The Secrets of Vegetable Gardening Crop Rotation
If you want to have a beautiful and healthy garden year after year, you must learn the secrets of vegetable gardening crop rotation. Vegetable gardening crop rotation is the process of planting your vegetables in a different place in the garden each year. While this requires a little bit of thought and planning before you do your spring planting, vegetable gardening crop rotation is worth the effort because it will increase your yields come harvest time.
Why is Vegetable Gardening Crop Rotation Essential?
All good gardeners know that the soil you plant in contains nutrients that feed and enrich your crop. What you might not know is that the soil also has the potential to contain disease and pests that can ruin your garden plants. Vegetable Gardening Crop Rotation helps to lessen the damage that pests and disease can cause.
At the end of the gardening season, most bad bugs lay eggs that will hatch and grown and then hide out in your garden soil, waiting for next year’s garden to emerge. You can outsmart these critters by vegetable gardening crop rotation. Squash and pumpkins are often attacked by squash borers. These little bugs pierce the vines of your plants sucking out the nutrients until the leaves wither away and the vine eventually dies.
They will even suck the liquid right out of your squash, leaving behind a shell. If you plant tomatoes this year, where your squash were planted last year, the squash borers will emerge far away from the plant they like best. This doesn’t mean that you won’t see squash borers on your vines, but it does help to deter them.
Garden diseases can also affect your crop yields. If a viral disease that green beans are susceptible to hits, it can wipe out your crop for seasons to come. That bacteria can live in the soil through the winter and prey on next year’s crop. The best defense against this is to plant new crops in different places using vegetable gardening crop rotation. If you plant corn where you had your beans last year, you can be confident that if there is any residual bacterial disease left in the soil from your beans, it can’t hurt your corn.
It is important to understand what crops share diseases when you practice vegetable gardening crop rotation. For example, tomatoes and potatoes should never be planted in the same area or where one or the other was planted the season before. These two very different vegetables actually share the same diseases.
