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Crop Rotation Is Vital For Vegetable Gardening

Vegetable gardening is easy once you get the hang of things. In order to ensure that the soil is always fertile, experts recommend crop rotation. The practice of crop rotation has been going on for years. It ensures that the soils nutrients are never depleted and prevents the buildup of pathogens or pests. The best way to do this is to plant different sorts of vegetables in a marked area. For example, if you just harvested cabbage, another product from a different family must be planted.

The best way to do this is to divide the area in your backyard into four or five sectors. If you had legume crops in one bed, root crops in another, fruit bearing in a third, foliage in a fourth and brassicas in the fifth, then just move it over to the next and so forth. The process is tedious yes because it is repetitive but this is the only way to ensure that soil where your vegetables will be planted are able to bear fruit.

So you don’t get confused, you should record everything so you don’t make the mistake of planting it again a year from now. Remember, there must always be a season interval before planting that vegetable. If you like the vegetable so much and can’t live without it, you can plant the same vegetable again but not in the same place where it was before. It has to be relocated elsewhere.

You can never plant a vegetable of the same family in the same area. Take for instance cabbage and broccoli that belong to the brassicas family. Both of these require a lot of nitrogen and if you plant one or the other there again, do you think that there will be sufficient nitrogen for the other one to grow? Naturally the answer is no which is why the nitrogen level has to be replaced by putting in beans or peas that belong to the legume family that have nitrogen producing nodules in their roots that will eventually be passed on to the soil.

So you have to know which vegetable belongs to what family when you engage in vegetable gardening. Making a mistake will cost you a season of hard work with nothing to show for it so do some research, get advice from experts and most of all, have fun in your backyard.