Easy Home Garden Crop Rotation + free workbook

Crop rotation can be an essential part of the success of your home garden. This post covers an easy way to implement a crop rotation for your home garden.

What is crop rotation and why do it?

Crop rotation is the simple act of NOT planting the same thing in the same spot every year. At first is can sound a little willy nilly. But there is a bit of a science behind it. Don’t worry, it’s the easy kind of science.

Up until fairly recently (as far as history goes) crop rotation was a common practice. The idea is that plants in the same family tend to require the same nutrients. They can also be susceptible to similar pest and diseases. By rotating your crops, you can optimize nutrients available in your garden and reduce the pest load on your plants.

Plant families/groups

For this easy home garden crop rotation we are going to focus on 4 main plant families. They are brassica and leafy greens, legumes and alliums, cucurbits and solanums, and root crops. Most of what would be grown in a standard home garden could be classified into one of these 4 groups.

Brassicas & leafy greens

This group includes cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, kale, kohlrabi, lettuces, spinach, as well as other leafy greens

Legumes & alliums

Legumes include crops such as peas, bean, lentils and soy. Alliums are things like onions, shallots, leeks and garlic

Cucurbits & solanums

Cucurbits include melons, cucumbers, and squash (both summer and winter). While Solanums are crops such as peppers, eggplant and tomatoes

Root crops

This group includes a lot of our storage favourites. Potatoes, carrots, beets, parsnips are all in the root crop group.

How to plan your easy home garden crop rotation

The easiest way to plan our your home garden crop rotation is to start with a list of what you are going to grow in your garden. Take that list and group your crops into each of the four plant families. If you are unsure of what family a certain crop belongs to, check the seed pack for plant family information, or simply look it up online.

Once you have your crops grouped into each plant family, make a simple sketch of your garden area. Write out on your sketch where you would like to plant each family. Then when it comes time to put seeds in the group, you just need to get out your list crops in each family and plant away.

Keeping track of your crop rotation

How will you keep track of where everything was planted? A garden binder is a great option. You could not only keep a printed copy of your garden plan in there, but you could also add some paper for keeping notes on how things went in your garden. Be sure to date everything, that way you will know you are referencing the right garden plan the following year.

You could simply take a photo or screen shot of your garden plan and make a folder in your phone. Then next year you can easily find your plan for your new garden crop rotation.

There are a lot of fun apps out there as well. One that comes to mind for me is freeform. It’s a free app for iPhone. It uses simple shapes on a dot grid background. You can add text to it, colour code it, make it as fancy or simple as you like.

Easy home garden crop rotation workbook

In order to make your home garden crop rotation even easier, I have created a simple workbook. Use the sign up below and I’ll send it directly to your inbox. Then you can add it to your garden binder and have everything you need at hand to successfully implement and easy crop rotation for your home garden.