Crop Rotation and Planting in same bed same year??

[caribumamba]

I am glad someone else asked this as I was wanting to know just the same thing lately.

Quite often crop rotation in a small(ish) plot is virtually impossible once you take into account the layout of the plot, where the most sun is, 2 crops in a season etc. Crop rotation is really designed around large monocultures rather than gardens and allotments,

This is just what I had been thinking and even if you tried to rotate in a small space it seems doubtful that you would really be getting proper isolation due to everything being so close together? So probably it doesn't matter and the rotation is just a false sense of security when you didn't need to do it anyway.

I was actually reading about large monoculture farming on this very subject this morning because I had noticed out 'in the field' that farmers locally had planted wheat both last year and again this year, now I am taking more notice of these things. When I looked it up apparently for some crops such as wheat and also corn they will sometimes indeed do this indefinitely since it allows streamlining of their machinery and other inputs and general process so just easier I guess for them and it must not be a problem but I do know potatoes are one they don't do it on, or so I'm told.

[Penellype]

I am glad someone else asked this as I was wanting to know just the same thing lately.



This is just what I had been thinking and even if you tried to rotate in a small space it seems doubtful that you would really be getting proper isolation due to everything being so close together? So probably it doesn't matter and the rotation is just a false sense of security when you didn't need to do it anyway.

I was actually reading about large monoculture farming on this very subject this morning because I had noticed out 'in the field' that farmers locally had planted wheat both last year and again this year, now I am taking more notice of these things. When I looked it up apparently for some crops such as wheat and also corn they will sometimes indeed do this indefinitely since it allows streamlining of their machinery and other inputs and general process so just easier I guess for them and it must not be a problem but I do know potatoes are one they don't do it on, or so I'm told.

Potatoes are incredibly hard to harvest completely in soil. I grow mine in buckets and even though I empty them out onto a sheet and pick the potatoes out by hand, often the odd little one remains and grows the next year. Blight is pretty much endemic and overwinters on tubers in the soil. It is therefore not a good plan to continually grow potatoes in the same soil as it encourages a build up of what can be a devastating disease.