![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Once you've harvested your onions and leeks from your first bed, the next crop in that spot would be cabbages, cauliflowers and broccoli and so on, for the first seven categories. The rotation starts with lilacs and blues – onion family plants and peas/beans – which are commonly grown together as they both like soil enriched with compost and take up little space. Working from the inside of the rainbow out, you can see which plants belong together and which should come next in each bed. Miscellaneous (non-rotation annual crops) eg basil, lettuce, endive, cress, corn, okra, salsify, scorzonera, New Zealand spinach, mache, chicory Umbelliferae (carrot family) – celery, celeriac, cilantro, fennel, carrot, parsnip, parsley, dillĬucurbitaceae (marrow family) – squash, zucchini, cucumber, marrow, melon, cantaoupe, pumpkinĬhenopodiaceae (beetroot family) – Swiss chard, perpetual spinach, true spinach, beetroot Solanaceae (nightshade family) – potato, tomato, peppers, eggplant Leguminosae (pea & bean family) – all types of pea and beanīrassicaceae (cabbage family) - broccoli, Brussels sprout, cabbage, kohl rabi, cauliflower, kale, mizuna, pak choi, radish, arugula, swede, turnip If you want to get really geeky about crop rotation – and I do – you can also plan a set rotation order, and a really handy way to do that is to give each plant family a shade relating to the colors of the rainbow, as shown below.Īlliaceae (onion family) – onion, shallot, leek, garlic This means you can group plants with similar maintenance requirements together – for instance, all plants in the cabbage family are best grown together to make it easier to net them against cabbage white butterfly and birds – and there's no risk of accidentally passing on crop-specific soil-dwelling pests and diseases to the next crop. Rotating Crops by Crop FamilyĪ better way to rotate annual vegetables is to group them by their plant family. Peas and beans are a very useful part of a successful rotation cycle due to their nitrogen-fixing qualities, the benefits of which are passed on to the crops that follow them in rotation. Using a three-bed rotation, peas and beans commonly occupy a fourth bed and are grown in the same spot each year to avoid having to move cumbersome supports, but while legumes are typically fairly trouble-free there is still an increased risk of a build up of pests and diseases in the soil. Both are members of the Solanaceae family and both are extremely susceptible to the same type of blight that can wipe out whole crops, but under this system they would be classed as fruits and roots respectively, and so could follow one another and pass on the disease to the next crop. However, while this system is simple (you can tell where to group a plant based on the part you're going to eat) it does have a major drawback – plants which belong to the same family, and therefore suffer from the same soil-borne pests and diseases and draw the same nutrients from the soil, don't always produce the same type of edible part.Ĭonsider tomatoes and potatoes, for instance. Traditionally, three or four equal sized beds are planted up with crops which are divided into fairly generalized categories, such as fruits, shoots and leaves, with perhaps an extra category for ‘pods' – peas and beans. ![]()
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