Strange Rotation

For the organic gardener, rotating vegetables within a garden is important both to confuse insect pests and to allow plant diseases time to die out due to the absence of their plant family host. In a small garden in which the beds for each vegetable are close together this may be less than totally successful. If you rotate the white potato bed with the zucchini bed, it will not be too great a task for the potato bugs to find the new potato bed three feet from last year’s potato bed. Also the squash bugs and borers will find their way the three feet to the new zucchini bed. One solution would of course be to separate your beds to the four corners of your back yard but that could cause lighting issues and other problems.

An unorthodox solution might be to not have a plant family in the small garden for three years but to have its culinary equivalent in the garden instead. Sweet potatoes, butternut squash and carrots all come from different plant families and are not much bothered by the same insect pests but from a culinary point of view they all cook up to about the same thing. Similarly, French fries can be made from white potatoes, sweet potatoes or zucchini wedges. Zucchini and cucumbers have similar uses and could be alternated even if they both are in the same family. Some salad greens are in the lettuce family, some in the cabbage family and some in the beet family so one might rotate lettuce with kale and then with chard. Cooked greens could be substituted for green beans one year. Green beans and asparagus are also good culinary substitutes for one another.  White potatoes and rutabagas are from different families but both of them cook up to “mashed potatoes” and serve as similar stew ingredients. The bottom line is that if the small, postage stamp gardener can find enough culinary equivalents  then he can starve insect pests out of existence by planting similar tasting vegetables from different plant families on alternating years.