by Janette Peel

Created on: March 28, 2009   Last Updated: March 05, 2012

Rotating vegetables each growing season will produce healthier plants and greater yields. It is an easy way to keep a garden healthy, improving the soil and controlling diseases.

Crop rotation is the practice of moving the location of plants in your garden from year to year. It is one of the simplest ways to control many insects, weeds and diseases in the garden, while enhancing soil fertility and increasing crop yields.

Planting your vegetables in different spots in the same garden each year can have dramatic benefits.

Some vegetables deplete the soil of specific nutrients that other vegetables actually add back into the soil. Crop rotation prevents the soil from being depleted and can greatly reduce the need for chemical fertilizers.

Crop rotation is designed to reduce the risk of diseases and pests. Since many soil diseases are often specific to certain vegetables, crop rotation ensures that pathogens, or disease-causing agents, do not have time to develop in the same soil.

Giving the soil a rest from a particular crop for two or three years prevents disease buildup and starves any pests of their hosts.

Grow members of the same plant family together in the same general area of your vegetable garden. These related plants can then be rotated through the garden as an entire group each growing season, making your record-keeping and crop rotation much easier.

Alternating plants that add nutrients to the soil with those that deplete nutrients helps keep your garden fertile and will reduce the need for chemical fertilizers.

Plants such as corn, broccoli and eggplant are know as heavy feeders and take many nutrients from the soil. Other plants, such as peas, beans and clover, gather nitrogen from the air and fix in on root nodules. These crops actually add nitrogen to the soil.

Many gardeners include flowers in their vegetable garden. Flowers such as gladioli, asters and tulips need to be rotated to avoid problems with viral diseases.

For crop rotation to work, the same plant should not be grown within a radius of 3 meters in successive years from the spot where it was previously planted.

To see what crops should be plant should be planted where the following season, keep track of your garden plan from year to year. Draw your basic garden design on heavy white paper. Each growing season, overlay with tracing paper and draw in plants you will grow in specific areas. In order to make your plan and your crop rotation much easier, grow all the crops in the same family

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