Making plans for next year's crops and the layout of them on the vegetable plot.
Vegetables require a bit of thought about where you will grow next year's plants in relation to where you planted them in the past.One of the things that I like about growing fruit is that for most things once it is planted in an area of the allotment there is no need to reallocate a spot for it in the future. Get the location that you plant the fruit in right and you can forget about moving it around the plot.
Vegetables however demand a bit more thought when planning where to plant them next year. This is due to the need for crop rotation and the importance of this was discovered hundreds of years ago. Most will know the necessity for this when sowing and planting food crops is to reduce the risk of plant diseases. If you get the correct rotation of the vegetable crops you grow it can benefit the plants in other ways. This is due to some plants liking freshly enriched soil and others preferring to grow in a spot that was manured or had compost added in past years.
It is not as complex an idea as it might seem, once you get into the idea of a planned rotation for your planting. It is often easier to draw up a plan for the vegetable plot and each year add to this plan the details of the crops and their growing positions. This type of visual record can work better than trying to work from a list. With the digital cameras you can even add photos to this record to help you remember just where on the plot the French beans were.
It is probably easier to read about this simple explanation of crop rotation for vegetables at a BBC site
Plot Rotation.
Which is better than me trying to explain it. That would be a bit like reinventing the wheel and once someone has done it well, why alter it unless you can improve on it!
