Reasons For Crop Rotation In The Small Garden.
 (Read 50+ times)
By Glory Lennon
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You’ve been planting your vegetable garden in the very same spot in the very same order year after year. You’ve got rows neatly labeled for tomato, lettuce, carrot, watermelon and peas in precisely that order without variance. At the beginning it seemed great, neat, clean and predictable. At least it was. Every year after the first few seasons, however, the quality and quantity of the vegetables seemed to go down, the plants are looking sickly now and they’ve been inundated with insects. What the heck is going on? You didn’t rotate your crops, that’s what.
Rotate crops in a small garden? Isn’t crop rotation for big commercial growers so they don’t end up with another Dust-bowl as they had back in the days of the Great Depression? So, why should you rotate crops in a tiny, little, insignificant, backyard vegetable garden? Merely because the same principles apply just on a smaller scale.
Let’s take that example of the Dust-bowl and see how it happened. Farmers were using the soil, abusing it actually and over-planting. They never allowed the soil to rest to replenish itself before setting another crop. This stole all nutrients and left just dust. It was no longer rich, vibrant soil alive with micro-organisms, organic matter and lovely, wiggly, under-appreciated worms that do so much for the soil. It was literally dust, a lifeless, mass of dirt with nothing to hold it together. Not even weeds could grow on it in order to keep it from blowing away in the wind. Thus, we had the dreaded dust-bowl.
Now, with much research done to understand where those by-gone farmers went wrong, we are no longer ignorant of the fact that you only get from the soil what you put back into it. This means if you only take from the soil and never replenished it you will be lucky to be able to grow crabgrass.
This is where composting is so vital for the overall health of your garden. A small pile of spent vegetation, kitchen scrapes, grass clipping and leaves from all those deciduous trees decompose into something rich, nutritious and wonderful for you to use on your garden. This replenishes the soil, re-activates those micro-organisms and brings back the wiggly worms we no long take for granted.
So, if all you need is compost then what’s with the crop rotation? How can putting tomatoes where the lettuce was and the peas where the carrots were do anything? Aren’t you still stealing nutrients from the soil? Aren’t you still over-planting? And if so, isn’t compost going to fix it anyway? Yes and no.
You forget or perhaps you are unaware that crop rotation isn’t just to give the soil a rest. Crop rotation also helps eliminate diseases in the soil and hopefully confuses insects so there isn’t a mass invasion to take out your whole crop of cabbage. If you keep planting the tomato in the same place insects will get used to seeing it there, they will tell their friends and woe-be-you! You will not have a healthy tomato plant ever again. Fungal diseases, just like insects, linger in the soil and attack the same place year after year so if you tend to switch things up a bit it will confuse them, upset the status quo and then you may be able to catch those varmints before they latch on permanently causing irreparable damage.
So, knowing all this, next time spring planting time comes around do yourself, your veggies and your soil a favor and mix it up a bit. Put the corn where the peas grew last year, put the tomato where the melons were and switch up the lettuce and broccoli. You’ll be glad you did.
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Author Bio Box: Glory Lennon
 Visit http://www.helium.com/user/32782 for more fascinating gardening lessons, amusing short stories and intriguing novel excerpts.
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