mr mustard
The season is rolling by and bare earth is appearing as crops are taken. Bare soil is bad soil, so into the ground go the green manures.
We have now established an annual cycle of green manures and overwintering plants to follow our crop rotation.
This years potato bed is planted with field beans and with broad beans to be followed by legumes in the spring...
This years legume bed is planted with mustard to be followed by brassicas in the spring...
This years brassica bed is planted with garlic, onions and shallots...
This years onion bed is planted with grazing rye... to be manured and planted with potatoes in the spring.
As Hannibal Hayes said 'I love it when a plan comes together'.
4 comments:
Oh, dear, you sound so organized in your rotations. I'm so trying to do better, but I really like to play in the garden, instead of being a good record-keeper. I have managed to make a decent map of this year's main vegetable garden and satellite garden now.
We have all sorts of critters/micro-organisms (across phyla) that build up in our warm humid climate to worry susceptible plants.
Thanks for encouraging me to be serious about my rotations!
Best,
Lisa
When I laid out the allotment, a neighbour looked darkly across and said
'I see you're a systems man'.
I don't think it was a compliment!
I wish I could be more chaotic!
My dad is a very tidy gardener and I have inherited it from him!
It is really dark here tonight. Winter began today!
Take care.
Rob
I try to rotate, but don't always get it perfect as I plant large areas of certain things like tomatoes. With limited space, unavoidably tomatoes sometimes end up overlapping year to year. I do try to compost the soil well each year, so that probably helps.
Hi Will!
The problem we face with potatoes and tomatoes is blight. Even having a four year rotation probably leaves insufficient tome for viruses etc to die. A warm damp summer creates perfect conditions for wind blown blight spores to ravage tomatoes and maincrop and second-cropping potatoes. Worse still for us, our climate gives us two years out of five on average for outdoor tomatoes to ripen. So, even if we had a good summer, late summer conditions could see the crop wiped out.
Crop rotation does not stop the rot.
Cheers
Rob
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