February has arrived and as a vegetable gardener, you are likely ordering seeds and making plans for your garden for the coming growing season.
One factor to consider when planning your vegetable garden is crop rotation, which may get overlooked if you only have a small space to grow vegetables. Rotating crops, however, is a critical tool which the gardener can use to reduce issues with diseases and pests, and balance the soil’s nutrients.
Crop rotation is one of agriculture’s oldest cultural practices. In a home vegetable garden, crop rotation is achieved by changing the location of vegetables within the garden each season.
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While this sounds simple, the practice takes some planning, especially when you have limited space to grow vegetables.
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Rotate vegetables by plant family
Vegetable crops in the same botanical family are often susceptible to the same diseases and insects. For crop rotation to be effective, gardeners should rotate plant families and not just different crops.
For example: Tomato, eggplant, pepper and potato all belong to the nightshade (Solanaceae) family, so growing peppers in the location in the garden where tomatoes were grown last year would not be an effective crop-rotation practice.
Planting a crop in the pea (Fabaceae) family in the location where tomatoes (or pepper, eggplant and potato) were grown the previous season would be an effective crop-rotation strategy. Vegetable crops in the pea family include pea and any type of bean.
For crop rotation to be most effective, gardeners should not plant vegetables belonging to the same plant family in the same location for three to four years, as many disease organisms are soil-borne and may persist in the soil for several years. For a complete list of vegetable crop families, visit go.osu.edu/veggieplantfamilies.
Managing soil fertility
Vegetable crops in the same botanical family typically utilize the same type and amounts of nutrients from the soil. For example, crops in the gourd family (Cucurbitaceae), such as melons squash and cucumber, utilize a high level of nitrogen from the soil, while crops in the onion family (Amaryllidaceae) utilize a greater amount of potassium than other crops.
Because they are legumes, crops in the pea family (Fabaceae) such as beans are nitrogen-fixers and add nitrogen to the soil. Rotating the location where different crop families are grown can replenish certain soil nutrients and even out the loss of other nutrients in the soil.
Rotating crops in small gardens
One of the best methods for rotating crops is to have several different garden beds in which you can rotate plant families each year. If you have three or four raised or in-ground beds, planning for crop rotation may be simple.
If you don’t have more than one bed and you have adequate space for new beds, consider adding additional beds. If you are concerned about the additional labor and time required for adding additional garden space, consider adding smaller beds or dividing large beds which you already have in production.
If you aren’t able to have more than one garden bed, there are ways to rotate crops if a gardener is willing to think outside the box. Using containers to grow a few plants could be an effective crop-rotation strategy if you are short on space.
Utilizing containers, especially for disease-prone vegetables such as heirloom tomato varieties is a great way to rotate a crop out of your primary garden bed.
You might also be able to carve out a pocket vegetable garden in different areas of your home landscape which receive full sun for at least six to eight hours each day. Incorporating vegetable crops into shrub beds or herbaceous perennial beds will add visual interest to the landscape and can be an effective crop-rotation strategy.
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I’ve even heard about neighbors in a condo community with very limited yard space who work together to have each gardener grow a different vegetable family in their small garden bed, and they then share the produce with each other! This also allows gardeners with limited space for gardening to grow an increased number of different varieties of a specific crop.
Recordkeeping is key
Effective crop rotation requires good recordkeeping to keep track of where you grow different crop families. Yes, I know you can remember which bed you grew your tomatoes in last year, but can you remember what was grown in that bed three years ago?
I can’t remember what I had for dinner yesterday, so I keep a garden journal to record all kinds of data from my garden each season, including detailed maps of where each vegetable crop was planted each year.
Mike Hogan is Extension Educator, Agriculture and Natural Resources and associate professor with Ohio State University Extension.
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