Can any one tell me if one should pratice crop rotation within a season.
ie If early cabbages have been grown and harvested can savoys then be planted in the ground. Or maybe early peas harvested and then more peas planted in the same ground. Same for lettuce.
Not sure I'm saying this very well.
Any advice gratefully received,
David
Crop rotation
Moderators: KG Steve, Chantal, Tigger, peter
I do understand what you are saying and would say not exactly 
. You need to be pragmatic (don't we love that word on this forum? 
). For each bed or area of the rotation you pick a point when you change over from last year's rotation family to this year's. This will vary from crop to crop as they mature at different times and the follow-ons need putting in at different times.
But a lot of the time that will mean with something like lettuce you slot it in here and there. Because it has a short time to maturity the diseases it gets are not going to build up in the way they can on a crop that is in the ground for months. And it isn't in one of the major rotation families which could carry disease specific to that family.
I don't know what the others think, but I would say that two reasonable rules of thumb to follow are
1) The longer a crop is in the ground the more important it is that you rotate to another family with the next crop.
2) The more crops there are in a family the more important it is that you rotate.
But as you may have noticed on other threads people do get away with not rotaing some crops at all
. You need to be pragmatic (don't we love that word on this forum? ). For each bed or area of the rotation you pick a point when you change over from last year's rotation family to this year's. This will vary from crop to crop as they mature at different times and the follow-ons need putting in at different times.
But a lot of the time that will mean with something like lettuce you slot it in here and there. Because it has a short time to maturity the diseases it gets are not going to build up in the way they can on a crop that is in the ground for months. And it isn't in one of the major rotation families which could carry disease specific to that family.
I don't know what the others think, but I would say that two reasonable rules of thumb to follow are
1) The longer a crop is in the ground the more important it is that you rotate to another family with the next crop.
2) The more crops there are in a family the more important it is that you rotate.
But as you may have noticed on other threads people do get away with not rotaing some crops at all