The Allotment Book. Andi Clevely

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      With this design system, the garden or allotment is divided into zones, with plants that require the most attention closer to hand. A typical border will include ‘keyholes’, which are short paths branching to the side of a main pathway. These paths are surrounded by zones of plants, the closest (salads or spinach, for example) requiring frequent care or harvest, while the furthest, such as cabbages or squashes, need tending only once in a while. The overall aim is to combine beauty and bounty with easy maintenance.

      SEE ALSO ▸ Improving your soil pages 116–21 Green manures page 119 The case for weeding pages 152–3 Keeping your plants healthy pages 154-7

      crop rotation

      What is crop rotation? This is the custom of moving annual and biennial vegetables year by year around a number of different beds. A key technique in traditional husbandry, and equally important as part of efficient organic gardening, crop rotation ensures the same type of plant is not grown in successive years in the same piece of ground. Crops with similar needs and susceptibilities are grouped together, each group moving on to the next bed in the rotation the following year. Thus a crop literally rotates around the arrangement of beds until it returns to the first bed in the sequence a number of years later (see pages 32–5).

      Rotation helps to avoid disorders by interrupting the life cycles of pests and diseases. It can also prevent the gradual depletion of certain soil nutrients. The principle is a sound insurance against inviting unnecessary problems, even in its simplest form of growing crops wherever you like but making sure no group or individual vegetable occupies the same spot in two consecutive years (with the exception of perennials, see page 31). Just moving a crop a few metres is a worthwhile precaution, but this minimalist approach requires a good memory and efficient organization. Following a full crop rotation scheme is usually more dependable.

      A simple, efficient way to organize crops is to divide them into the three main traditional groups of root crops, brassicas and legumes, and base the rotation on these. The advantage of this approach is that members of each group need similar soil preparation, so the whole bed can be cultivated accordingly. Vegetables like salad greens, tomatoes and squashes, which do not obviously belong in any of these categories, are fitted in wherever there is space; perennial crops are, of course, not rotated.

      

      VARIATIONS With three vegetable groups and three beds to rotate them in annually, each group will get back to where it started in the fourth year, so this standard system is called a four-year (‘course’ or ‘stage’) rotation. It is not inflexible: you can extend the number of years before a group returns to its original position by adding extra courses; some gardeners give maincrop onions a bed to themselves, grow potatoes as a separate course from other roots, or allow one or more fallow years for green manure crops.

      Nor is the system infallible. Some vegetables, especially winter crops, overlap inconveniently with others. Some pathogens survive in the soil for many years, so you still need to be alert for symptoms of disorders. Opinions differ about whether it is better to isolate crops with common serious disorders – separating potatoes and tomatoes to prevent the spread of blight – or grow them together to keep the problem in one place, where it is more manageable. Experience will determine your own preferred approach.

      SAMPLE ROTATION PLAN

      This example of a rotation plan shows how three different allotment beds are planted up with the three main plant groups of legumes, brassicas and root crops over a four-year period.

      

      LEGUMES Podded crops like garden peas, French beans, runner beans and broad beans.

      ▸Grow the onion family (bulbing onions, leeks, shallots, salad onions and garlic) here, as they like the same soil preparation.

      

      BRASSICAS Cabbages, cauliflowers, Chinese cabbages, oriental greens, Brussels sprouts, calabrese, sprouting broccoli and kale. If brassica diseases are a problem, include turnips and swedes in the brassica group; otherwise treat them as root crops.

      ▸ Interplant fully spaced brassicas with salad and leaf crops such as lettuce, chicory, endive, corn salad, land cress, claytonia and spinach.

      ROOT CROPS Potatoes, carrots, beetroot, radishes, parsnips, swedes, turnips.

      ▸ Salad and leaf crops may also be grown with this group. Add sweetcorn, celery and celeriac.

      

      OTHER PLANT GROUPS Members of the pumpkin family (squashes, courgettes, marrows, outdoor cucumbers and melons), as well as summer-fruiting vegetables like tomatoes, peppers and aubergines, may be grown with any of the above plant groups, wherever there is space.

      BED A

      YEAR 1: LEGUMES

      CROPS TO GROW Podded vegetables and onion family.

      CULTIVATION Dig in plenty of manure or compost. After harvest plant onions to overwinter and overlap with Brassicas in Year 2.

      YEAR 2: BRASSICAS

      CROPS TO GROW Cabbage family interplanted with salads.

      CULTIVATION Add leafmould or more compost, forked in or as a mulch, and lime the soil if it is acid. In autumn mulch with more compost, to raise fertility for Root crops in Year 3.

      YEAR 3: ROOT CROPS

      CROPS TO GROW Root crops, leaf crops and extras like sweetcorn.

      CULTIVATION Add more compost. After harvest sow green manure to dig in before Legumes in Year 4.

      YEAR 4: LEGUMES

      BED B

      YEAR 1: BRASSICAS

      CROPS TO GROW Cabbage family interplanted with salads.

      CULTIVATION Dig in leafmould or compost, and lime the soil if it is acid. In autumn mulch with more compost, to raise fertility for Root crops in Year 2.

      YEAR 2: ROOT CROPS

      CROPS TO GROW Root crops, leaf crops and extras like sweetcorn.

      CULTIVATION Add more compost. After harvest sow green manure to dig in before Legumes in Year 3.

      YEAR 3: LEGUMES

      CROPS TO GROW Podded vegetables and the onion family.

      CULTIVATION Dig in plenty of manure or compost. After harvest plant onions to overwinter and overlap with Brassicas in Year 4.

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