beans
Alliums like all types of onions plus other alliums such as leeks and garlic
Roots and tubers like potatoes, carrots and beetroots.
With these four groups, you can then establish a four-year crop rotation system. At the end of each growing season, you will clear the growing beds and move the position on one place ready for next year.
So, your brassicas would move to the position where you had previously grown your legumes and so on. Keep a plan so that you can easily see where each type of crop will be moving to each year.
Salad crops can easily be fitted around your other groups, wherever you have space, but it’s also a good idea to move these around year by year.
Another benefit of crop rotation is that, with a little planning, you can make sure a particular type of crop follows another to make the most of the soil conditions. For example, legumes help increase the amount of nitrogen in the soil which is beneficial for brassicas. Therefore, planting brassicas in a spot which was previously home to legumes could have big benefits for the success of your crop.
Gardeners with less space sometimes group legumes, alliums and roots together to save space and still get good results. Or, for really small spaces, the simplest option is to swap crops between two positions each year. The golden rule is to not keep the same crop in the same position two years running.