Heavy, medium, light feeders: plan next year's rotation now
The first beds are clearing in late August, and right now you still remember exactly what grew where. That makes it the ideal moment to lock in next year's rotation.
Crop rotation sounds like a farming textbook, but at heart it is one simple question: what gets to grow in this bed next year? Answer it now, while the potatoes are freshly lifted and you still know where the tomatoes stood, and you save yourself the guesswork in February. Your soil pays you back with less disease pressure and steadier yields.
Why late August is the right moment
Come February, you sit down with a blank plan and try to recall whether the cabbage was on the left or the right. Right now you can still see it: the lifted potato rows, the tomatoes winding down, the bean bed already making space.
That snapshot is worth a lot. Capture it, and your winter planning takes ten minutes instead of two hours, with far fewer mistakes along the way.
The three feeder levels at a glance
Heavy feeders take a lot out of the soil: potato, tomato, squash, courgette and every kind of cabbage. They want rich, well-fed ground.
Medium feeders get by on what is left afterwards: carrot, beetroot, chard, spinach, lettuce, leek and garlic.
Light feeders need little and some even give back: pea, bush bean, onion, radish, corn salad. Legumes such as peas and beans fix nitrogen in the soil through root nodule bacteria, which is exactly what makes them such valuable predecessors.
The four-year cycle, plainly
Year 1: heavy feeders on a bed freshly topped up with compost – potato, squash, cabbage.
Year 2: medium feeders living on the leftovers – carrot, beetroot, leek.
Year 3: light feeders – pea, bush bean, onion. The legumes quietly build nitrogen while they grow.
Year 4: green manure or one undemanding crop as a recovery year, then compost again and back to year one.
With only two or three beds, a shortened cycle works too. What matters most is that the same crop does not land on the same patch two years running.
The trap: rotating nutrients, forgetting families
The most common mistake is a switch that looks right on paper but not botanically. Tomato and potato are both nightshades and share diseases such as late blight. Planting tomatoes after potatoes keeps the feeder level unchanged but does the pathogens in your soil a favour.
The same goes for cabbage and radish – both brassicas, both prone to clubroot. And for beetroot, chard and spinach, which all belong to the amaranth family.
Rule of thumb: check the plant family first, the feeder level second.
Transitions that reliably work
Potato to bush bean: the soil is loose, and the bean brings nitrogen back. Cabbage does well after potato too, but give the bed fresh compost first, since both are heavy feeders.
Tomato to corn salad or lettuce: a light follow-on crop that still fits into autumn.
Pea or bean to cabbage, tomato or spinach: the classic way to use up that nitrogen.
Squash or courgette to salad, then beans the year after: light first, then rebuild.
With carrots it pays to look at what came before: after bush bean, pea or lettuce they do noticeably better than after parsley or celeriac, which are umbellifers just like the carrot itself.
Note it now, benefit from it in winter
For each bed, jot down two things: which crop grew there this year and which plant family it belongs to. Your winter plan needs nothing more than that.
In Rootivo this happens along the way: your beds are stored per season, and when you plan for next year the crop rotation check speaks up as soon as you place a plant where a relative already grew the year before.
Im Lexikon: Kartoffel