Juli Lawrence – Rakish Gardening

July 28th, 2007

I hope I’m not overextending myself with this garden diary, but I need to do it from this point on so I’ll know where I planted, what I planted, what worked, what didn’t and so on. Every year I say I’m going to keep notes and just get too busy and never do it. I take lots of pictures, though, and while it’s not perfect, it’s helped.

Crop rotation was always an important part of farming. One of the many nuggets of growing wisdom my grandfather gave me. For farmers, I think it was more about nitrogen fixers (legumes) versus plants that took nitrogen from the soil. I’m not so worried about nitrogen because it’s easy enough to add. My reasons are to confuse the bugs and to change types of plants so that if there’s a fungus or a virus in the soil that hurts one type of plant, it won’t get what it needs when I plant something else. It’s really a kind of musical chairs, trying to stay a step ahead of bugs and disease. It’s a theory and I don’t know if it works or not, but I think it does.

This year I had to study several pictures and try to plot out where I’d grown the tomatoes, where I’d done it the year before, and so on. Huge pain in the ass. Since I have memory issues, I just can’t always remember the details I’d like to remember.

But now I have to catch up and make my notes.

This year it was all about companion planting.

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