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Multiyear Planting Cycles
On this page find good vegetable garden practices that help plants prosper and thrive, including:
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- Why rotating plantings from season to season in a home vegetable garden produces healthier vegetables.
- The concept and application of rotating vegetable crops.
- How replanting the same vegetables builds large, resistant populations of plant pests and diseases.
- Examples of problem vegetables that deplete garden soils and increase pest populations.
- How legume vegetables such as beans and peas produce nutrients and help keep soils fertile.
- Rotating and varying vegetables in a garden.
About Vegetable Plant Rotation
Rotating plantings on multiyear cycles is another practice to improve vegetable gardens. Consider moving vegetables from place to place in following seasons. You’ll make them healthier and prevent plant diseases from becoming established in your garden.
Certain plants have well-documented relationships with certain common diseases and pests. Prevent harmful pests and plant diseases from becoming established by changing vegetable growing locations every year.
Garlic and onion, for instance, attract a flying pest called Hylemya antiqua that lays its eggs in the soil around the roots of the growing plants.
It takes several generations for the insects to build up sufficient numbers to become a damaging nuisance.
Vegetable gardeners seeking good harvests of garlic may enjoy bountiful and beautiful heads the first year, but find second and third year’s crops are stunted and filled with boring maggots.
The pests hatched from eggs the adult flying pest laid on the prior year’s garlic plants as they grew.
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Knowledgeable gardeners choose new locations to plant their onions and garlic each year since the pupae that hatch in the prior year’s garlic patch die if no host plants are available to feed them.
It is safe to replant them in the original bed after a few seasons have reduced the insect population. Roughly, a four-year cycle works best. During this time, immune crops such as squash, melons, beans, or peas, will grow perfectly well in these spots.
Other plants rapidly exhaust the soil of certain trace nutrients. Their loss means plant vitality and yield decline in subsequent years.
Home vegetable gardeners should amend their garden soils. Apply compost, fertilizer, and pH-improving amendments to eliminate the soil depletion cycle and return organic materials to their original levels.
There are aesthetic reasons to vary plantings as well as practical ones. Many gardeners grow weary of their garden’s routine appearance and plantings each year. Sometimes conditions change due to rapid growth of young trees that mature and shade planting beds.
For these reasons and for better garden health, try new planting locations for repeat crops or plant new varieties in the old patch. You’ll find change a helper in your quest for the perfect garden.
Beds and Vegetable Planting Rotation
Equal-area beds or rows in home vegetable gardens makes it simple to plan rotations of vegetables over a 3–4 year cycle. Prior year planting plans may be used, assigning the plantings to a new bed each year until the cycle repeats.
As an example, using four beds of equal area and sun exposure, imagine planting one bed with corn, the second with greens, a third with cucumbers and squash, and the last with corn.
The following year, make the same plantings—or vary a bit, as you prefer—but move them along to the next bed.
Repeat the process each season until the crops return to their original beds in the fifth year.
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