Thoughts on Crop Rotation February 2023

 Since coming to Creekside Farm five years ago we have largely been experimenting with different theories on how to make money by growing things. In the first year we built our first greenhouse and planted quite a nice little fifty by eighty foot gardening space on what was the only clean and flat space on the property. We got some food out of the ground in the first year but not so much for the following three years as we built the Farmhouse and cleaned up the amazing trash and debris on the Farm.  By the end of the third year we had cultivated a fairly large half acre of ground, but had not found success in planting.

Basic Rotation is not quite right for us.

At the end of the third year we, through a halting and non-linear approach, found "no-till" gardening and success in planting high quality food. By the end of the fourth year we were committed to No-till as the way we would grow so, because this is a system that requires a twelve month plan, brought in hundreds of yards of leaf debris so that we might begin cultivating the entire Farm. As I write this we have perhaps two hundred yards of prime leaf compost and another fifty yards we will allow to turn to leaf mold. These piles will become the basis for our great expansion of planting spaces. 

"No-till" is something of a misnomer where it comes to our Farming practices. In the abstract, No-till is a slow process where you only put amendments (like compost) on the top of the soil and let natural processes take the good stuff down into the dirt. What we are doing is a hybrid of this. In the first year we lay raw compost on the top of the native clay soil, let it over-winter on top of the ground, then in early Spring actually till in the compost to mix it with our native clay soils. This destroys much of what we intend to keep by adding a lot of air to the mix and chopping up a great many beneficial worms which we would rather not chop.  But at the same time we won't kill everything off and our fungal communities will largely be left intact because we won't till deeply.  We will loosen up the deeper soils using our broad-fork and top dress the new beds with fresh compost just before, or after, planting. 

Three years seems right, but not this one. 

In the second year we will not use our tiller, but will add compost to the top and loosen the soils with the broad-fork once more. A few years of this and the soils will have all become top-soil worthy of the name. In the fourth or fifth year all that will be needed will be to spread a light layer of leaf mold on the surface to feed the microbes and fungus make things grow.  If  there were time we could allow the compost to work its way down without tilling, but we haven't the time. But the end product will be good using the hybrid model for soil building and so we can begin planting as if the better way was in place and this brings us to thinking about our next planting puzzle. 

I have written a bit about the general problems we have experienced in controlling pests in our gardens. But even as we get these bugs and bad microbes under control, as our new garden beds grow and improve, there are other pest problems that come to intensively planted ground which are related to the types of plants in the ground. Some plants, like potatoes, attract certain types of pest animals and microbes and these pest accumulate in succeeding years if you keep putting potatoes into the same dirt. This happens with many, if not most crop plants and so we will introduce a concept of crop rotation into our planting plans to avoid this problem, while using other plantings into our plan to help restore the soils following a planting cycle and get the soil ready for another season of robust growth. 

The idea of crop rotation is an old one. Before people understood anything of microbes some smart guy figured out that if you left a field unplanted one out of every three years, plants grew much better. Today we know that letting the soil rest isn't really as important as replacing what we have removed from the soil and maintaining balance. Adding compost to our soils is how we will do this replacement of vital nutrients for the most part. The second part of the rotation problem is avoiding the pest trouble that comes with differing plants if they are replanted year after year. 

One easy way to think about this is to divide our Farm into three primary sections, each growing a particular type of crop, and then rotate the three types of crops through each of the three sections of the Farm, each year. The idea is to never give these crop specific pests a second year to become established in any particular place in the gardens. As to the other row crops, we will rotate them as well, but it is not necessary to plan these moves since the crops will change as needed. 

A four year rotation we wouldn't do.

We have three basic "truck" crops, things that we need to grow in larger amounts and which have the pesky problems that come with growing things. Potatoes, Tomatoes, and Corn, all need a larger place in the beds and have crop specific troubles. So we will rotate these crops through a three year planting plan. Each truck crop will be planting in one section and then moved to another in the next year and a third in the third year, before returning to the initial place to restart the plan.  In this plan we will avoid growing bad things, but this plan brings another problem. 

Corn uses a whole lot of soil nitrogen, Tomatoes uses quite a bit of soil nitrogen, and potatoes don't need much nitrogen.  So, once the is finished, but before we rotate potatoes into the beds where corn has grown, we need to replace at least some of the nitrogen the corn stripped out of the soil or the plants won't be able to grow the leaves that turn sunlight into potatoes. This nitrogen problem is made a bit worse when tomatoes are planted in the third year since growing potatoes don't put nitrogen into the soils. So by the third year we will be having a hard time growing tomatoes if we don't find a way to replace nitrogen. 

Some plants actually take atmospheric nitrogen, which has two electrons, and fix soil nitrogen, which has one electron, in soils. Peas, Beans, and Clover are all planted in fields every third year to put back some of what is taken out. And it is very possible to put down nitrogen fertilizers, like blood or fish meal, to replace this important nutrient, but this requires tilling to be effective. What we need is something of another hybrid system to make our rotation plan work:

When Corn is finished and chopped down we will plant Sweet Peas to replace the nitrogen that corn takes out and before the Potatoes go in. And when the Tomatoes are finished we will plant White Clover on those rows to replace nitrogen before Winter. In Spring we will simply mow the clover and plant Corn. When the Potatoes are finished, digging up the spuds disturbs our No-till plan so we will use this as an opportunity to till in some new compost and rebuild the beds, then plant Sweet Alyssa (a version of Clover) where the Potatoes had been to help stabilize and protect the soils through Winter and replace some nitrogen before putting corn in.

Reducing insect and microbe predation is a multi-faceted project. Keeping the soils fertile while intensively growing crops which remove nutrients is also a multi-faceted project. We are attempting to address all of these issues as part of our expansion plans knowing much of this will fail until we learn how to make it work. But it must work, and we must succeed if our larger Farm plans are to move forward.

So here's our planting plan for 2023: