Using Crop Rotation in Your Garden
There have been many advancements made in the field of farming in modern times. With new technologies, yields have been able to flourish and failure has been kept at bay.
When it comes to actually setting up the garden, you need to take in to account the need for crop rotation. This technique is necessary to keep the soil healthy and prevent it from being drained too quickly. Improper crop rotation will lower yields for subsequent years.
For crop rotation to be effective, you need to segment your garden. You will put different types of vegetables in each segment, and then rotate the vegetables every year.
You decide what sections to put the crops in based on what type they are. Four categories exist, the initial one being heavy feeders. They are called this because they use large amounts of nitrogen to fuel their rapid growth.
Medium level feeders are one level below heavy feeders. These include lightly demanding crops that do not grow very tall but still have a lot of leaves, like tomatoes.
Light feeders use the least nitrogen out of all the categories. If you only used light feeders and did not use crop rotation, you would probably be fine for many years. In the light feeding category, the plants are very basic and are essentially only the food, like carrots.
Without the last group of vegetables, crop rotation would not do anything. This final grouping is soil builders, as they replenish the soil with more nitrogen. By doing this, the other vegetables can benefit from their annual support.
When you rotate crops, the heavy feeders follow the soil builders, medium follows heavy, light follows medium, and builders follow light. This ensures that the heavy feeders get the most nitrogen, and keeps the light and middle ground feeders from using more than they need.
