Vegetable Crop Rotation: How To Increase Your Harvests

Having problems with disease or pests? Are your vegetables not growing well? Learn how vegetable crop rotation every year can give you better harvests.

You’ve tried to grow food for your family but you’ve run into problems. 

Maybe:

• you’ve had pests decimate your greens and leave you with leaves peppered with chew holes.
• you’ve had disease hit your crops and wipe them out every year like clockwork.
• you’ve had mediocre harvests and find that crops just don’t do that well anymore and you are having to use lots of fertilizer to try and get stuff to grow.

These problems all sound familiar as I’ve encountered all of them myself. And these problems are hard to avoid if you’re growing food organically without resorting to chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers.

However by implementing vegetable crop rotation, you can help break the cycle of pest and disease infestations and depleted soil and have better and greater harvests.

Why Vegetable Crop Rotation is so Important

Pests

Insect pests are very territorial and love staying in one place. Once they have established in part of your garden, they settle in and raise their family there.

And then you get damage to your plants such as leaves with holes, broccoli and cauliflower heads filled with aphids and big fat cabbage worms.

And some pests can be very monotrophic – eating only one thing. So if you keep planting broccoli in the same spot every year, they are overjoyed not having to move to continue feeding on what they like.

The good thing is that pests hate it when you change their diet. They usually lay their eggs close to the best food source and so when you move their favourite food, they don’t know what to do. Yes, they could move but first they would have to find out where their food was moved to.

Without their favourite food source, the pests will die off. Maybe a few might find where you moved the crop to but you’ll find the infestations to be much smaller and easier to manage with organic pest control methods. Natural pest predators and beneficial insects will have an easier job of keeping the pests in check as well when there are less.

So vegetable crop rotation is great for confusing pests. You have to though keep it up otherwise pests will find the new location and settle in. You have to keep them guessing where their crop will end up next and they hate that.

Plant Diseases

Plant diseases can wipe out a whole crop. And they can be very persistent especially if they’re a soil-borne disease. Fungal diseases such as club root that affects brassicas can survive in the soil for years and affect every brassica crop you grow.

There may be ways to sterilize the soil between crops but unless you resort to chemicals, you will likely not be able to get rid of all remnants of the disease.

However as with pests, diseases require the host plant. Without the host plant the disease will die off. We’ve seen that in human history with plagues. Plague organisms will kill off a large number of the population but then run out of food (as morbid as that sounds) and die off.

So vegetable crop rotation will halt most soil-borne diseases or at least minimize them so that they can be handled more easily.

Soil Health

Soil gets depleted from every crop that is grown in it. Plants take up nutrients in the soil to feed themselves. You can and should add amendments and fertilizer to boost soil health, especially before you plant out transplants or direct seed. 

However for the best soil, building the soil by following vegetable crop rotation is the best method and will save you money on purchasing all of those amendments and fertilizers.

One key element is nitrogen. Legumes such as beans and peas help to fix nitrogen in the soil. They are able to extract the naturally occurring nitrogen in the air and store it in their roots. When the plant is spent at the end of the growing season, it then releases the nitrogen into the soil where it is available for the next crop.

The other way that crop rotation will boost your soil health is by growing root crops to break up heavy soils. No-till gardening is becoming popular so having a natural way for your crops to loosen the soil for you naturally is a great benefit.

Growing potatoes has always traditionally been a great way to prepare the soil for other crops such as greens that require a loose soil. However potatoes are notorious for having diseases such as blight that can affect crops planted afterwards. They are better grown in grow bags which can be emptied at the end of the harvest and new soil used for the following crop of potatoes.

Root crops that are especially good at loosening soil include parsnips and carrots, but even the daikon radish does a good job with its roots.

Need a handy vegetable crop rotation cheatsheet to figure out how to rotate your crops most effectively?

Just one of the many cheatsheets, worksheets, checklists and guides in the Homegrown Resources Library.