Rotate, Rotate, Rotate!

Organic systems manage insects and diseases in a variety of ways, one of the fundamentals though is Crop Rotation. Crops Rotation is the practice of planting dissimilar crops in succession — in other words, not planting the same crop in the same place year after year.

On our farm crops are grouped into plant families, the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant are all nightshades, the cabbage, kale, and broccoli are all brassicas, squash and cucumbers are cucurbits and so on. Each plant family has specific disease and insect issues so each family is planted in its own part of the field. Plant families are not planted in the same spot for several more years — where this years kale and cabbage are, next year we will plant winter squash, and after that a cover crop of clover for two years. Since many diseases can live in the soil for quite some time, the longer we can manage to keep from planting the same plant family in the same field the better. In general we aim for six years before we plant the same crop on the same soil again.

It gets a little more complex, doesn’t life always! We lump some plant families together that share certain disease and pest parameters. We have multi year perennial cover crops like clover as well as successions of annual cover crops over several years that help us to add time between the crops. There are some crops don’t need a six year rotation and get slipped in more often, and some crops get diseases eventually no mater how broad the rotation program. Sometimes we have other factors to contend with as well. For example it might be nice for the rotation plan to plant the early planting of spring peas right where the tomatoes were last season, but if that field doesn’t usually dry up until mid May, chances are we will have to plant the peas elsewhere. Managing a rotation can really keep us on our toes, but it’s nice to have something that keeps the intellectual challenge in our work.