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Rotations

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Rotations are a basic tool of organic gardening and together with the 'Bed' or 'No-Dig' system help towards good allotment management. Different vegetables have different needs and in many cases growing the same vegetable in the same place year after year can lead to problems - pests and diseases can build up and the nutrients can be depleted so your yields suffer and your problems can spread to surrounding plots.

Grow your vegetables on a different bed each successive year. By following a regular order of cropping can make better use of the ground and also better use of fertilisers and other soil treatments because the following crop benefits from the legacy of its predecessor. Common rotations follow a three or four year pattern, but it would be possible to devise a ten or eleven year pattern - which you choose depends largely on the vegetables that you and your family like. There's not much point in growing them if your not going to eat them simply for their being part of a rotation system - you can make your rotation pattern almost as individual as you like - there are some pointers to follow in planning your personal pattern but even then they are not written in tablets of stone. I'll come to how the variations arise and how they can be dealt with later.

A simple rotation pattern to begin with is over four years.

Begin by dividing the growing area of your plot into a number of beds divisible by four, so that, for the first season beds 1, 5, 9 and so on will have members of the potato family - that includes tomatoes and peppers as well as potatoes. In the second growing season they will be replaced by the legumes - beans and peas, followed in year 3 by the Brassicas - your cabbages and Brussels sprouts and, this may come as a surprise, turnips and swedes. Finally in year four will come the onions and root crops, but in this case that means carrots and parsnips. 

Because there is no reason to grow crops that you don't like you will develop a rotation that suits you. And the way that you work is to plan where your basic rotation pattern crops are to grow and then fill the remaining spaces with those other vegetables. They have now become part of the rotation and will also move around the beds keeping their place in the rotations. There is one other possibility to consider once you have established your plot pattern, some vegetables work very well together, you will hear this sometimes called 'Companion Planting' - typical examples are members of the cucurbit family - marrows and courgettes - they work  well with climbing beans, both Runner and French and also Sweet Corn.

Certainly until you have some experience you will find that both the choice of variety and the weather will affect the time that a crop will occupy the growing space will vary from what is claimed on the seed packet or in books, those are only a guide, Nature hasn't read the seed packet, not the book and will go about it in her own good time, you have to learn patience and a few tricks.

Because of those different growing times there will be occasions when your crop has been harvested and you don't have anything to fill the space - it may be that it is the wrong season for sowing or something else, but the one thing that you don't want to do is to leave the soil bare - this is where you will find either catch crops - the quick growing salad vegetables are typical - or green manures and mulches become valuable techniques that can be included on a regular basis into your rotation. At least one well-respected writer on organic allotment management includes a fallow year in her rotation..

To end this very basic description of Rotations let me encourage you to get to know the vegetable families - the members tend to like the same conditions as other members of the same family and in fact as mentioned earlier you could build your rotation pattern about all of them. This is a far from complete list but it does include most of the vegetables that are commonly grown on allotments: