How to Use Crop Rotation in Gardening

Three Parts:Separating Your GardenPlanting and Harvesting Your CropsContinuing Your Crop RotationCommunity Q&A

Crop rotation is the practice of growing different fruits and vegetables in a different patch of soil each season. Learning to rotate your crops effectively is mostly a matter of careful planning. Once you’ve decided what you want to raise, map out your garden into separate plots and designate one type of plant to each. Every growing season, you’ll move your desired crops to a new plot, introducing them to fresh, nutrient-rich soil where they'll be able to go on thriving.

Steps

Part 1

Separating Your Garden

1. 1

   Divide your crops up into groups.

   Once you have an idea of what you want to grow, assign your selections to one of four categories: fruit crops, root crops, leaf crops, and legumes. Since the crops in each category deplete similar amounts of nutrients from the soil, splitting them up by type is easier than trying to determine where to place them individually.

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   • Fruit crops include those like cucumbers, peppers, and eggplant require lots of nutrients to produce their colorful, meaty fruit.^[2]
   • Popular leafy greens like lettuce, cabbage, and spinach are heavy feeders that should follow low-nutrient crops in the garden.
   • Root crops such as onions, turnips, carrots, and radishes can get by on fewer nutrients, and tend to be relatively low maintenance.
   • Legumes, which include beans, peas, and all other veggies that grow in a pod, actually return nitrogen to the soil. This property makes them a good choice for trading off with more demanding crops.

2. 2

   Determine each group's specific nutrient needs.

   Learn a little bit about the plants you want to grow and how taxing they’ll be on your garden’s soil. Heavy feeders like corn, tomatoes, and cabbage, for example, can drain large quantities of nutrients in a single season. Light feeders, such as most root vegetables and herbs, get by on relatively low levels.

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   • Legumes are in a league of their own. They actually improve soil health by introducing essential nitrogen into the ground through a process called nitrogen fixation.^[4]
   • Understanding of your crops' unique requirements will allow you to modify your rotation plan so that they'll have the best chance of success.

3. 3

   Designate a plot for each crop.

   Since the soil conditions in your garden will be the same starting out, you’re free to situate your crops wherever you like. You might choose to plant your legumes in alongside fruit crops like tomatoes or squash, or alternate leafy greens with low-impact root crops. The exact placement will only become important after the first growing season, when the soil containing each crop type has been used up.

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   • For maximum nutrient retention, consider alternating between heavy feeders and light feeders. Moving a crop of melons into a plot previously devoted to a few cilantro plants will ensure that they get the sustenance they need.
   • The traditional eight-crop rotation plan can be a great place to start if you’re new to crop rotation. It calls for a eight simple crops: tomatoes, peas, cabbage, sweet corn, potatoes, squash, root crops, and beans. Each of these crops is shifted over one plot every next growing season.^[6]

4. 4

   Leave at least one plot empty.

   In order to rotate your crops effectively, you’ll need enough room to plant everything you want to grow and still have one or two patches of soil left over at all times. Leaving a plot fallow, or unused, will give the soil a break and prepare it for the next growing season.

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   • If you don't plan on growing a certain type of crop, use the spare plot to plant more of the fruits and vegetables you like.
   • Alternately, you can leave more than one plot empty (preferably on opposite ends of the garden) to give the soil more time to recover.^[8]

Part 2

Planting and Harvesting Your Crops

1. 1

   Plant your crops.

   Till the soil in your growing site lightly and sow seeds for each crop in their corresponding plots. It will take a few weeks for your delicious homegrown fruits and veggies to begin springing up. The exact time of year you plant will depend mostly on the crop, so be sure to study each plant type to find out when to put it in the ground.

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   • You can increase the organization and efficiency of your rotation cycles by sticking to crops with similar planting and harvesting schedules.

2. 2

   Harvest the crops from your first growing season.

   Once the items in your garden have reached peak ripeness, venture out and gather as much as you can. Try not to leave any usable veggies behind. Your next step will be to relocate the plants, and any leftover growth will have a tough time surviving the transition.

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   • Hold off on picking your crops until they’re ready. With most plant types, you’ll have a span of several weeks to take care of your harvesting and replanting and keep things on schedule.^[11]

3. 3

   Re-fertilize your soil as needed.

   Following the first season's harvest, examine the soil at your growing site closely. If it looks overly dry, sandy, or colorless, it may be spent. Add a small amount of nitrogen-rich organic fertilizer to restore vital nutrients and make sure that the next growing season is equally fruitful.

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   • Compost, humus, and manure tend to make the best fertilizers for vegetable gardens in arid climates.
   • Fertilizing shouldn't be necessary in most cases. In fact, one of the major advantages of crop rotation is that it cuts down on the need to use fertilizers as often as for traditional gardening methods.^[13]

Part 3

Continuing Your Crop Rotation

1. 1

   Shift each crop over one plot for the following season.

   Dig up your freshly-picked plots and aerate the vacant soil thoroughly. Then, move each crop over clockwise to its new destination and re-plant it. There, it will enjoy a brand new set of soil conditions that will promote healthy growth and discourage pests and disease from setting in.

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   • A basic clockwise rotation is the most common configuration in rotation gardening. However, you could also move relocate your crops counterclockwise, across opposing plots, or even in a random pattern, as long as no patch gets the same kind of crop 2 seasons in a row.
   • Don’t forget to also move your empty replenishment plot over. That way, each patch of soil will have a full season to recover.

2. 2

   Adjust your rotation plan if your crops are failing.

   In time, you may discover that a certain rotation works better in theory than it does in your garden. If this happens, play around with the order of your plots until you find a more productive arrangement. Remember that as a rule, plants with high nutrient needs should be moved to plots previously occupied by plants with low nutrients needs, and vice versa.

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   • To get struggling crops back on track, stick to the fundamentals of crop rotation, like trading out herbs with robust fruit crops, planting legumes after alliums and cucurbits, and following legumes with needy brassicas.^[16]
   • It may take a couple seasons to find out what works best for a particular selection of crops.

3. 3

   Change out your crops as desired between seasons.

   If you want to introduce new selections to your garden, the best time to do it is just before the start of the next growing season. Following a successful harvest, clear out a plot and use it to sow fruits or vegetables with nutrient needs that match the soil's current levels. You can then put the new crop into rotation along with your existing crops.

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   • Heavy feeders like pumpkin or Swiss chard, for instance, will do best in a plot that housed light feeders or legumes the season before.
   • Consider making room in your garden for local seasonal offerings each year to take advantage of changing growing conditions.

4. 4

   Continue with your rotation cycle every growing season.

   Assuming you’ve chosen a logical sequencing for each of your offerings, they should go on producing at a high rate year after year. To ensure that infestation and disease don’t become a problem, rotations should adhere to a three-year cycle, meaning that no one crop returns to its original position in less than three consecutive seasons.

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   • Neglecting to properly rotate your crops can result in losses of up to 40% in subsequent seasons.^[19]
   • It’s not necessary to stick to the same rotation pattern every growing season—the most important thing to remember is that no crop should go back where it’s already been.

Tips

• When in doubt about the next rotation in the cycle, follow the crop in question with a light feeder like beans or leafy greens.
• In addition to keeping your garden healthy, crop rotation also reduces your ecological impact, as it cuts down on the need for chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
• While it’s possible to reap the benefits of crop rotation in a smaller garden by dividing available beds into individual growing areas, this can make it more difficult to control the spread of disease.
• If you have a long growing season or are raising plants like radishes that mature quickly, you might be able to plant more than one crop in a single bed each season. With careful planning, succession plantings can even be rotated through different beds in the same season.

Warnings

• Whenever possible, avoid planting crops that favor drastically different soil conditions alongside one another. This can stunt the development of one or both.

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