Let's Move Those Veggies Around: More Gardening Tips

Every few years it is a great idea to change up the location of your garden vegetables. I usually change where I plant from year to year. But changing every three to four years is good enough.

Changing where you plant your vegetables is necessary for the health of the plants you are growing.

Certain plants will pull nutrients from the soil and other plants will add those same nutrients back into the soil. So when you change the location of the plants, they will all get pretty much what they need, nutrient speaking.

If you don't change locations, eventually the soil will be depleted of the necessary nutrients needed for that vegetable to produce well. And than the whole garden will suffer.

A good example of this would be sweet corn and beans or peas. Sweet corn needs plenty of nitrogen for it to grow well and produce that great tasting food. Peas and beans add nitrogen to the soil. So just by switching those two vegetables around you will be improving your harvest.

Having the soil full of nutrients is great for the vegetables and not so good for weeds. That is another bonus. The way it is supposed to go is that the healthier your soil is, the fewer the weeds. The fewer the weeds, the healthier your plants will grow because weeds will starve the plants of what, if any, nutrients and moisture there is in the soil.

In the spring, before I plant I make up a chart of where everything should go that year. To make things easy, keep a hold of that chart for the next year so you know where everything was planted the year before. If you don't change every year, just write down how many years it has been since you made any changes.

Crop rotation has been around for many years. It works great.

Try it and you will see for yourself.