Crop rotation and permaculture

Hi all,

most books on permaculture do not even mention crop rotation (in the sense of not planting annauls of the same family on the same bed for a couple of years).

Some practices - like not even having divided beds/blocks but instead just putting plants where a gap appears - seem to make crop rotation virtually impossible.

Permaculture is about observation, and I observe that many gardeneres in the mediterrean plant their winter brassicas in the same beds every year,
on the other hand farmers have developed crop rotation based on observation/insights obtained by several generations,
and those conclusions made it into the conventional gardening/farming books.

When asking other permaculture people IRL about crop rotation, they say that they don't really care about it.
They also bring up examples where people have been successfully ingoring crop rotation rules for decades,
because everything will be fine if you put enough compost on the beds every season.
While this argument seems feasable for nutrients, it is the diseases that are concerning me.

Let me elobarotae with the example of Clubroot( Plasmodiophora brassicae ). If someone plants brassicas on the same spot for 2 decades
and finds his plants free of  Clubroot, i cannot take this as a proof that you can plant brassicas in this way without risking loosing your crop and infesting the soil with clubroot.
My argument is, that if there is no clubroot spores, it will not manifest out of nowhere, no matter what you do.
So if someone wanted to prove to me that just by using sufficent compost you can circumvent the clubroot problem,
he would need to inoculate the soil with clubroot and keep growing.

Now my question is, has anyone ever done such an expermient?

My focus/issues with crop rotation centers around brassicas because they seem to be the staple annual vegetable in the temperate climate
especially during the colder season  (Don't forget Turnips are brassicas , they used to fill the niche potatoes took over) and most of the profitable market gardet crops are brassicas too (Asia salad, arugula, radishes just to name a few).

The only cost that I have incurred in order to do crop rotation is the time it takes to plan it o
I too have not felt convinced that crop rotation is not needed. I worry sitting in one spot might breed conditions to allow unfavorable outcomes when it comes to disease.

Arguments that I heard is that if you have a polyculture then you don't have to worry about crop rotation. The argument is the soil food web interacting with the plants is some kind of 'immune system' compared to monoculture crops? I'm not sure what that mechanism is.

I'll be curious to see some answers!

There may not be a lot of discussion on crop rotation because there is more talk about planting perennial vegetables and planting polycultures.

I am a believer in practicing methods for soil health so I feel crop rotation of annual plants might be necessary depending on the plants.

Maybe some plants use more of the nutrients than others making it a necessity to rotate to something else the next years.

And as Timothy suggests with polyculture this may not be a necessity.

It is a question of balance. With the right combination of living, the right connections, a rich soil, anything you call a plague is an element of the system in imbalance.
The imbalances can be solved killing that which is in excess o adding that which is in default. But it is better and more of a long term solution if it can be solved creating the conditions that discourages that which is in excess and promotes that which is in default.
In what conditions does the clubroot prosper? How can these conditions be prevented? What outcompetes it? How can it be promoted?

Nature hates repeating itself, so growing the same stuff in the same place over and over again will find Nature's oposition. That's why sometimes we neet to fallow. Evolution is dynamic; if your work is static, it will stay behind. Crop rotation is just another method for staying ahead, not the only one.

Abraham Palma wrote:
In what conditions does the clubroot prosper? How can these conditions be prevented? What outcompetes it? How can it be promoted?

I tried some research on that topic, the only thing i found is that acidic soild favours clubroot, whereas alkaline soil somewhat inhibits it.
Also warm wheather favours the patogen, so one should plant them as overwintering crops rather than summer crops.
(makes sense anyway, because there are so many other things to grow during summer, while winter veggies are almost excusively brassicas)

Also there are some brassica cultivars (conventially bred, not GMO) that have resistence agaist clubroot, however the intensive usage of those resisent cultivars on clubroot infested land led to the emergence of new clubroot strains that can infect the resistent cultivars.

Excellent!
Do you know if garlic/onions have any effect on them?

Most of permaculture seems to focus on perennial plants.

It helps to think about why we rotate annuals.  Soil nutrients (build better soil), pests (companion planting), and illness (mostly companion planting and saving our own seeds so we don't need to bring in plants or organic matter from off site).

I found, if we observe carefully, I seldom need to rotate crops unless one of the three pressures mentioned above gets too much.  Then again, most of it is solved by running the chickens in that area for a winter.

I found this thread today on a break from building mounds for a three sisters garden.  As I was digging up soil to make the mounds I was thinking "This sure is a lot of work, I dunno if want to do this every year as I rotate through my garden!"

I think where it's easy to rotate crops then why not? But if you need to make special infrastructure  like mounds or supports for vining plants etc then don't bother and research landrace cropping and seed saving to evolve past any local pathogens.

just my 2 cents and for what's it's worth I'm no master gardner😀

My gut feeling is that the closer we garden in monocultures the more important rotation is. I don't think there is much down side - special preparation for specific crops as Jeff suggests can actually be useful: nutrients can be concentrated for those crops that appreciate it more (like wood ash or manures for brassica and potatoes).
I like to have a rotattion going in my polytunnel because it is not a natural environment. The enclosed shelter means that pests and diseases can be protected from natural predators and system balance is more difficult to achieve. I'm hoping that by rotating my tomatoes around the area I will be less likely to have root diseases, but maybe I'm fooling myself!

I don't ever plant the same thing in the same spot each year for annuals.  I guess the exception is self-seeding annuals who plant themselves before I can do something about it haha.

Something like potatoes, I'm extra careful about because the blight lives large in my mind.

Riona Abhainn wrote:Something like potatoes, I'm extra careful about because the blight lives large in my mind.

I always think blight is more weather dependant - not much you can do with planting, although covering the plants when you get blight weather might help (like with tomatoes). There are other soil bourne pests/diseases of potatoes though, so it won't hurt to rotate them.

Rotation breaks disease cycles, BUT… it also breaks mycorrhizae and other beneficial cycles. Which is a bigger threat or benefit depends on your situation.

Monoculture became a necessary convenience for agriculture.  Some large ag farmers are going away from it, sort of. They are stagger planting or skip-row plant cover crops or companion crops to get diversity but enough difference in maturity by timing to still mechanically harvest at least the main cash crop.

The mycorrhizae point is worth taking seriously. Rotation breaks disease cycles but it also disrupts the fungal networks that build up around specific plants over time. In a polyculture with good soil biology you probably get enough natural suppression that strict rotation matters less. But in a polytunnel or any enclosed space I'd still rotate, the conditions are just too controlled for the soil food web to compensate on its own.

My experience is:

- I can can rotate without deep tilling.  

- Mycorrhizae seem resilient enough to recover from mild disturbances.  

- I suspect rotation is mostly to change/support different soil biomes that enable different minerals to become bioavailable to the plants.

I think diseases are usually secondary.  Meaning they tend to be a side effect of conditions-stressors (too much or too little sun, wind, water; too much nitrogen; or lack of compatible plant/fungi communities) and/or lack of needed nutrient availability (typically, lack of compatible plant/fungi/biome interactions).  I've come to this conclusion after years of growing and having people note "How is it your X doesn't have X (bug, disease, problem, etc)??"  I grow a garden in a radically different way than most people.  It's the whole system in action.

- Much of my rotation happens naturally on it's own.  A large part of my annuals and biennials are self seeding and move all over.  They only require a tiny amount of soil disturbance, like literally scratching the surface.  I don't usually even do it myself.  I think birds do.  Carrots, celery, parsley, Sweet Williams, hollyhocks, lemon bee balm, cornflower, Hopi tea - these all move around the garden at will.

- Nitrogen is not a fix-all.  I've found it's use causes nearly as much problems as it seems to fix. Example, Strawberries can last a long time in one spot if they are being grown in a diverse enough low nitrogen system.  I suspect overfertilization causes them to crowd themselves badly, and then fizzle out.  So the need to rotate increases, or the soil is perceived to get "tired".  

That's my sense of these things at least.  I have lived and grown plants in the PNW and the desert SW.  But I have no experience in the east, mind you! So I can only speak to the western growing conditions.  :-D

To me crop rotation is important if you plant a lot of one thing in one place, and not really import if your crops are already interplanted.

Of course if theres a disease or pest in one area you might choose to plant elsewhere, but you’re less likely to have fungal or virus or even pest issues if you don’t plant all your potatoes in one big block, and they’re instead spread out with other types of plants between them.

I just started reading "Gardening When it Counts" by Steve Soloman.
It has some very astute observations, like plant spacing to not need water (once the seedling sets off) which is kind of obvious but not what the lots of compost and squeeze as much in as possible brigade always suggest.
Anyhow, for a family garden he suggests having two areas, leaving one fallow for three years while only using the other. Plus feeding his design of universal compost.
So crop rotation from a wider perspective.

problem with the fallow approach is you have no hope of ever controlling  weeds.  One approach I want to pursue once I have chickens next year is the 'dueling gardens' technique.  Keep chickens where last years garden was and where it will be again next year.

Jeff Marchand wrote:problem with the fallow approach is you have no hope of ever controlling  weeds.  One approach I want to pursue once I have chickens next year is the 'dueling gardens' technique.  Keep chickens where last years garden was and where it will be again next year.

If you've spent three years controlling the weeds where you are growing, then put that to "fallow" maybe seeding clover at the start, you still think weeds would go nuts?

Hello,

I also think it depends on your conditions. For me it is slug pressure under heavy but very short rainfall.
Departing from an unproductive (for my little stomach) mixed polyculture, I planned a rotation in the veggie garden this year, with potatoes - pulses - leafy green - roots.

There is still a perennial structure in the form of ash, redbuds and pear trees that are scattered in the garden, feral parsnips and chards that grow wherever they please, and the drip lines running just under the surface and used once a week. The paths are covered in wood chips and full of wild mushrooms.

Still I have to feed my growing soil with mulch, compost and hay, and on the other hand litter-covered soil is a shelter for slugs and snails that were able to destroy nearly everything I planted until now.

So I concentrated all the mulch of the year in the potato part, and the remaining surface is only protected with goutweed between veggies. I plan to rotate this every year.

So far, we have had our usual spring drought and peas, goutweed, chards and celeries have been quite good ; storms came in last week as forecast and the slug pressure has been much lighter than usual in the veggie garden.
I am facing the summer with exploding greenery and around 9 weeks worth of water in the tank.

We'll see ...

Sounds lovely Oliver.   I had to re-read "usual spring drought" twice.  Where I live in Eastern Ontario spring means rain.  Spring drought just did not compute!

I think it depends on conditions too. I have two garden spaces at least 1000 feet away from one another. through the years I have found that cucurbits do extremely well in one space but not in the other
and in the other space tomatoes and peppers do fantastic. and the few corn plants that didn't get eaten by wild turkeys are doing very well.this year I planted beans and marigolds between the squash, cucumber and pumpkin plantings. the marigolds winter squash and pumpkins were just planted last week but both the summer squashes and beans are doing better than any other year. the only fertilizer ever used is the material from cleaning out chicken coop, sawdust and chicken poo

Jeff Marchand wrote:   I had to re-read "usual spring drought" twice.  

It is quite unexpected in Belgium, but repeated the last 3 years so it becomes a pattern : no rain from february to the end of may with temperatures peaking at 25-30°C in march-april.
Then irregular storms with hail in may-june, then again dry heat until september.

By irregular, i mean neighboring villages might receive fifty liters per square meter or more overnight and no single drop here.

We used to have consistent rain throughout the year before and adapting to this new reality is quite hard.

Have a nice evening,
Oliver

Crop rotation has been proven, over and over, to be an excellent strategy ...    for monocrop systems.

Permaculture  ....   ("permanent culture") is going to lean heavily on perennials, guilds, polycultures and self seeding annuals.  

Crop rotation is an excellent technique for organic systems.  But ...  my position is that it doesn't fit with permaculture gardens.  

A few positions I think about in this space (and the "you" is "me"):

  - if you are thinking of crop rotation, you are doing it wrong

  - if you are thinking of a block of monocrop, you are doing it wrong

  - corn it out

  - wheat is out

Move to a system that will pump out food without any seeding, fertilizing, irrigation ....   without any care at all ... the only effort is on harvesting.  That is the permaculture goal.  To design a system so well that years can pass with zero care.  And with zero care it grows more food and is spreading.

paul wheaton wrote:Crop rotation has been proven, over and over, to be an excellent strategy ...    for monocrop systems.

Good morning Paul,
Indeed i start from a monoculture.
If I left the garden for a year I would find a 2-feet high carpet of goutweed, smothering everything including young trees.
The chards, nettles and parsnips i mentioned earlier are not able to compete without intervention.
It is freeze- and drought- resistant, immune to slugs, loved by wild bees and fortunately delicious with garlic and olive oil.
The point is I cannot eat it three times a day every day, being its sole predator around here. Lime and mowing weekly will also contain it.
So under my conditions i have to do some babysitting to introduce diversity at this present time. Rotation allows me to mitigate other constraints as space, water and slug pressure, but we are talking about tens of square feet and not acres.
Hopefully some beetles or butterflies with an interest in it will come to balance the system, or it will exhaust naturally.
We'll see that with time.

paul wheaton wrote:Crop rotation
  - corn it out

  - wheat is out

Move to a system that will pump out food without any seeding, fertilizing, irrigation ....   without any care at all ... the only effort is on harvesting.  That is the permaculture goal.  To design a system so well that years can pass with zero care.  And with zero care it grows more food and is spreading.

But until I achieve that nirvana in twenty years time I will still be fed mostly by the supermarket unless I have annuals, some of which will self seed to that future happy time.

paul wheaton wrote:Crop rotation has been proven, over and over, to be an excellent strategy ...    for monocrop systems.

A few positions I think about in this space (and the "you" is "me"):

  - if you are thinking of crop rotation, you are doing it wrong

  - if you are thinking of a block of monocrop, you are doing it wrong

  - corn it out

  - wheat is out

Move to a system that will pump out food without any seeding, fertilizing, irrigation ....   without any care at all ... the only effort is on harvesting.  That is the permaculture goal.  To design a system so well that years can pass with zero care.  And with zero care it grows more food and is spreading.

Geeze I dunno I have seen videos of Geoff Lawton's Zatuna Farm's kitchen garden and he seems to grow in blocks and certainly his interns seem to weed and water and do plenty of work. Is that not permaculture?

Why would corn be out if a person does a three or four sister's garden?

I believe a for a person to grow their own calories with varied crops (who wants to live off of just potatoes?) they would need a fairly substantial size garden say 1/8th of acre per person if it were space efficient and weeded to maximize production.  Many people are not lucky enough to have that much space to allocate to a garden.  A weed infested higely pigely garden with zero maintance would have to be much much larger no?

I know what you propose worked for Master Fukuoka but for how many others? Is that how you are getting your calories?

There are millions of small scale gardens who rotate crops to break pest cycles and to not deplete soil nutrients who leave the soil richer than when they found it. Elliot Coleman describes a garden rotation in his books where each preceding crop benefits the next proceeding crop in a virtuous circle . A management system that can be done on the land indefinitely while improving soil health and the local micro and macro fauna seems to me to be the very definition of a permanent culture.  

Finally a well managed vegetable garden can be a thing of beauty and peaceful place for a hardworking gardener to  bask in the glory of his or her hard labours at the end of the day. For me if my permaculture farm and garden is neither beautiful nor peaceful I am doing something wrong.  Of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder so other's  mileage may vary.

Just my two cents.  

Geoff:  it would seem that geoff's philosophies about permaculture are different from mine.

Why would corn be out if a person does a three or four sister's garden?

Corn is out.  so three sisters is out.  And four, five, six, and seven sisters.

Plant corn and walk away for two years.  There is no more corn.  

If you want more about why corn would be discouraged in a permaculture system, read Mark Shepard's book Restoration Agriculture.

Many people are not lucky enough to have that much space to allocate to a garden.  

Lucky?  My guess is that they elected to live somewhere that has very little (or zero) garden space.  

I hope to demonstrate a style of gardening that will entice people to seek a place to live where they can have a large garden.

I have read Mark Shephard's book with great interest.  I seem to recall his complaint about corn is when its grown in massive industrial hundred acre plantations and the GMO varieties bred to maximize sucre content for cattle feed and ethanol production. Those corn plants are not food. Humans would die trying to survive on just that corn. But those are not the corn I am growing and I not growing just corn!

I am talking about open pollinated heritage corn with much higher protein grown on a garden scale with beans , squash and sunflowers.  Those four sisters sustained meso-america for millennia before the Spanish came.  So its hard to argue that they are not food or unhealthy.

We need carbohydrates for energy.  Yes we can grow potatoes and I do but the Irish found out the hard way what happens when you rely on potatoes too much.  Corn is easier to store than potatoes or squashes too .  Variety is the spice of life and diversity is safety.

R. Han wrote:
So if someone wanted to prove to me that just by using sufficent compost you can circumvent the clubroot problem,
he would need to inoculate the soil with clubroot and keep growing.

Now my question is, has anyone ever done such an expermient?

My focus/issues with crop rotation centers around brassicas because they seem to be the staple annual vegetable in the temperate climate
especially during the colder season  (Don't forget Turnips are brassicas , they used to fill the niche potatoes took over) and most of the profitable market gardet crops are brassicas too (Asia salad, arugula, radishes just to name a few).

So you're asking if anyone has ever used permaculture methods and/or non-rotation methods with soil known to have clubroot to successfully grow brassicas unaffected by it, or are you literally asking if anyone has intentionally added Plasmodiophora brassicae to their soil and successfully grown brassicas unaffected by it? If you're looking for the latter, I'd think that'd be something an agricultural college student would do or someone with a research grant... and I haven't seen any papers about it, so I'm thinking it hasn't been done, but clubroot hasn't been a focus for me. Perhaps doing a search via your local university's resources and librarian could help. Now, for the former, there may be people who have been able to overcome already existing clubroot without the standard methods of removal, sterilization, not growing brassicas, etc for the area...but again, I have not heard of them. You might want to start a thread specifically about clubroot (in the title too) to find out if any are here.

Personally, I'm in the group of people who grow too many things together that it makes conventional crop rotations complicated to say the least, and practically impossible realistically, especially when it comes to brassicas. I love brassicas, so they're all over the place and I will stick them under or beside almost anything and everything. Also, I let my things go to seed for collecting and self-resewing, so they place themselves all over the place too. I would be hard-pressed to find a garden spot where a brassica hasn't been for more than a season or two. That said, while gardening where I am has a multitude of challenges, the large temperature shifts, low humidity, low rain, alkaline high pH soil (and water) actually helps prevent clubroot.

I'm thinking if one were going to try to grow brassica in a place with Plasmodiophora brassicae in their soil without the standard treatments, it would include doing things to increase alkalinity and pH, make sure you support the health of the soil microbially, try to avoid soil temperatures between 68-77°F, err on the side of less water rather than more (so let the soil dry out some at times), make sure you've got really good drainage, and avoid getting any plant or soil matter from other known or suspected sources of Plasmodiophora brassicae.

So its hard to argue that they are not food or unhealthy.

And yet I stand by my position.  And so does Mark Shepard.  You, of course, are welcome to have a different position and continue to grow and eat corn.  I choose to not grow corn anymore.  To me, it's a hassle.  And not only does Mark make some points about health and corn that resonate well with me, but I have studied the works of a lot of doctors insisting that all grains cause a variety of health problems - and I find that information resonates well with me.   It would seem that many people (including you) think corn is healthy.  And many people (including me, mark and several doctors) think corn is not healthy.  You say "hard to argue" but ...

Further, the question is about permaculture gardening.  My philosophies about permaculture gardening are about techniques to grow food staples that will, in time, not only grow themselves without human intervention, but will spread without human intervention.    As I said above:  corn does not meet this criteria.  

So I would think 80% of my garden space would follow my ideas of "permaculture gardens".  And then 20% could be novelty gardening that would take greater effort and expense.

For some of us variety is a need when it comes to food, and so we're willing to put in the extra work in order to achieve food variety.  I think that some big names in permaculture think growing corn, mixed in among other things of course, can be fine.  And obviously some don't.  And that's okay because variety of thought means people can pursue the options that work for them.

 It would seem that many people (including you) think corn is healthy.  And many people (including me, mark and several doctors) think corn is not healthy.  You say "hard to argue" but ...

No doubt that a person subsisting on corn alone would become very ill. But surely the same can be said for any food crop.  Most corn today is grown today for animal feed, ethanol and high fructose corn syrup.  All very unhealthy uses but surely the blame for that falls on the growers not the crop.  Our current corn growing practices and uses are contributing factors in our current obesity epidemic.  

Context, it seems to me , is king.  If eating corn as part of a varied diet is detrimental to a person's health how on earth did the Meso-Americans survive and flourish for millennia?  They ate corn , with beans and squash, sunflowers, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and amaranth amongst many other crops.  Corn was the cornerstone of their diet just as wheat was for Europeans. That is why I find it hard to argue that it must always be unhealthy, especially when grown as part of a diverse garden to provide diverse nutrients to the gardner .   Permaculture is a design science and in science, when a hypothesis is proposed and there is a proven counterfactual  the hypothesis  is either rejected or modified. To me the pre-Columbian history of America refutes the claim that corn is always unhealthy.

i asked google "what was the life expectancy of Meso-Americans a thousand years ago" and the response was 20 to 35 years.  I am already older than that.  

Of course, I am sure that there were other factors.  

Because of my research about health, I have chosen to eat zero grain (well, nearly zero) for the last three years.


Your words sounds like "this sugar coated, corn based, crunchy cereal is part of a complete breakfast!"  Meaning that if you mix junk in with healthy food, the whole package becomes "healthier" than if you ate it alone.  I think I am attempting to suggest a path without the cereal.  Without grain.  Of course, not everybody will be convinced - and that's okay.  

I just asked Google what the life expectancy in Europe was a thousand years ago when no one there ate corn

"In the 11th century, the average life expectancy at birth in Europe was roughly 20 to 35 years. However, this historically low number is heavily skewed by high infant and childhood mortality rates, where up to half of all children died before reaching adulthood "

So the same.   By same logic  wheat, rye,  brassicas, beef , pork, and fish are best avoided.   I think we are starting to run out of foods safe to eat.

Of course modern medical science , sanitation, the rule of law and the historically peaceful era we live in have played a significant role in allowing you and I to live well beyond what was expected at birth a thousand years ago.

By same logic  wheat, rye,  brassicas, beef , pork, and fish are best avoided.  

I would say wheat and rye are avoided.  

I choose to not avoid brassicas, beef or pork.  But I suspect many do.  

I would say that each person is gonna find their own food path.  

Again, the topic is "crop rotation and permaculture".  I choose to do my idea of permaculture which excludes crop rotation.  Zero grain.  My garden.

Can't argue with you there.

gustibus non disputandum!  Which is Latin for lets stop arguing and eat!  


p.s.  its not