To minimise pests and diseases and ensure you maintain a healthy soil, ideally the same veggies should not be grown in the same bed season after season.
Plants in the same botanical family tend to suffer from the same pest and disease problems and rotating veggies from the same family helps to break the pest and disease life cycle.
Also, different crops have different nutrient requirements and some veggies like cabbage and tomatoes are heavy feeders and use up nitrogen and phosphorus rapidly. Whereas beans, peas and other legumes add nitrogen to the soil but need lots of phosphorus.
A good option is a four bed veggie rotation by plant type which could look like this:
|
Bed 1 |
Bed 2 |
Bed 3 |
Bed 4 |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year 1 |
Legumes |
Root veggies |
Fruiting veggies |
Leafy greens |
| Year 2 |
Leafy greens |
Legumes |
Root veggies |
Fruiting veggies |
| Year 3 |
Fruiting veggies |
Leafy greens |
Legumes |
Root veggies |
| Year 4 |
Root veggies |
Fruiting veggies |
Leafy greens |
Legumes |
Legumes – beans and peas
Leafy greens– spinach, lettuce, chard, cabbage, brussels sprouts, broccoli, celery and pak choi
Fruiting veggies – tomatoes, capsicum, corn, cucumber, eggplant and pumpkin
Root veggies – potatoes, carrots, parsnips, onions, leeks and beetroot
Garden beds do not have to be all the same size and smaller beds can be created for veggies and herbs which you only need in small amounts. Grown in pots and scattered around the veggie garden, herbs bring colour and fragrance to the area.
There are some plants that are better off in individual beds either because they are perennial, such as chillies, or because they have bad habits. Mint is one of those and will take over the garden bed but planted in a pot in a damp, partly shaded area, will grow for many years. Cucumbers can be trained to grow on a trellis but pumpkins are probably best avoided unless you can dedicate a large garden bed exclusively for them.
If space is limited, a hardwood raised garden bed which is 2.1 m long and 1.3 m wide can easily be divided into 4 quadrants or 2 beds into 2 quadrants each, providing 4 areas for a 4 year rotation. Alternatively, four small corrugated steel garden beds, 1.2 m long and 0.6 m wide would fit into an area 6.4 m long x 3.2 m wide, allowing for 1 m wide paths around and between the beds.
There are many different methods for a successful crop rotation and it is a matter of experimenting to find what works best for you. Garden bed rotation is just one of the techniques that an organic gardener can use to control pests and diseases. Increasing the biodiversity within the veggie garden area, as well as the surrounding the garden beds, is critical to a successful veggie garden.
