The open soil in the kitchen garden is largely divided into four plots for separate vegetable families that I like to eat. (1) beet family eg beetroot and leaf beet. (2)brassicas eg kale, Brussels sprouts, purple sprouting broccoli and cabbage. (3) legumes eg peas and beans, I put sweet pea in here too for a bit of colour. (4) alliums eg onions, leeks, garlic and shallots. I’m told that repeatedly growing the same crop in the one place year after year risks attracting a disease or pest which likes that crop. For example, brassicas can get clubroot. However that means no brassicas can be grown for maybe 25 years in that place. As with all things in life, prevention is better than cure. The video below may be of interest meanwhile.

Five different families of vegetables are rotated annually around the  other five patches. There is now an easy way to remember which crop goes in the first patch, which in the second, third and so on. The aide memoire is ‘People Love Bunches Of Roses‘ which gives P-L-B-O-R. So plant potato family crops in the first patch, legumes in the second, brassicas in third, onion family and leeks etc in fourth and root crop in the fifth. When root crops are harvested, that patch gets enriched with compost and/or manure again to take the seed potatoes the next Spring. The same order is observed with each crop family moving up one patch in the rotation.

Thank you to Dave and the Balbriggan and District Horticultural Society for taking the guesswork out of which comes first in a rotation, legumes or brassicas!