Crop Rotation?

Can I plant my (landrace) crop species in the same location in the same plot year after year?
My assumption is yes and that this will create hyper-adaptation, because the plants will become accustomed to their specific home.
I would like to read others’ thoughts.

1 Like

Yes and it may increase selection pressures related to fungal/bacterial/microorganisms, especially with certain crops, but as long as you are able to get a decent number of survivors and good amount of seed they should adapt to those conditions.
I would recommend adding compost to keep soil health and return some nutrients, and you might also add cover crops or companion plantings.

2 Likes

This is a fascinating question to me. This far, I’ve found that the combination of warm season/cool season rotation (I’m in a climate where this makes sense) and top dressing with compost plus selecting for well-adapted genetics allows me to grow the same crop in the same place year in and year out without problems from things like root knot nematodes in tomatoes and aphids in broccoli. I haven’t gotten brave enough to let more than a few brassica plants go for a second year or longer - I may down the road, but not yet.

Based on space logic, I have beds/rows continuously in legumes (common bean/cowpea/pea), alternating tomatoes and peppers in the summer with brassicas in the winter, alternating cantaloupe and Armenian cucumbers with peas, and alternating corn with brassicas. I’m also expanding my mix of perennial alliums with strawberries to include garlic and shallots this year.

1 Like

I’m expecting quite a few struggles before reaching a healthy variety of anything. But when it gets there, look out! I’ll have something special (we have insect/severe heat and drought/critter/fungal issues). We seem to have really good soil.
Cover crops. Great idea for no rotation beds.

1 Like

I’ve had many similar issues.
I have already seen some improvements for drought tolerance (after pretty extreme selection pressure, I do zero input no irrigation).
The biggest problem for me has been rodents. My best crops so far have been okra, beans, and watermelon.

I would agree with @JinTX that it would theoretically increase pathogen levels, and so then selection pressure. Depends of what you want.
Then on the addition of compost or whatever, if you focus on adaptation/selection only (… which maybe a bit artificial) you may not want to add anything, even to “compensate” the mineral and fungal losses. Joseph never added anything over more than 15 years, tilled once a year, and J Whyte found out bacterias capable of fixing nitrogen in his tomatoes last year (you can hear Joseph talking of it briefly in there). Same story with Walter Goldstein 's corn breeding over decades (see there): never a pinch of manure or anything. Great results. The best overview of that is in the EXCELLENT conference of J.Kempf talking about all things related to breeding .

Then then then… That overall no-input approach is interesting if you FOCUS on plant adaptation to stresses, I mean to get super healthy plants over time. But then none of us are public breeders, so I think that most of us try to understand the agronomical and breeding basics, and then, when it comes to our gardens, it depends on what we focus on first thing, so to me the question is around: how much space and time do I have and how much losses I can afford? Then I apply the relative selection pressure.

Seems like it’s all about compromises, with the clearest mindset possible. For example personnally, on top of my standard cover crops, I decided to add manure on one plot last year, and this year I am adding calcium everywhere (which I get for free, and which will take me only a few hours to apply it manually at 2Tons/ha on my 2000 square meter field). I do it because I consider that my soil ph, which is about 5 to 5,5, is demanding too much to the plant: minerals get blocked, and so my yields go down. Unsatisfying. And I “need” better yields. So I trick it a bit towards about 5,5 to 6… Overall what that implies is somehow less selection pressure and the outcome is more yields. Yes theoretically. So we’ll see… Implied is that my plants will be somehow “less adapted” to my natural ecosystem… and that if I was more patient, willing to stand smaller harvests, more losses, I would have perfectly adapted plants on the longer run.

To see it from an other angle: considering soil health, the no input, no cover crop, bare ground, plus heavy tillage is a catastrophe. You basically “kill” your soil over time. That may worth the cause, or not. Depending on scales also…

Overall adaptation breeding remains super simple, as Joseph says: the plants will adapt to whatever you throw at them! … And as I am personnally invested in both fields: adaptation breeding (or let’s say plant regeneration!) and soil regeneration, your question is a permanent to me. Principle remains: the plants will adapt to whatever you throw at them! So then I just try to make choices of what I throw at them in relation to my personnal objectives: breeding, eating…

3 Likes

It’s your garden, you can do whatever you want as long as you’re not breaking the law.

Crop rotation is a practice that was developed for reasons. It continues for reasons. It’s extra work, so those reasons must be compelling in at least some situations. Not every garden has the same situation though.

Some small gardens in marginal spots may not lend themselves to a lot of rotation of crops. In my garden, full sun is restricted to a specific area. Everything that wants full sun has to go there, if i want to grow it. I crowd a lot of plants in, some don’t make it, i figure the ones that do well were meant to be. I plant tomatoes and squash and so on in the same area together but not in precisely the same spots. My patches are sort of randomly assembled mixed groups of the same kind of crops i grew in that area last year.

If i had more space and more sun, i would personally choose to rotate crops just because it makes sense to me to mix things up a bit. Natural ecosystems don’t tend to stay the same forever, there’s succession and disturbance. I’m always interested in what other people do and how that works out for them. But keeping in mind that soil, climate, soil microbes, pests vary a lot from site to site.

1 Like

You can do whatever you want as long as you don’t get caught.

1 Like

It can be easier to ask for forgiveness then ask for permission. :rofl:

I’m super interested in grocery row gardening and food forest, so I’m thinking to intercrop all sorts of things. That would mitigate the stress on the soil. and in my aritificial beds that I cultivate, I’m thinking about what would happen in nature if I didn’t do anything. And some things drop seed right there, and some things get their seeds blown around or moved around. and nature adds supplements as the plants that drop leaves or die and decompose. And since my plan is to have plants I can tuck into newly emptied spaces, I’m not doing what mother nature would do. I feel like thinking about it this way will help me decide what I actually want from my garden.

1 Like

John Letts in the UK does continuous cropping with wheat. You might get some ideas from this essay.

Last year I sowed medium red clover along with hulless barley. There was something green on that bed all season—barley from spring into summer and, after harvest, clover into the fall and early winter. The clover may resume growth first thing in the spring. The clover will add N. All the plants are producing root exudates for the soil microbes. I can’t comment on selection in the barley, since this was only one year.

Will Bonsall plants clover under corn, although he probably moves the planting over time. He describes the method in his book. I tried it too, but the clover didn’t do well under the closed corn canopy. Corn plants would need to be spread out a little more if the clover is going to do OK.

1 Like

I like this discussion.

As far as I am concerned, I have a dual objective in my gardening
1 - grow soil life to increase soil health, to secure long term fertility.
2 - breed robust landraces to secure long term adaptability

for this reason, I will rotate, rather than stick to same plot for each crop. I even favor cover crop between each production or multiplication crop any time I can.
Soil life , I believe, will benefit from a diversity of crops, root systems, mineral consumption, companion bacteria and fungi.

1 Like

Crop rotation makes little sense to me in small gardens. What? A bug can’t move a hundred feet to locate the new location of the tomatoes? Microbes don’t travel around the garden on the wind? And on my clothing and tools? And on the insects?

2 Likes

I may have created a root knot nematode situation for my tomatoes in my oldest garden by bringing in lots of sand and growing tomatoes there for many years in a row. Though now it is an interesting opportunity! I could probably grow a fine seed crop of something like Siberian kale there and do a crop rotation. I could also probably dig the sand in deeper so that it isn’t such sandy soil (which root knot nematodes like according to a quick web search) and then the topsoil itself would be deeper for vegetables. However- I really like the idea of being able to select for tomatoes that are more vigorous in a sandy soil prone to root knot nematodes. Though I also have four gardens that have never gotten any added sand and I couldn’t find any nematode nodules in those.

However, for certified organic farming- crop rotation is considered to be a normal part of certification. So, if you wanted to be certified organic- you would want to rotate.

1 Like

It isn’t even a hundred feet across my garden, and I’ve been growing a lot of the same crops in it for thirty years. I do rotate a little bit, for example peanuts fix nitrogen and corn loves it, so I might alternate them in the same spot. As far as trying to avoid disease build up or something like that, I figured it was impossible in such a small space anyway, so never made any effort to do it. I also don’t do garden “cleanup”. If a plant is disease or bug infested it goes in the compost or gets used as mulch, the same as everything else.

I also have no clue as to the chemistry of my soil, I’ve never done a soil test, I don’t even know the Ph. Don’t tell anyone, I wouldn’t want the YouTube garden experts and purveyors of soil amendments to find out that stuff grows anyway, they might have a stroke. :laughing:

2 Likes