Do I need to rotate tomatoes if I plant cover crops?

Green Greetings,
I'm planning to put in a small area of raised beds this winter for my vegetables and herbs. Do I need to rotate tomatoes if I plant cover crops between seasons? I was just watching a YouTube about tomatoes and the permie gardener (Morag from Australia)says she just lets the tomatoes fall and self-seed. This implies that her tomatoes grow in roughly the same areas. How far away would I need to move the rotation if I do need to rotate? So many questions!
Thank  you,
Jane

High Jane. Since it’s a raised bed I would say maybe. The drainage may be pretty good and nutrients leached away from year to year. You did mention cover crops though and they are magic!
I use mostly Austrian winter peas and ryegrass. Those winter pea sprouts are great eating all winter too. When ready to plant just chop and drop.
I continue to feed my soil during the growing season too. Comfrey, grass clippings, and finished compost all go around the plants base from time to time. I’ve grown tomatoes in the same beds for years without ever rotating. Others may disagree though and I look forward to hearing what they have to say.

In a word, yes.

Both blights that affect tomatoes are soil-borne. If you grow the same thing year-after-year in the same soil, you increase the chances that some tomato-specific pathogen will take up residence in your soil.

Incidentally, I wouldn't try digging up and carting off the infected soil. The chances are much greater that you won't get it all, and just end up spreading it around, instead.

Especially in largely perennial plans, crop rotation can be a pain. Shortage of adequate space or light conditions can also be frustrating. If you only have the same spot in which to plant tomatoes and cant rotate between two or three plots, I would suggest using large planters or planter bags. Yes, I would rather grow in the ground, too, but if you're not going to rotate your crops, you have limited options.

-CK

Addendum: I should have noted that there is another option. You could be prepared to be on the lookout for blight and other symptoms of disease, and to chop out the affected parts immediately, before it spreads to other plants, and other parts of the same plant. Most tomato pathogens that I worry about infect the plant through the stomata on the leaves through water droplets bouncing off infected soil. Just look for signs of infection and be ready to cut it out.

-CK

Hi Chris,

How far might the blighted soil travel? If I have three or four separate raised beds a couple of feet apart, would that be enough rotation? How deep does this blight go? I've read over and over about the need to rotate tomatoes over a four year rotation. I am hoping to get this project right from the beginning... High hopes, right?

Jane

If blight were much of a problem here, I would purposely plant my tomatoes in the same spot to encourage more of it. I'd figure out very quickly which tomatoes were blight resistant and which weren't. I don't like working against my environment cause I'm lazy. If there's a challenging condition present, I try to figure out what to grow that can handle that condition on its own, or even thrive in it.

I've never worried much about crop rotation and never noticed a problem. I grow some cover crops and mulch with various things. Sometimes I'll remember about mustard being a good cover crop before potatoes or something similar and actually make it happen.

I planted mustard as a cover crop after my tomatoes were done for a couple of years. That worked out as a roaring failure. I moved a couple hundred feet to two new plots one of which still got early blight or Septoria. I expanded the size of the new space so that I can rotate crops. But then I started growing potatoes; since I had all that space.

I grow only heirloom tomatoes; including Pink Brandywine Sudduth, Dester, Mortgage Lifter, Giant Belgium, Pink Ponderosa, Kellogg's Breakfast, Yellow Pear, and Santa Maria paste tomatoes. I still get some of the above problems but I am growing the ones that are the "hardest". I get some leaf loss about the time the tomatoes ripen, but don't loose the crop. I've experimented with setting out seedlings late; even as late as July 10th. Those plants start producing big crops of tomatoes on healthy vines beginning in September

Over the years I have done a little bit of both rotation and selecting for plants that are resistant to tomato ailments. I generally do a 3 year rotation but I haven't stressed about it too much. My current batch of tomatoes are in the same bed as last year and we've had no problems or losses. Over the last 20 years or so I have ripped out any plants that show problems and only save seed from the healthiest plants.

I do plant rotation more for nutrient availability than for disease prevention now.

If you intend to plant in the same place year after year any new virus or fungus will may take hold and you could lose a lot of your crop. But you could also save the survivors to breed a resilient tomato. It all depends on what you want to achieve. All of my strategies are dependent on saving seed. If you buy new seed or plants every year then you will have to be more careful.

I've never used cover crops as a way to prevent disease. Usually it's for nutrient and biomass additions to the soil, which will make a healthier soil and a more balanced microbiome.

I guess I will be the one some of you want to boo and hiss.  I'm not an expert.  I have spent many of hours searching the internet and reading on this very subject.  My take, (again not an expert) is crop rotation is primarily for large farms and monoculture. If your going to plant only tomato's in your bed, then rotating may be needed.  If you add compost before every crop, and plant a variety of plants in your raised beds you should be fine to plant in the same space.  I have seven raised beds and a tomato in almost every bed.  So there is no way to rotate crops.  I hate to say this out loud and temp fate, but I have never had blight.  I have never had a major fungus issue, or a major pest issue. Unless you count the fricking gopher I'm battling this year.  I'm not saying I never have pests, right now I have aphids on my beans and zucchini.  But it's not super bad. I just keep spraying them off with water and hoping the ladybugs will fly in to the rescue.   I think the key is to plant as many different things in the bed as you can, chop and drop as long as it doesn't have pests or problems. (Those things I use in a nongarden place to smother weeds.)  Add compost before each planting, and pay attention to what's going on in your garden, and you will be fine.

I think it's so important I'm going to make my point one more time.  Before I got into permies, and even organic gardening I grew gardens.  I would use stuff like Miracle Grow, and group all my tomato's together and all my beans together, and all my zucchini together etc., you get the idea.  Every year I would get tomato worms, and tons of aphids, and need to feed and treat all my veggies for every issue under the sun.  Then I discovered organic gardening, and I had stronger plants and thing still had issues, but the veggies seem to handle them better.  Then I discovered Permies, and learned about soil building and health and not disturbing the soil, mulching and planting a polyculture.  And things got even better.  This year besides the evil gopher is the best garden I have ever had. I mass planted to the point of being ridiculous.  It's so crowded you wouldn't think anything would produce.  But not only did it produce it blew me away.  In one bed I have 2 tomato's, 2 zucchini, a gypsy pepper, pole beans, cantaloupe, chives, radish, marigolds, zinnias, nasturtiums, bachelor buttons and cosmos.  In my smallest bed 4' X 4"  I have a tomato, egg plant, 3 cucumber, bell pepper, radish, basil, marigolds, nasturtiums, bachelor buttons,,  and salvia.  It's imposable to tell where one plant starts and another ends.  Yet it produces like crazy.  Not a tomato worm in sight.  I did put a sprinkle of organic blood meal, bone meal, and organic kelp in the beginning of August, besides water that's all I have had to do.  The aphids appeared  a couple weeks ago, and I haven't been as diligent about getting rid of them as I should, and everything is still producing amazingly well.  

So my humble opinion is add compost, plant what you want where you want, plant a bunch of other stuff you want and enjoy your garden.  Rules are meant to be broken.  Happy gardening.

The pictures were taken a couple of months ago.  Its even fuller now.

I use a three year rotation of everything in the nightshade family.  I do two year for everything else that can be rotated. I don’t know if I need to, but it seems safer. I rotate regardless of what approach I use.

Wow! Your garden is gorgeous! I was up late doing research. I’d like to set up the no dig system after I remove the last of the concrete that might have been a patio in 1957. I am concerned about gophers which is why I was going to dig down to put in hardware cloth and then do raised beds. Stupid gophers! And we having free range cats in the neighborhood, even.

It does seem that the permaculture  approach would compensate for soil issues. I will be paring down my kitchen garden to a 20’x6’ area and want to make the most of it.

Thanks.  I will probably redo my raised beds so I can put hard cloth down.  Such a bummer. Two beds are new this year. I hate to have to redo them.  I didn't have the money for the hard cloth. Now I wish I would have bought it anyway. Oh well, live and learn.

So it seems like I need to dig things up to put down hardware cloth since HOPING gophers won't come might not pan out? May I just mention that I am a bit overwhelmed with designing a permaculture garden?

Any new thing can be a bit overwhelming.  I think if we simplify it the permaculture part is about working with nature instead of against it, and not using bad chemicals.  
New raised beds can be as simple as using something that holds soil, and filling it with what you have or can get.  Or you can add any number of variations.  It mostly depends on what works for you.  
The 2 beds in the pictures are my oldest beds, so they have weed cloth on the bottom and are full of organic compost and organic soil. (My chickens removed all the soil this spring so I had to replace the soil).  They are doing great, and the gopher didn't get into these beds.  My other beds are hugel beets, which means I dug into the ground 2 feet, and filled the bottom with wood, soil, branches, soil, wood chips, soil, then I added organic compost,soil and chicken manure.  These beds build amazing soil and need less water. That being said they are the ones the gopher got into.  I will eventually make all my raised beds hugel beets, but you can bet I will be using hard cloth from now on.  
It doesn't have to be complicated, my simple beds are doing just as well as the others.  A couple years ago I covered a weed patch with wood chips. About 6 months later I made holes in the wood chips filled the hole with organic compost and planted a bunch of melons, and got the best melon harvest I have ever had.  Besides planting I didn't do anything but water.  
I say just do what feels right.  Gardening is an ever learning process.  Somethings you pat yourself on the back for a great job, and other you learn from.  For many of us it becomes a great joy.  Good luck, have fun with it.

I find that a lot of what is easiest depends on what you are and are not willing to do, and what your gardening goals are.

If you are seeking to eliminate tillage, or only amend soil from the top, and only minimally, results may vary, and obviously, the situation is quite different from someone who makes a tonne of compost and adds it yearly, rototilling it, and maybe also passing chickens over it.

I think it's laudable to seek to breed blight-resistant varieties of tomato. But the reason such blights haven't been bred out of existence, as one might think would make sense, is because blights and pathogens are also evolving. The ones that survive in soil and succeed in infecting blight-resistant tomato plants essentially are the strongest specimens, adapting generation after generation to be able to infect our fancy disease-resistant varieties.

So while we're busy grouping our blight-resistant tomatoes in one tomato pathogen-filled garden patch, thinking we've solved the tomato pathogen problem because we're just going to STEM it to death, the tomato pathogens are busily adapting, too.

It's exactly like the argument concerning certain types of herbicides and the genetically modified staple crops that have been bred to withstand that toxicity, that kill virtually all weed plants. Virtually is not all. Whatever survives being sprayed with herbicides well enough to breed will pass that resistance on to its offspring, and several generations down the road, the original herbicide is useless because it killed off all but the strains of specimens that were resistant to it. Voila herbicide-resistant weeds.

Same goes for blight-resistant tomato plant resistance. If we maintain soil conditions that help these pathogens thrive, we get stronger pathogens, too.

This isn't opinion. This is simply evolution. The weak or unsuitable die off. Those that survive tend to eventually build on those survival traits, even if just incrementally, generation to generation. How else would we have gotten blight-resistant tomatoes?

So in the case of blight, maybe the first year you don't see any.

Maybe in the second year, sometime near the end of harvest, you see some evidence of stomata infection in the lower leaves, but they're blight-resistant, you think, so let them be.

Maybe in the third year, the blight hits when you're two-thirds done your harvest, leading you to need to trim up infected lower branches on virtually all your blight-resistant tomatoes.

Maybe in the fourth year, the blight starts hitting just as the first tomatoes are ripening.

The tomatoes are still blight-resistant, just the resistance becomes less and less effective over time, meaning that it hits sooner.

In my opinion, having a tomato pathogen bed is a bad idea. I feel that rotating nightshades regularly and keeping pathogen counts in the soil low keeps the rate of pathogenic adaptation down.

Otherwise, we're breeding superbugs.

-CK

Jen Fulkerson said:

Before I got into permies, and even organic gardening I grew gardens.  I would use stuff like Miracle Grow, and group all my tomato's together and all my beans together, and all my zucchini together etc., you get the idea.  Every year I would get tomato worms, and tons of aphids, and need to feed and treat all my veggies for every issue under the sun.  Then I discovered organic gardening, and I had stronger plants and thing still had issues, but the veggies seem to handle them better.  Then I discovered Permies, and learned about soil building and health and not disturbing the soil, mulching and planting a polyculture.  And things got even better.  This year besides the evil gopher is the best garden I have ever had. I mass planted to the point of being ridiculous.  It's so crowded you wouldn't think anything would produce.  But not only did it produce it blew me away.  In one bed I have 2 tomato's, 2 zucchini, a gypsy pepper, pole beans, cantaloupe, chives, radish, marigolds, zinnias, nasturtiums, bachelor buttons and cosmos.  In my smallest bed 4' X 4"  I have a tomato, egg plant, 3 cucumber, bell pepper, radish, basil, marigolds, nasturtiums, bachelor buttons,,  and salvia.  It's imposable to tell where one plant starts and another ends.  Yet it produces like crazy.  Not a tomato worm in sight.  I did put a sprinkle of organic blood meal, bone meal, and organic kelp in the beginning of August, besides water that's all I have had to do.  The aphids appeared  a couple weeks ago, and I haven't been as diligent about getting rid of them as I should, and everything is still producing amazingly well.  

What a lovely testament, Jen!

I believe testimonials like these should be shouted from the rooftops.

Back to the original topic, though:

I'm of the opinion that we shouldn't let the fears of "what if X happens" override our willingness to try something new. Yes, we may get tomato blight. But you might end up with a unique landrace that is blight resistant. We may have a rockin' successful garden! We won't know if we don't try, I feel.