Crop Plan and Rotation

The last article (one year ago yesterday!) was focused on the general layout of our market garden and I plan on exploring our overall farm design plan in further detail in future post. But today I want to elaborate on the crop plan and rotation for our market garden.

The basic layout :

  • 5 Field blocks- I have scaled back to 3 blocks for the 2022 season

  • Each field block made up of 10- 30” W x 70’ L raised beds (the aisles were dug out and mounded on the beds) with 12” Aisles

  • 10 year crop rotation proceeding from left to right

The crop rotation needed to take into account

  • Cover cropping and species diversity to promote soil health

  • Optimizing sequencing in order to promote increased yields

  • Avoid pest and disease pressures

Note: Elaine Ingham has said several times that crop rotation is a fallacy and we should just grow brassicas year after year in the same place. I don’t believe this to be true and I do feel that crop rotation is a cornerstone to plant, soil, and human health by avoiding pesticides and herbicide application.

My crop rotation changes and I’ve had to make some changes.

Why did I change my initial plan?

  1. Species diversity- complex cropping, intercropping, relay cropping require some flexibility

  2. Cover crops- sometimes cover crops are not ready to crimp when you are ready to seed. You need flexibility

  3. Soil born disease sometimes require more distance- For instance, 2018 was an amazing potato year, we moved the bed 12 inches over, 2019 was ok, moved the potatoes over 12 more inches, and 2020 was horrible. Potato beetles anhilited our crop. These crop jumps combined with beneficial insects cover cropping, and even skipping a season of a certain crop can be helpful. Blackberry Farm does this with brassicas over the summer. They remove all brassicas for several weeks over the summer to break insect pressures in this family

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Bed Formation

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Crop plan