Doing the twist, otherwise known as crop rotation, is desperately important in your garden.
Stop! Before you dig anything, or start planting anything for the new year, have you made sure that you’re giving your soil the love and tender care that it needs? This year, you can improve your vegetable patch no end by doing the twist again: crop rotation.
Moving your crops around in a rotation system is an essential part of managing your veg patch well. It means crops leave nutrients that are useful to the next crop, and that soil diseases and pests don’t build up as quickly.
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.
Pumpkins, salads and sweetcorn can be grown wherever there is space. Grow onions and roots together as the scent of their foliage, grown together, confuses pests from the others.
Here is a sample crop rotation plan:
Year1
Year2
Year3
Year4
If you’re super-keen, or you have a huge plot of land, have a look at the wonderful Tamsin Borlase’s 12-year rotation plan.
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Diligent Gardener
A useful and timely reminder. Many an allotment holder has fallen foul of not rotating!