Crop Rotation Craziness (or rotations based on the land rather than schedules in books) — Hartwood Farm
I know a lot of gardeners stress out about this, but IMO (not sure if I count as an expert to ignore here or not) if you have a backyard garden that’s 10 x 10, crop rotation doesn’t matter as much because you’re already planting a small and diverse mix of species, so the issues crop rotation deals with in theory shouldn’t be hitting you too hard. (Exception, if your garden is 100% tomatoes year after year or something similar, you could run into problems and might want to consider diversifying your plantings or starting a rotation of spots).
But when you start planting like we do of beds upon beds of related vegetable species, if you don’t rotate what you grow where, diseases can build up really fast. Plus, as organic farmers we don’t have great pest and disease control options. Yes, there are things that we can spray that are allowed in organic situations, but most of them don’t work very well and cost a lot more than conventional spray options (and you have to apply them way more, so labor costs go up). Our goal with crop rotation is to plant things in a way that we don’t have to spray and that they still stay healthy.
Crop rotation is one of the funny areas in gardening full of super rigid ideas and proscriptions. Unfortunately for the ease of filling out our organic application, our farm’s process is the opposite of rigid.
We have a lot of fields that were supposed to all be the same size and length but they aren’t. Our land has these odd little seeps and hills and gullies and areas of good and bad soil and spots with more or less wind. Over the past decade as we learned about the locations of all of these little non-conforming zones, we’ve tweaked and changed our fields around so now they aren’t uniform, they aren’t mathematically neat in the sense of being easy to crop plan around, and they can be a total hassle for managing materials around (do you cut your row cover to 150 feet or 200 or 285 or 315 feet?).
