Everyone wants juicy, flavorful tomatoes from their vegetable garden – am I right? There is nothing better than slicing a gorgeous homegrown tomato for a delicious BLT sandwich!  Or how about munching on a fresh picked ear of buttered sweet corn? Eating food from your garden is hands down the best, freshest flavor you will ever get.  Practicing some easy vegetable garden crop rotation can to help make sure that happens for you year after year.

If you want your vegetable garden to produce excellent crops for years to come, pay attention to keeping as many healthy nutrients in the soil as possible. Different plants use different amounts of nutrients from the soil and some can also replace nutrients in the soil.  If you were to grow tomatoes, for example, in the same spot every year the soil would eventually be depleted of some of the nutrients a tomato needs to grow. You would then have to replace the nutrients by fertilizing the soil in some way – either by adding compost, or by using a commercial fertilizer.

Benefits and Brief History of Crop Rotation

Crop rotation has a couple of great benefits. Legumes, like beans, replace nitrogen in the soil so there is less need to fertilize. It also helps to control weeds, diseases and pests by breaking their life cycles.  A disease or pest that lives in the soil that is attracted to beans, for example, may not be able to thrive on tomatoes. So by rotating your crops, you break the cycle.

The idea of rotating crops is nothing new.  It was first used as far back as the early 16th century, and was popularized by Charles Townshend, a British agriculturalist, in the 18th century. The main idea behind rotating crops, is to alternate plants that deposit nitrogen in the soil (like beans) with plants that deplete nitrogen (like corn). In this way, the nitrogen in the soil remains at a healthy balance. This is why here in the Midwest, farmers alternate growing beans and corn on their land.

It’s nice to know a little about crop rotation and why it is necessary, but for the average vegetable gardener, a simple rotation plan is really all you need.

A Simple Vegetable Garden Crop Rotation Plan

Crop rotation is based on plant groups, and there are four main plant groups in a vegetable garden. For this reason, we have constructed four raised beds in our garden.  The groups are as follows:

Legume:  peas, beans of all kinds, lentils, edamame

Root:  onions, carrots, garlic, beets, radishes, turnips, potatoes

Leaf:  spinach, lettuce, greens, herbs, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower

Fruit:  tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, melons, peppers, eggplant, corn

We do not grow all of the above – that would be too large of a garden for us!  We choose the veggies we want from the groups, and each year we rotate the groups in a systematic manner. The graphic below illustrates a simple, easy way to rotate vegetable garden crops.

Where you planted legumes one year, you would plant the leaf group the next. Where you planted the leaf group, you would now plant the fruit bearing group, and so on.  To make it easier for you, I’ve made a free, printable sheet that illustrates the simple crop rotation plan with the vegetables in each group listed.  Each spring, I refer to the rotation on this sheet to remember what gets planted where. You can get the simple crop rotation plan by subscribing to our free newsletter below.

Crop rotation is only one of the important ways to keep the soil and plants in your vegetable garden healthy. It goes hand-in-hand with its sister method for good soil health – manually adding nutrients back into the soil. My suggestion for manually adding nutrients would be to add compost to your soil rather than chemical fertilizers. Our soil and groundwater are polluted enough with our man-made chemicals. No need to add to the problem!  Learn about composting in this post.

Suggestions or questions?  Please leave a comment below – We love to hear from my readers!