Free Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth by Cindy Conner Page B

depleted of certain nutrients. You can fertilize, but moving things around is a more balanced approach. That is, in addition to having your soil tested and adding any organic amendments, of course. Also, if you plant things in the same place each year, pests and diseases will accumulate. The pests know just where their favorite crops are and use those spots to raise their young, with the assurance that food will be there when they need it. There is no break in the disease cycle, either. You can fix that by rotating your crops — not planting them in the same places each year. In fact, you want to avoid planting anything in the same family there for the next couple years. With that said, I do have to mention that many sources recommend that tomatoes can stay put year after year. Whoever recommends that must not live in Virginia. With our hot humid summers, there are many tomato diseases here and I rotate my tomatoes each year. I’ve provided a list of some common crops and their kin, so you know which ones are related.

    Figure 8.1. Crop Families
    There are more things to know than simply not planting the same crop family in a bed. Legumes — peas and beans — leave behind some nitrogen for the next crop, so they might be followed by crops that are a little hungrier for nitrogen than others. If you have mulched a crop, the mulch will have discouraged weeds, leaving a cleaner seedbed for the next crop. It might be advantageous to plant something like carrots in that bed next.
    In The New Self-Sufficient Gardener , Seymour divides his garden into four sections with groups of crops divided as (1) Miscellaneous,(2) Roots, (3) Potatoes, and (4) Peas, Beans, and Brassicas. The crops in each section rotate to the next spot each year. In New Organic Grower , Eliot Coleman has an excellent chapter explaining rotations with an eight year plan. His plan inspired Pam Dawling to make a ten year plan and put it on a pinwheel. You can read about that in Sustainable Market Farming . If you are like me, you never have the one perfect plan. You work out rotations and that plan may do you well for a few years; then you decide to grow more or less of something or throw some new crops into the mix. If you understand how it all works, it will be easier making adjustments.
    In my garden I had grown peanuts after wheat and rye for years. The grain harvest finished just in time to get the peanuts in. I thought that, since peanuts were legumes, it didn’t really matter what preceded them. I started to stay away from following grains with peanuts because the grain beds attracted voles, which are my biggest garden pest. One year, when I planted peanuts in a bed after garlic and onions, the half that was planted after the onions did considerably better than the half that followed the garlic. At first I thought I had planted two different varieties, but I hadn’t. I checked my garden records and realized that the onions, which were planted from sets in the spring, had followed Austrian winter peas. The garlic was in there since the fall. I adjusted my garden plan, and that fall I planted Austrian winter peas in a bed where peanuts would go the following year. My yield that next year was almost three times in that bed compared to the peanut crop following a bed of kale, onions, and garlic. When you are in your garden, make it a practice to notice little things like that. Write it down and find out what happened. It only took a glance at my garden map to realize the difference in the onion half of the bed. I could immediately see that there had been Austrian winter peas before the onions. Then I vaguely remembered reading about a legume cover crop before peanuts, which is also a legume, so I checked How to Grow Vegetables & Fruits by the Organic Method , my favorite reference book. That book actually suggests two soil building crops before peanuts. Okay, so there goes the guideline about not following with the same crop family. I had avoided legumes