Stacey - lots of 'crop rotation' discussions here of late that a search will pull up for you to read through if you wish. Some of them address your very questions. I linked a few of them for you. Dave Here is a link that might be useful: Crop rotation discussions

but quickly, what is your opinion? As I have posted in the other discussions, I have no dirt here unless it is trucked in. We are rocks and glacier scrub otherwise. So all my gardens are raised beds of off-site soil - about 1 to 1 1/2 acre total in several locations around the farm here. In some 40+ years I have never rotated crops except for succession planting with different crops. Tomatoes have gone in the same beds in the spring for years, so has most everything else with no problems. But I am a big advocate of both fall and spring tilling, heavy mulching, and of home composting so no, I don't rotate. Not to turn this into a long discussion on composting which best belongs on the other forum, but we have the space and components to do heavy composting and we don't restrict our compost to only healthy ingredients - if it is organic it goes on the compost piles. Wife and I come from long line of farmers and grew up composting that way. All our gardens get several inches of fresh compost each spring and more as it becomes available for mulching and mixing in between crops and another layer in the fall. I do not have chronic disease problems except during the rare soupy spring we may get and in that case the compost isn't the cause - the airborne fungi and humidity is. No nutrient problems and never have. That said, I recognize that many cannot compost in the amounts we can nor as effectively as we can but I still maintain that if they make the effort to compost properly (get it to 'cook' even 1x) OR allow it to cold compost for at least 1 year, the compost will not be the cause of any disease problems they may have. How to tell if it is hot? Easy - it steams and you can't stick your hand in it. You can feel heat radiating off the pile. As Dennis said, proper composting takes some learning. While coffee grounds are ok, they sure shouldn't be your primary source of nitrogen for a hot pile. If you don't have the resources to hot compost or don't what to invest in or use any of the many high N kickers, then go with long-term cold composting or elect to not compost diseased materials. Either way, crop rotation is not required IMO. Dave

Ha, ha, 100x100! Someday..... but this ate up the majority of the open lawn space and all of the sunny area in the new yard. And it's a 10x increase in garden space over what I had before! I'm already nervous I've bitten off more than I can chew. My daughter was begging for 5 pummpkin plants today and I told her OK, but only if she commits to 3 hours of weeding and watering a week to help out! Thanks for your advice. I won't stress about the rotation, then! I wonder why just about all of my organic gardening books (which are mostly aimed at people with this size garden) advocate small scale crop rotation?

Thanks to you both for the information. I will keep feeding/nutrient demands of plants in mind, and plan for legume covers, as I'm working out the rotation scheme. My main question is whether the plant's order should also be a consideration in a rotation scheme. Here in Florida soil diseases & pests are a major concern. My plan is to group plantings by family--all the nightshades in one bed, all the aster family (lettuce, chicory, etc.) in another, and so on. This way I can keep the rotation scheme neat, and if everything works out, a bed will get a five or six year rest before it gets planted with the same family again. But in summer I sometimes plant things like malabar spinach and purslane. These are in the same Order as chard and amaranth, but in different families. I also use buckwheat here and there as a trap/cover crop. This is also in the same order. I realize I need to plant a legume after something like chard, but would the following summer I plant malabar spinach there? Are they closely related enough to matter?