Hope Springs Eternal for my Spring Garden

Because I am an eternal optimist, I have great hopes for my spring garden.  I expect to harvest a lot of veggies but I also expect to learn a lot.  Last year's gardening venture taught me about tomatoes.  I also had a small bed of sweet potatoes which, as it turned out, reaped more learning than sweet potatoes.  But I am not discouraged.  As long as I learn something, it's not a complete failure.  What I learned about the sweet potatoes is that...uh...they need fertilizer.  This year I'll have four beds full of veggies to learn from. 

And speaking of learning, some of my reading over the past couple months has covered crop rotation.  To keep it simple, you don't plant the same vegetables in the same bed from one year to the next.  The diseases and pests that liked your tomatoes last year, for instance, will still be there waiting for your new tomato plants this year.  So you'll want to plant something from a different plant 'family' in that bed instead, and plant your tomatoes in another bed.  Also, planting the same vegetable in the same bed year after year will deplete the soil of the nutrients that that vegetable needs, resulting in lower yields.  Finally, moving your vegetables from one bed to another each year will benefit them even more if  you move them in a specific order.  Leafy vegetables, such as lettuce, spinach and corn, need nitrogen. Planting them in the bed where your peas and beans grew last season will give them the nutrients they need without your having to amend the soil, since legumes 'fix' or leave nitrogen in the soil.

Subsequently, to be sure I was putting the right veggies together, and to be sure I rotated them in the right order, I needed to identify the different families into which plants are grouped and the significance of each.   My research turned up more than a dozen 'family' charts and lists with plant groups numbering as few as four to as many as nine.  However some of the groups didn't agree with each other.  One of the 'four family group' charts didn't include leafy vegetables; another had the Legumes going into the bed after the  Brassicas (leafy crops).  After sorting through them, I came to the conclusion that many if not all of these crop rotation/family group charts were drawn specifically for it's author's garden/farm.  Thus, I've created my own also.  With my limited space I'll use the smaller group of four rotating crops: leafy, root, fruiting, and legumes.  The nitrogen fixing legumes will follow the root crops which have loosened the soil as they grew deep.  Leafy crops will suck up the nitrogen left by the legumes, and fruiting crops will move in where the leafy crops were previously. 

 

My next post will cover seed starting.

Till then, never give up, never surrender, and may all your dreams come true.