The way I handle crop rotation is I don't do it ;-)

In the home garden it is rarely necessary and almost never effective.

Consider a large, commercial farm field with acres upon acres of the same plant growing. If you were a pest/disease looking for a meal wouldn't that huge buffet attract you? Large monocrop fields attract pests by the zillions. Because of this the pest populations in these fields can build to levels where the crops suffer serious economic damage.

A solution is to alternate the fields any given crop is planted in. What does this accomplish? It denies the pest it's food source so it can't build up to damaging levels.

In the home garden we generally don't attract the pests in the same amount as a large field and we generally don't monocrop, we plant a variety.

As a result crop rotation just isn't as important for us.

OK, so lets say your garden does attract a nasty pest/disease and it does serious damage to a crop.

Lets say this pest overwinters in the soil. Will planting in a different area 10' over make any difference? Well, in some cases it will, but in many it won't. Depends on the pest/disease and how mobile it is.

If it is a soil dwelling pest/disease and you use the same shovel in one bed as the next, you will likely transfer the pathogen anyway.

Crop rotate if you like, but don't bend yourself into a pretzel trying to figure out what to put where as it really doesn't matter a whole lot in a typical back yard garden scenario.

Another reason some crop rotate is for soil fertility. Plant a nitrogen fixer and then a nitrogen hungry crop next. Given the small scale a backyard gardener grows on, it would be simpler to just amend each planting area with compost and an organic fert highest in whatever nutrient would have been most used up by the previous crop.

"Crop rotate if you like, but don't bend yourself into a pretzel trying to figure out what to put where as it really doesn't matter a whole lot in a typical back yard garden scenario"

That says it all. I have 20x40 in a community garden and aim to put the main crops (onions, tomatoes, potatoes, etc.) where they hadn't been the year before. But the soil is disced before we plant and, even if my own "tomato" soil from last year didn't get dragged to where I plant them this year, someone else's will be.

Ditto to what username said. I amend heavily with horse manure in the Fall and then plant cover crops where I don't have my Winter garden.
Crops seem to find themselves in the same old familiar spaces, going on 20 years now. Always great returns.

As the others have said in the home garden "crop rotation" is seldom of any benefit since you almost never get sufficient seperation of the soil to prevent any pathogens from migrating to the new spot and the insect pests will travel without any hinderance that small distance. The best way to keep disease and pests at bay in the home garden is to make the soil into a good, healthy growing medium, good and balanced, with sufficient nutrients (not just NPK) to feed the plants so they grow strong and healthy and are simply not bothered by the pests and diseases that may be out there. I have seen this work in my garden, I have seen this work in other peoples gardens and it never ceases to amaze me that people will come to this dorum and state that organic gardeing does not do that when they have not really tried it.

i'm glad you asked this question.

do you who responded above not rotate at all?

i appreciated reading your responses, because they reinforce something i've had in the back of my mind for years: that the area in my garden is probably not large enough to present much of a challenge to any pathogens and pests no matter how i rotate. adding organic material yearly seems to keep everything really healthy. but i've never NOT rotated, so i don't know how it'd be without doing it.

old habits die hard. and i do enjoy those winter hours spent planning the garden.

The only time I rotate is when I get tired of something so plant something else. I may rotate at other times for reasons of personal conveinience, but I never rotate for reasons of soil fertility or pest control.

I grow tomatos with the aid of 8' t posts. I don't much like taking them down and up every year so I just leave them and keep planting tomatos there. I love growing pole beans, but they get tall and shade things so I plant them on the north end of the garden and never move them.

I grow vine crops, but don't feel like making a trellis, so they grow along, up and over a chain link fence and I can't really move that so those crops always go in that area.

The rest of the garden then gets all the rest of the crops and those rotate from time to time just because I want to do things differently.

This is an enlightening thread. Funny how the lazy way is usually the best. :) Think I'll quit fretting about rotation - at least no more wondering whether it's okay to plant beans or whatever in the same spot as last year..

For the organic home gardener, companion planting is one solution if you're concerned about soil fertility. The classic companions are pole beans with your corn. The corn provides poles for the beans to climb and the beans fix nitrogen in the soil that the corn requires in large quantity. The other is the tomatoes and garlic combination. Garlic provides insect repellent to several pests that love tomatoes. I'm not sure what tomatoes do for garlic, but garlic doesn't have too many pests anyway.

And the other solution is to amend with your organic, home-made compost every year, and you'll have no worries. The compost encourages earthworms, and the earthworms improve the soil even more with their castings. It's all just good stewardship. But if you still felt like rotating crops, there's nothing wrong with planting tomatoes in the bed where you had your corn last year and vice versa.

Where you plant your cole crops, you may want to use floating row covers to protect agains roving pests, cover crops in alternating years and rotation as well.

Cheryl

People sometimes spend lots of time fussing over their vegetable garden trying to figure out where to plant what because I had it here last year. But their perennial beds do not get "rotated" every year and do not have problems with pests and diseases and they often plant annual flowers in the same place year after year, but because someone wrote in a book that you must rotate your vegetables, annuals, every year people get tied in all kinds of knots trying to do something that is totally usesless.
If the average gardener would add enough compost and other organic matter to the beds they plant veggies in each year (organic gardening) they will be putting more nutrients back then the plants they harvested removed which will make that soil healthier (organic gardening) so it will grow healthier, stronger (organic gardening) plants that are more nutritious and taste better, and there would be no need to rotate to keep pests and diseases from attcking the strong, healthy plants.

Start with, minimum crop rotation should be 1/4 mile away..

I think that leaves out most homegrowers.

You know what I do, is if I see a big problem, I lay off that crop for a few years.

Example: the first year with tomatoes was great. Every year since, hornworms have escalated, flavor has reduced, disease has gotten worse.

So, I am concluding that my home garden is not as good for tomatoes as when I moved in. My plan is to skip a few years. It's not a rotation, but it's sort of the same idea. Well, maybe it's a rotation come to think of it.