My suggestion is this: Grow your beloved brassicas in bed A each and every year. Don't rotate. If you ever run into a disease problem that is soil persistent switch to growing all your brassicas in bed B. Don't rotate. If bed B becomes infected switch to bed C etc. If you run out of beds go back to bed A. In between add organic matter to the infected beds which will assist in speeding up the eradication of the disease. If you ever get back to bed A and find the disease still present, switch to container gardening of brassicas. All the above words just mean that crop rotation on a small scale simply doesn't work. If you are using the same tools in bed A as bed B you are spreading pathogens between beds unless you are meticulous about cleaning tools between beds (who does that?). Just grow what you love and enjoy it and don't worry about the small stuff. If you have problems deal with them as they come. Each day/season has enough of it's own problems, no need to worry about problems that are only potential problems.

You do the best you can with what you've got. You might try mapping where you planted them this year, and if you can find other spots to place them next year, grow something else in the previous spots. Increasing the health of the to the maximum is the best way to avoid pests and diseases. Healthy soils produce healthy plants that resist problems more easily. The longer you can go without pests or diseases in your plants, the longer you can replant in the same area. And you might consider expanding in your "middle area", between the backdoor beds and the low-maintenance area. And don't forget your front yard, side yard, along the driveway, large pots on the patio or driveway, etc. The longer you do it, the more easily you will be able to tell what will work and what won't. Sue

Hi all,I just love this forum. I've only been gardening for maybe the past decade in the place i'm at,but i've found that with tomatoes it is best to rotate.In my old garden(which was 20' by 20'),I would just move the mater patch to the next quadrant of the garden.I grew tomatoes, peppers, cukes, broccoli,cauliflower and lettuce. This year I've gone to a raised bed with amended soil, and its working out just fine. Each year in the old garden I would amend heavily with compost. My compost was made of leaves,grass clippings,sawdust,newspaper(shredded),coffee grounds,straw,just about any fruit rind garbage,a bit of topsoil, and very little cow manure.This yrs compost will go into the garden next spring,(08).It has worked very well, although I never seem to make enough of it.I personally think that the only real element that needs close watch when re-planting is nitrogen.Tomatoes draw a lot of it for growth. You said your plants are on 6 ft squares,so you may be safer that most of us because of spacing. By the way: I used to hail from Montgomery co. in Pa.the ONLY time I miss all that heat & humudity is when I look at my tomatoes.

Yes, many herbs are amazingly simple to grow. The ones that come to us from the Mediterranean appreciate rainfall but don't need tons of it, like well-drained soil (just plant on ridges created by one of your plowing attachments/furrowers that you pull behind the tractor), and actually benefit from being sheared back occasionally. You cut them back, distribute the harvest at your food distribution points, wait a week or two or three (depends more on available soil moisture and temperature than anything else), harvest them again. Every time you harvest, you only remove some of the plant, and the rest of the plant kicks back into a highly vegetative cycle and quickly regrows tons of new growth. The easiest herbs to grow, in my opinion, are basil, parsley (but it is cool season and a biennial so keep that in mind), rosemary (as long as there is good drainage), and chives (cool season, grow like crazy and are perennial if you don't plow them up---you can divide a one year old plant into a million babies to replant). Sage also is easy but I have found that people generally only use it around the Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays so it might not be worth growing for a harvest that only would be appreciated for a briefer period. I have mixed luck with oregano and thyme---they seem to need better drainage than I can give them. There also are herbs you can grow for tea----just the leaves themselves steeped in hot water provide a nice herbal tea or, in the case of chamomile, the flowers are steeped to give you the tea. I like lemon balm and lemon verbena for tea, and catnip and chamomile. Many people appreciate mint, but be advised mint can be very invasive. Now, I don't mind invasive plants that want to run wild and grow everywhere because I have the dense red clay that tends to discourage invasiveness by causing plants to rot in wet weather. So, there's not much that truly is invasive in my garden. If it will survive the hot dry cracking clay soil in summer, it tends to die in winter's wet, soggy clay....and vice versa, but mint? Oh, mint has survived everything I've thrown at it here except for the summer of 2011. Mint can be used in tea or to flavor certain adult beverages (mojitos) or to add a nice little bit of flavor to sweet southern iced tea or as a garnish for fruit or melons. You could try a handful of different herbs every year to see which ones are appreciated and enjoyed by your clients, and which ones are duds. Most are easy from seed. Another great thing about the mints is that some of them flower and their flowers tend to be little tiny ones that are not particularly noteworthy but which do attract pollinators and other beneficial insects to your garden plot. I grow basil (one plant for every 3 or 4 tomato plants) with my tomato plants to repel tomato hornworms. I won't say it is 100% effective, but I grow about 100 tomato plants each spring, and in a bad year I'll see maybe a grand total of 6 or 8 hornworms all year long.....even though I see more tobacco hornworms than tomato hornworms (both feed on tomatoes) and maybe that's because I grow flowering tobacco (Nicotiana alata and others). I know lots of people who will see 6 or 8 hornworms on one plant, so I feel justified in believing my basil plants repel the hornworms, mostly, from my tomato plants. Cilantro is problematic. It is a cool-season herb that bolts in spring as soon as the weather warms up a bit. That is unfortunate because it is used in many recipes that use tomatoes (salsa pico de gallo, chicken tortilla soup, etc.), which are warm-season plants. So, I don't think it would be a good herb for your use. When dried, it turns bitter, so I don't bother drying it. I usually stop harvesting mine when it begins to bolt, and then I let the flowers go to seed and drop where they may. The following year I have cilantro here and there. That's not an issue in the home garden, but wouldn't really fit in with your rotation plan as it would be in the way of equipment needed to plow, plant or harvest. I think asparagus would be an awesome thing to grow, but it is perennial so wouldn't fit into a crop rotation scheme, and also would tie up its own growing area for 2-3 years before it could provide the first harvest. Or, you can take a page out of my dad's book. A child of the Great Depression, he developed a fondness for lambs quarters and poke salad that never left him. I have an enduring image, burned into my memory, of his lambs quarters plants that always grew out in the back corner of the yard right beside his compost pile. It can be hard to get people to try things like lambs quarters, poke salad or dandelion greens, but often they like them once they try them. Red Malabar Spinach or Green Malabar Spinach both are vining plants that need to be trellised, but provide a "green" for eating fresh or cooked in the summertime when it is too hot for most greens. With something like that, you might not want to introduce it for a couple more years-----wait until you get people hooked on eating and enjoying the regular veggies before you introduce some of the less common ones. You might want to consider some of the less well-known beans like favas or chickpeas.