Planning and Rotation

Home Vegetable Gardening

Course 1 · Chapter 9 · Planning and Rotation: Beds, Crop Rotation, Successional Sowing and a Planting Calendar

Chapter 8 introduced five easy crops. A little planning turns a handful of good crops into a steady supply year after year. This chapter covers laying out beds, moving crops around from year to year, sowing in stages, and putting it all on a calendar.

Laying Out Beds

Narrow beds are easier to look after than a big open plot. A bed about 1.2 m wide lets you reach the middle from either side, so you never walk on the soil and compact it (check). Leave paths of about 40 to 50 cm between beds for a barrow and your feet. Raised beds or plain beds edged with boards both work; what matters is that the soil stays loose, fed (Chapter 3) and weeded (Chapter 6).

# A small plot: four beds, each about 1.2 m x 2.4 m, with paths between
plot/
├── bed-A/   legumes: beans, peas
├── bed-B/   brassicas: cabbage, kale
├── bed-C/   roots: potatoes, carrots, beetroot
└── bed-D/   others: courgettes, salad, onions

Crop Rotation

Rotation means not growing the same crop family in the same place two years running. Pests and diseases that favour one family build up in the soil, and each family draws on different nutrients. Moving crops breaks the cycle and spreads the demand on the soil (check).

Group	Examples	What it does for or takes from the soil
Legumes	Beans, peas	Add nitrogen through root bacteria; leave the roots in (Chapter 8)
Brassicas	Cabbage, kale, broccoli, radishes	Hungry for nitrogen, so they follow the legumes; prone to clubroot, so the break matters (check)
Roots	Potatoes, carrots, beetroot, parsnips	Prefer soil that was not freshly manured, which makes roots fork (check); potatoes are in a family of their own, with blight risk (Chapter 7)
Others	Courgettes, salad, onions	Fill gaps; onions and salad are fairly flexible

With four beds, move each group one bed along every year, so that each group returns to its first bed in year five.

# A four-year rotation (each group moves one bed on each year)
Year   Bed A      Bed B      Bed C      Bed D
1      legumes    brassicas  roots      others
2      others     legumes    brassicas  roots
3      roots      others     legumes    brassicas
4      brassicas  roots      others     legumes

Keep a garden notebook Rotation only works if you remember what grew where. Sketch the beds each spring and write the crops in. A phone photo of the sketch is enough.

Successional Sowing

Quick crops such as salad leaves and radishes are best sown in small amounts every 2 to 3 weeks (Chapter 8), so harvests arrive in a steady stream. A second tactic is to follow one crop with another in the same space: early potatoes lifted in summer leave room for a late sowing of salad or quick-growing leaves (check). A third is intercropping, sowing fast radishes between slow-growing parsnips.

Common planning failures Sowing everything on the first warm weekend and then having nothing to harvest later. Planting tall beans where they shade the salad. Forgetting which bed held the potatoes and putting them there again. Filling every bed in spring with no space left for summer follow-on crops.

A Planting Calendar

A calendar shows each job in its month. The one below is a rough guide for a cool, temperate climate in the northern hemisphere; shift it by a few weeks to suit your own last-frost date (check). Chapter 10 turns it into a full plan.

Months	Main jobs
Feb to Mar	Plan the beds; chit potatoes; sow courgettes and tender crops indoors later in the spring (check); sow early salad under cover
Apr to May	Plant potatoes; sow salad and radishes outdoors; harden off seedlings (Chapter 5); plant out after the last frost
Jun to Jul	Water, weed and mulch; earth up potatoes; pick beans, courgettes and salad often; sow the second batch of salad
Aug to Sep	Harvest main crops; sow late salad and autumn crops; clear spent plants and sow a green manure or add compost (Chapter 3)
Oct to Jan	Tidy, mulch bare soil, order seed, review the notebook and plan next year's rotation

Plan on paper first An hour with a pencil costs nothing. Moving a crop on paper is free; moving it after the seedlings are in is not.

Not Yet Verified, and Sources

Source. Written from general knowledge of gardening; no specific source was read. Nothing is quoted from a text.
Marked (check). Recommended bed width, the effects of rotation on pests and nutrients, the details of clubroot and manured root crops, follow-on cropping, and all calendar dates. Verify against local advice and your own frost dates.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Last year beans grew in bed A, cabbages in bed B, potatoes in bed C and courgettes in bed D. Using the four-bed rotation, say what goes in each bed this year and give one reason for the move of the cabbages.

→ Solution

Exercise 2

You have a bed of early potatoes to lift in July and want to keep it busy. Describe how you would use the space for the rest of the season, and say what you would do to the soil first.

→ Solution

Exercise 3

Draw up a simple plan for one 1.2 m x 2.4 m bed for spring to autumn, using at least three of the five crops from Chapter 8. State what goes where, and when you sow or plant each.

→ Solution

Quick Reference

Beds: about 1.2 m wide, with paths, so you never tread on the soil
Rotation: legumes, brassicas, roots, others; move one bed each year
Succession: sow little and often; follow early crops with late ones
Calendar: plan, sow, plant out, tend, harvest, tidy
Notebook: record what grew where

Coming next Chapter 10 is the capstone: a month-by-month plan for your first season on a small plot.