Jacob need about craw rotation :
“ I subsist in the Upper Midwest ( Zone 5a ) , and conceive with the recent cold walkover , I might spend some prison term planning our garden for 2024 . I ’ve watched many of your video and learn several of your books , so I get down searching for your approximation on crop rotation and succession planting … and did n’t really find any . I think I remember some ideas you shared in Grow or Die – a six or eight harvest gyration , mayhap ? – but did n’t really find anything on your Youtube channel or internet site . So , I call up I have my answer already – it ’s likely more authoritative to just get something in the ground , mix it up , and not establish something back - to - back in the same spot every year – but if you have fourth dimension , I ’d like a more explicit answer : what are your opinions on planned crop rotary motion and succession by flora family ? In your experience and reading , is there any reward to following sure plant families with others when constitute in the same smear – for object lesson , brassicas with nightshades , etc . ? ”
Though I did write about crop rotation inGrow or Die , I ’ve stopped paying much attending to it over the years .
We do n’t completely disregard it as a drill , but we pass little prison term planning rotations .
It works more like this :
In February of 2023 , we planted potatoes in a eyepatch of garden that was previously a lawn .
After we harvested the white potato vine , we planted the expanse with a cover charge crop of sunn hemp .
We slashed that down and cover the area with woven nursery textile in the fall .
Next month , we ’ll plant it with something else . likely purloin or radishes . Or maybe corn whisky .
Then next twelvemonth , it ’ll probably be imbed in tater again . Who knows ?
We have various garden areas and styles we use , from words gardens to tighter , extremely improved beds , to our Grocery Row Gardens .
What I ’ve realize over the years is that nature does n’t rotate crops all that much . Generally , if you have cleavers or chickweed or some other weed growing in a patch , that same patch incline to self - seed and regrow year after class . It may have some unlike plants growing there at other time of the year , but it ’s often arise the same thing year after year .
If we ’re tear the ground down to bare soil and replanting the same crop without anything else growing at other meter , crop revolution may be more crucial . It ’s also more important to circumvolve if we ’re uprise a crop without adding any food back to the soil before we arise it again . If murphy are attract what they require from the primer coat , and then we plant them again and again without properly re - mineralizing the soil , we ’re probable to get deterioration in quality and fruit . We ’re also probable to have a build - up of white potato pestilence and diseases .
Yet if we grow Irish potato , then follow them with pea , then come the peas with mustard , we ’ve probably starved out the Irish potato pestilence , or confused them until they leave , or they were use up by something else .
We do n’t render to get “ consummate ” revolution . We just do n’t plant the same affair in the same spot repeatedly .
That said , I had a neighbour in Florida who planted the same zipper peas in the same spot year after class and always seemed to do fine with them .
In the Grocery Row Gardens , we have perennial that stupefy around for years , with annuals that come and go as we find gaps to plant them . Some conceive that prevent certain plant specie around from class - to - yr , even yearly , may keep their beneficial bacterium and fungi in the grime for them , ca-ca them acquire better rather than bad . Perhaps this balance the pests that would also remain . I do n’t know . But I do n’t sweat over rotation all that much .
And I bet if I put some compost on the old potato while and replanted it this spring , it would do just ticket .
There is obviously some benefit in rotating leguminous plant with other crops , since they supply nitrogen . See : corn / soybean revolution in commercial-grade farming . Or cotton / peanut here in the South .
Nature is complex and fulfil with variables . We just do our estimable to figure out what work . Yet I would n’t care too much with trying to get things perfect .
