Veggie garden in one place

Hello,
I am extremely new to permaculture and most of my gardening experience has to do with...learning opportunities- if I only could figure out what went wrong. I’m pretty sure what went wrong was not doing permaculture.

My question is about having one small area of my property dedicated to annual veggies whilst everything else goes to a forest plan. But if I just have one area can I keep planting the same annual crops if I land a cover crop in winter? Because I read one is not supposed to plant the same thing in the same place every year.

I asked my local master gardener who thoughtfully sent me every gardening topic link in the state of California for my research pleasure.

I’m not even sure if my question makes sense, so I’m not sure how to find a thread in the forum.

Thank you,
Jane

Hi Jane, how big is your annual veggie area and how many different things do you want to plant?  I try to not have the same family of plants in the same spot within a 3 year period.  

I have a number of garden beds. I try not to plant the same family two seasons in a row in the same bed. For example, tomato, pepper, and potatoes are all in the nightshade family. I do not plant them immediately after each other.

One exception to this in my garden is beans. This is because they are nitrogen fixers. So I always view them as a benifit.

Hello Mike,

 I'm in more than a bit of a quandary as I have nearly 1/2 acre of undeveloped dirt yard inside city limits of a small town. I am in the position of needing to plan to do less as I age (wisdom) so I am thinking to dedicate two 8' diameter sections in a keyhole pattern as described in Gaia's Garden (not the compost centered plan). I would like to raise fresh produce that is not available locally: lettuce, beans, tomatoes, three sisters with pumpkin or butternut squash instead of summer squash, peppers, carrots, radishes, calendula, nasturtium...that sort of thing. If I went back and forth every year, would that work for the tomatoes? I like sweet potatoes more than russet.
 I want to do the forest plan in the remainder of my yard with a tree/shrub/vine/ground cover focusing on perennial  medicinal herbs: borage, comfrey, rose, elderberry  and about a million other ideas as I study Rosemary Gladstar's Herbalism course.
 I've been trying and failing at container gardens (all the gophers) and a few other randoms: an apple tree that barely produces (because I need another I find out five years later), two lemon trees that are struggling and a blood orange tree that has produced one orange last year with four on the branch now. And one nearly dead peach tree (the local nursery forgot to tell me to wrap the trunk to prevent sunburn when I planted it).
 I feel more than a little overwhelmed with the work that needs to get done before I'm too broken to do and am stuck living in a sand trap. The land was once a riverbed in a former period of geographical history. Quite sandy but seems to want to become fertile. This valley used to be mostly farm land.
 I am thinking of signing up for the permaculture design course, but I'm not needing to go the homestead route.
Jane

Well, with two beds you could just flip the plant layout from one to the other each year.  And maybe jiggle them around within each bed to be in different spots.  So tomatoes could be on the East side of bed A the first year, then East of bed B the next, then West side of A, then West of B.

I think with that size, a 3 sisters garden won't work all that well.  Corn need a bunch of fellow corn plants to do well.  Something like 100 or more.  And one squash will take over the whole bed, unless it pops over the side and heads away from the rest of the bed.

Aha! So, no corn for me! I had no idea corn needed so much company! I had thought I could put maybe 10 somewhere else. But this is why I’m asking the experts!

So flipping beds would work, it seems.

Thank you so much!

Jane

I have a very small urban garden too. I do sweet corn, I plant 25 minimum, spaced pretty close together. The yields are not what they could be if I had more space, but I really like sweet corn, so I do what I can.
I would flip back and forth between the two beds, alternating. Also take advantage of planting in barrels, containers, etc. I have a good number of fruit trees and veggies in half-barrels because either that part of the yard is full of construction rubble or sand, or I need to let the roots of something else have full range. If you had to, you could alternate with containers and your garden beds.
Don't give up on your fruit trees- your blood orange might be the twin of mine. Two years ago I got one tiny orange, last year I got 4, this year the plant is covered in tiny fruit. We shall see if it pans out, but I believe we'll get there one day.