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PLANNING THAT ROTATION

As you prepare to put in this year's vegetable garden, keep in mind the importance of crop rotation. As we've discussed before, it's enormously helpful to the health and vitality of your plants if you relocate them from one season to the next. This prevents heavy feeders from using up nutrients in one spot, and it foils a lot of diseases and insect pests that favor one type of crop or another. 

But how do you know which types of plants should succeed each other? In general, you can divide your vegetables into five main groups: Nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, and peppers), vine crops (cucumbers, melons), corn and green manure crops (wheat and rye), crucifers (cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli), and legumes (beets, carrots, peas). With these categories in mind, you can plan to flip-flop a nightshade for a legume (instead of a tomato for a pepper, which might not be an effective rotation).
 

LINE OF SUCCESSION 
You can get a whole lot more out of a garden if you practice "succession planting." In essence, this technique involves growing the quick-maturing crops first and then replacing them with something that needs a bit more time to develop (possibly followed by a fall or winter crop). What types of crops can you assign to the first shift? Try early beets, spinach, and cabbage, lettuce, onion sets, peas,
radishes, mustard, and turnips. (These crops typically make good late-season candidates as well.) For that second shift, you might consider bush and pole beans, corn, cucumbers, eggplants, tomatoes,
peppers, melons, potatoes, pumpkins, and squash. 
 
 

 

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