Crop rotation is desperately important in any vegetable garden, but especially so if you have nobly decided to follow organic practices. If you plant the same crop in the same bed year after year, pests and diseases will flock to the site and happily breed and chomp away at your prized onions and potatoes. So splitting your patch, however small, into beds which will provide you with a three or four-year rotation plan will help confuse those nasty bugs.

Of course, if you’re working with a patch as small and condensed as ours, rotation is less effective than on larger, more disparate sites. But leaving gaps between planting crops from the same group, even if they are only a few metres away, will at least temporarily deprive some soil pests of their staple diet.

There are five main groups of vegetables which require rotating:
Legumes: beans and peas.
Brassica: turnips, swedes, radishes, broccoli, sprouts, cauliflowers, cabbages, kales, rocket.
Potato family: potatoes, aubergines, tomatoes, peppers.
Onion family: onions, garlic, leeks, shallots.
Roots/umbellifers: carrots, celery, parley, parsnip, celeriac.

So this is the rotation plan for the next three years:

2009
Bed 1: Red onions, carrots, leeks, garlic.
Bed 2: Pumpkins, courgettes.
Bed 3: White onions, parsnips, garlic.
Bed 4: Potatoes, chard.
Bed 5: Raspberries, loganberries (permanent crops), peas.

2010
Bed 1: Potatoes, chard.
Bed 2: Red onions, carrots, leeks, peas, garlic.
Bed 3: Pumpkins, courgettes.
Bed 4: White onions, parsnips, garlic.
Bed 5: Raspberries, loganberries (permanent crops), climbing squash.

2011
Bed 1: White onions, parsnips, garlic.
Bed 2: Potatoes, chard.
Bed 3: Red onions, carrots, leeks, peas, garlic.
Bed 4: White onions, parsnips, garlic.
Bed 5: Raspberries, loganberries (permanent crops), peas.

The balcony is the sunniest part of the garden, so we shall be growing our tomatoes, salads and peppers there in pots. Because the soil in pots is replaced every year and the pots washed out with boiling water, there is no chance of a build-up in soil pests.