Rotation

[Fair Weather 33]

Hi there peeps

This could be a silly question but here goes. I have just realised that one of my beds housed onions last year and cauliflower this year. Can I grow spring onions and pickeling onions on it next year. Or is this against the three year rotation?

[Primrose]

I suspect that few of us, unless we have an allotment, have sufficient growing space to maintain a perfect rotation system. I grow vegetables in a smallish garden and certainly can't rotate very effectively in my vegetable patch and in the border where I grow tomatoes and climbing beans.

I try to avoid soil based diseases by manuring as much as I can to keep the soil healthy, and as far as possible, grow crops in a different part of the veg patch every year. However, this has to be governed by which crops grow taller and shut out the sun from others. It's an imperfect system but over the many years I've been growing vegetables I've suffered from few diseases. (Slugs are my main bugbear, and crop rotation won't prevent them).

My tallest crops are climbing beans and tomatoes. These I grow in a long border against a south facing fence and I rotate their locations every year but that's as far as their rotation has gone for the past 30 years. and I still get good yields from them.

I'm sure, if your soil is in good condition, you'll get a reasonable crop of onions if you use the same position again. Often it's the weather, as much as any other aspect of garden which seems to spoil our crop yields.

[Fair Weather 33]

Hi Primrose

Yes this resonates very much with my position. I do my veg in the back garden. So there has always been an issue with trying to rotate things. I just managed to back myself into a corner by planting extra shallots, well they were going free .

I am very lucky the soil here is pretty much PH neutral, made up of a mixtrue of peat an sand. So I will do as you say and try to rotate as much as possibe, but not be as ridgedly as I was.

[Johnboy]

Hi Fair Weather,
To be quite honest we are all aware that crops should be rotated but I have grave doubts that the vast majority of us follow the rotation that strictly.
There are two things that should never be grown on the same ground in successive years and these are Potatoes and any of the Cabbage family.
Just so long as you observe these two you will not go that far off track.
JB.

[Tony Hague]

I fully understand crop rotation on agricultural scales, but on the scale of a garden plot or even an allotment, do the distances involved actually make enough difference I wonder ? How far is far enough ?

I guess it depends on the crop. With potatoes, tubers that are missed in harvesting are the link for blight, so I guess that so long as you don't have volunteers from previous years actually amongst a potato crop it is OK. But what of onion white rot or club root ? How mobile are they ?

[Johnboy]

Hi Tony,
I know people who have been growing Onions on the same bed for twenty years and I suspect that if you are going to get White Rot on an allotment it doesn't really matter whether you have rotated or not.
With potatoes it is the volunteers that are the risk of blight but Potatoes can be affected by about 200 different complaints and if not rotated, even on an allotment or in a garden, you run the risk of a build-up of these ailments. I normally only grow early potatoes but they get rotated every year. I have never had blight here on Potatoes and only once on Tomatoes in over thirty years. I also rotate the entire Brassica Family
because there is Club Root in the district. On the other hand I have been growing Runner Beans on the same designated bed for more than 15 years without any shadow of difficulty.
I have had a problem on my Beans this year which is Wasps chewing the beans and Ants following up and making the problem worse and this leaves a brown indentation in the bean. This I feel would have happened wherever the beans were planted and is nothing to do with rotation.
I wondered if there was a secretion of some kind on the beans to attract the Wasps but I cannot find an Aphid or Black Fly anywhere.
JB.

[Fair Weather 33]

Hi Johnboy

Thanks for that. I shall endevour to keep my Brassicas rotated properly. I suspect that no matter how much room you have in your garden or alotment, everyone could always do with a bit more each year. As we speak the field out the back of the house is looking prommising. Shame about the cows .

FW33