[Homestead] Tomatoes, to rotate or not to rotate

Clansgian at wmconnect.com Clansgian at wmconnect.com
Fri May 2 21:05:58 EDT 2008


In a message dated 5/2/2008 12:02:49 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
genegerue at ruralize.com writes:


> >. "Tomatoes love to grow where tomatoes have grown." "You must  
> rotate tomatoes each year to stop disease."
> 
> ...... It is my common practice to  
> prune off low branches as the plants get taller



It has taken me a lot of years and a lot of digging (no pun intended, not 
much any way) to come to my own semi-conclusions about this.

Over the years my plantings of individual crops have become smaller and 
smaller. That is, I still plant as many tomato plants, but there are not whole rows 
or beds of them.  The two exceptions to this are hard corn and potatoes.  
Almost everything else is planted in blocks of the 4' wide beds 1' to 4' at a 
time.  Along a 60 foot bed there will typically be 4 feet of cabbage, 3 feet of 
onions, 2 feet of spinach, 4 feet of snap beans, 3 feet of peas, 1 foot of 
radishes, etc. etc.   So using the exact same ground two years in a row is 
unlikely.

And yet, I have come to very much doubt that crop rotation in the small 
organic holding is gemane.  Take Gene's example of the tomatoes,  Early and Late 
blight are airborne diseases and rotation will do nothing to thwart them. 
Fusarim and Verticillium are deep soil born.  But it takes more than 5 years for the 
spore to pass out of the ground, so the same ground could  not have potatoes, 
peppers, eggplants, or tomatoes for five years to rotate out the disease.   

Soil borne pathogens on the soil surface can be thwarted by removing lower 
foliage.

Open air space and good organic plants will resit the diseases.  But I see 
little evidence that rotation does all that much good.  I am suspecting that 
crop rotation is yet another one of those things that is necessary in 
agribusiness operations that gets subliminated into the kitchen garden without examining 
very deeply that it is apropos or not.

James
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