crop rotation
 

Hi,

I don't know if this is the right place to ask this questio. A few years
ago I did a weekend course in permaculture and the teacher said to plant
the veggies all mixed up, different kinds in together, with some herbs
and flowers as well. This was to make it harder for the bugs to find
them. If I do that, should I rotate them from bed to bed as well? Or is
that unnecessary?

Thanks for any help,

Jane

crop rotation
 

Hi Jane,

Growing a whole lot of different plants together will help to confuse the
bugs, while also quite likely hosting predatory insects (let some umbels
like parsley go to flower). The idea behind crop rotation is to not overdraw
the same nutriets and/or replant in an area with some pathogenic fungus or
some such. It would seem to me that having such a random grouping of things
would probably imply that only rarely would a plant be put in the same spot
next year, and heck it'd be hard to track from year to year such random
plantings. Unless you just made up a mix of seed for 3 or 4 different beds
and rotated your mixs around year to year.
Those are my thoughts, but I can't say I'm a PC expert.

Cheers,
Bear

From: Jane VR
Newsgroups: alt.permaculture
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2003 09:12:12 +1100
Subject: crop rotation

Hi,

I don't know if this is the right place to ask this questio. A few years
ago I did a weekend course in permaculture and the teacher said to plant
the veggies all mixed up, different kinds in together, with some herbs
and flowers as well. This was to make it harder for the bugs to find
them. If I do that, should I rotate them from bed to bed as well? Or is
that unnecessary?

Thanks for any help,

Jane

crop rotation
 

Nature doesn't have a fixed rotation, but the way seed is scattered does
introduce some spatial variation. Rotation schemes substitute temporal
diversity for spatial diversity. If you are just growing self-seeding
annual crops, I see no need for rotation. Pests and nutrient depletion
should not be a problem.

However, nature does evolve disease resistance. Some disease organisms can
accumulate in the soil. If you're buying fresh seed each year, and
especially if you're buying transplants, you won't be getting the natural
selection for disease resistance (and may be introducing diseases, too).
Tracking where individual plants go is probably not worth the effort. A
better way is (like Bear suggested) to create several different guilds of
plants that grow well together (like the classic beans, maize, and
squash), and rotate them among your beds from year to year. You may want
to pay attention to what families they are in, and try to put all the
members of the same family in one bed.

Of course, if you don't care to do such planning and don't mind some
losses, you could just wait until the plants do get some disease, and then
take some corrective action. An excellent natural way of fumigating the
soil is bury some brassicas (such as broccoli) deep in the soil in the off
season; the gasses produced as they decompose help kill off some disease
organisms.

++JohnWheeler

On Fri, 28 Mar 2003 21:18:18 +0000, BK wrote:

Hi Jane,

Growing a whole lot of different plants together will help to confuse the
bugs, while also quite likely hosting predatory insects (let some umbels
like parsley go to flower). The idea behind crop rotation is to not
overdraw the same nutriets and/or replant in an area with some pathogenic
fungus or some such. It would seem to me that having such a random
grouping of things would probably imply that only rarely would a plant be
put in the same spot next year, and heck it'd be hard to track from year
to year such random plantings. Unless you just made up a mix of seed for 3
or 4 different beds and rotated your mixs around year to year. Those are
my thoughts, but I can't say I'm a PC expert.

Cheers,
Bear



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