That's a good link, Steve. Thanks for sharing! My veggie garden is small scale compared to what you have going. I have 5 raised beds for veggies, 3 are 4'x4' raised beds, one is roughly 3'X8' and the other 4'x8'. I dedicate 1 bed each spring to tomatoes. In fall, after frost kills the tomatoes, I pull them, amend, then plant garlic in that bed in October/November. Since garlic usually get harvested in July and the tomatoes go in late May/early June, it keeps me from planting tomatoes in the same bed 2 years in a row.

I do try to keep track, I used to draw it out on paper, now by email in a folder dedicated to veggie plantings by year. It works, but I tend to throw a wrench in things by having extra tomato plants to squeeze in somewhere, then forgetting to document what I squeezed in where. I remember having some kind of blight on a couple of tomato plants 4 or 5 years ago in one of the bigger beds. I did avoid putting tomatoes in that bed for several years after.

4 of the 5 beds now have tree, shrub seedlings and perennials in them to overwinter. This is the first year since 2009 that I'm not ordering seedlings from CSU, I have plenty here to plant come spring!

I'll save the link and try the 4 year rotation. I've stopped planting potatoes and sweet corn, they take up too much space for my set up with too little return. I'm interested in what you discover on organic vs non organic and what crops don't need to be rotated.

Barb

Don't take anything I say about rotation as fact ... I have almost no experience with NOT rotating ... but, it's pretty much random, never with any real plans. Crops rotate because I have had large gardens.

Here is what I have learned from some gardeners:

1. They feed their tomatoes compost and question how it could possibly help to move them around. Garden debris is brought to them in the form of compost.
2. Onions are supposed to gain little from being moved about.
3. I have seen corn grown on the same field for like 20 years. It is now a residential neighborhood and, I'll say this, the soil there looks very poor.

1. I wonder about this, too. The tomatoes in my garden have a few locations where they can be away from the neighbor's lawn, which has proven to be Slugville.
2. My emphasis with onions is to get lots of organic nitrogen fertilizer on them and to keep it coming.
3. My corn may or may not be fertilized organically. It's a heavy feeder. BTW, corn is the only veggie crop that I might feed conventional fertilizer.

Steve

Maybe not facts, Steve, but sharing info is what RMG is all about. it's appreciated! How are you healing up?

I'm positive that I didn't feed the sweet corn enough the few years I tried it. Truth be told, there's a farm stand I pass on my way to work that sells my all time favorite, Peaches and Cream. I'll never grow it as well as they do, so I'm content to buy there.

I didn't know onions were heavy feeders, too. I haven't rotated mine in several years. I just leave one or two to go to seed and move around what pops up in spring. Pretty lazy!

Are there things you don't bother growing? Or tried, but you just couldn't get to grow in your climate/conditions? I try different crops for fun, but some things just don't want to grow here, bell peppers for example. Chili peppers do great, but my bells have been pathetic every time I've tried them. It's a learning curve, I'm sure and I have much to learn!

I KIND of rotate, but not really. I don't rotate tomatoes, sun hours are (were?) a precious commodity in my garden so so the "queen of the garden" got the choice spot every year. (Peppers have always the "king" of my garden, but simce they were almost always grown on containers, rotation and placement was never a big concern.)

For other stuff, I have tried to rotate as best I could, either by skipping crop families altogether for a season or more, or moving them around a little. But with a small garden, true "rotation" is hard to do.

"some things just don't want to grow here, bell peppers for example. Chili peppers do great, but my bells have been pathetic every time I've tried them."

I second that motion. Chiles do amazingly well, even long DTM ones like habaneros. Bells on the other hand are exactly that... pathetic!

New things can be fun, but this past summer I was very glad to have taken a step back and really grow just a few of the "old standby" crops.

treebarb said:I didn't know onions were heavy feeders, too. ... Are there things you don't bother growing? Or tried, but you just couldn't get to grow in your climate/conditions?

Yes, those onions are ... I have learned to think of them as grass. No, not pot - grass, like lawngrass or sweetcorn ... they are all leaf and the bulb is just an enlarged part of the leaves.

I tried to grow okra, once. Sweet potatoes - Dad and DW have experience with sweet potatoes and my experiments over a couple of seasons and with a couple of different varieties of sweet potatoes nearly made them laugh. Well, those plants had some roots, altho calling them tubers was a bit of a stretch.

I have some trouble with all peppers. Until I grew Super Chili and Thai Hot in the greenhouse through this summer, I thought that I had a good handle on those two varieties. I'd say they had about 20% - 30% better growth in the greenhouse. They were so busy growing during the early part of the season that they were several weeks behind the same plants outdoors but, of course, they had several more weeks of a growing season in October than those outdoors.

Bell peppers don't do well but I can get a couple off each plant if they are early-maturing types. Habañero proved a pathetic failure the time they were in the garden. Many, many tomato varieties are just too late maturing.

Having a big garden allows me to have several varieties of most anything at one time. If my choices were not informed by those comparisons, I'm not sure if I would grow some crops, at all! Each year I have had varieties that I have never seen growing. Sometimes, I have had 3 or more to look at. A gardener can really be made a believer when one variety can outperform ALL others, together!

Steve

Healing?

When I wrote the last post, I was kinda keeping my head down here in the lazyboy. DW had chewed me out earlier ...

I have some work needing dun on the pickup and the guy at the parts house carried them out and put them in the back of the car. When I arrived in my driveway, I moved them from one vehicle into the other, not thinking one thing about being limited on what I can lift. DW obviously thought that was kinda stupid but, hey, I guess that I've returned to some kinda normalcy.

ッ Steve