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Crop Rotation
196 Plays2 years ago
Crop rotation is a practice that involves changing the type of plants grown in a specific area each season or year. This can help prevent soil depletion, pest build up, and disease outbreak, as well as improve soil fertility and crop yield. In this episode, we'll explain the benefits of crop rotation, how to plan your rotation scheme, and some examples of crops that work well together in different rotations. Whether you have a larger production field or a small raised bed garden, crop rotation can make a big difference in your horticultural success.
Home Vegetable Gardening in Kentucky
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@l.uky.edu
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Transcript
Introduction and Food Fusion Humor
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to Hort Culture, where a group of extension professionals and plant people talk about the business, production, and joy of planting seeds and helping them grow. Join us as we explore the culture of horticulture. Hello, everybody. How are we doing today? I'm pretty good. How about you?
00:00:24
Speaker
Good. I have a really random question and I want everybody to answer with a yes or no. There's no other explanation. No. You didn't spring this on us before, so this should be interesting. I'm ready. We're recording after lunch. I just finished my lunch. I want to know if you feel personally that it should be frowned upon or not.
00:00:44
Speaker
that I soaked up the miso, like, the liquid of my ramen with a homemade, like, Southern biscuit? Like, is that, like, too much cross-culture happens? I think you provided the answer with the question. You said Southern biscuit, which everything is gravy to a Southern biscuit, so I think it's perfectly fine. Ray can't follow directions. Yes or no, Ray?
00:01:06
Speaker
Yes. Oh, yes. It is fine. Yeah, it is acceptable, right? I was like, I mean, I have this biscuit and I have all of this delicious broth. It's the word biscuit in it with a single word or five. That's called fusion, Alexis. You take that down to Asheville and you could sell that biscuit for $18.99. You can. And Alexis is a food DJ. She is a mix master all of a sudden.
00:01:30
Speaker
Ooh, that was good. Yeah, you're really rethinking the Southern cuisine foodscape foodway. I mean, it's broth. So it's just, you know, it's just miso broth, whatever. It's fine. Anyway. You're building connections right there. There you go. When is your book coming out? When's your cookbook coming out? You can find it at tiny.url. At Southern Fusion. You can find it at buybitcoin.com.
00:01:55
Speaker
Please send me all of your Venmo money. Thanks. Or pay me in biscuits. I mean, what's the platform if you pay in biscuits?
00:02:02
Speaker
Um, I don't know. Biscuitbelly.com. I don't know. Ooh, yeah. I think that is a thing though, actually. Butter milk corn. Biscuit belly biscuit. Butter milk corn. Oh, it sounds like more of like a roadside stand situation, you know? Biscuits. We've talked about marketing on this podcast before, so if we can market this, I feel like we might be able to market just about anything. The best donuts I've ever had have come from the side of a road. So I'm just saying.
00:02:26
Speaker
Were they like just like in the ditch? Like literally I thought it was like a doughnut plant and I just like plucked this little, no. That's why your microbiome is so strong. Yeah. Is it though? Is it? Ditch doughnuts. Fine dining to me is gas station food, so nobody should talk to me about fine dining. Yeah, Ray eats gas station sushi, so let's not talk to him about that. I do. I do.
00:02:51
Speaker
And you get extra points of a style like a taco salad or a tuna salad base. Tuna salad, you get extra points for survival. Wow. I mean, some of that stuff is good, you all, especially of, you know, southern cuisine. There's biscuits and gravy and all sorts of stuff. And you me so involved at all in that? Yeah, me so dizzy and sick after eating there. Got it. I know. On that note, we probably should figure into greener pastures, I suppose.
00:03:20
Speaker
All right.
Understanding Crop Rotation Basics
00:03:21
Speaker
What are we chatting about today, friend? I mean, I know, but do you know? Is this a quiz? Is this another yes or no question? Yes. What is crop rotation, Alex? Alex, thank you. Alexa has ruined my life. Amazon has ruined my life in that way. I am no longer known by
00:03:40
Speaker
the extra two letters of my name. You should not say that on the podcast. You just triggered like maybe... I did. I'm sorry. Nobody else is ever going to hear this. Well, if you think you've got it rough, Brett's actually my middle name. My first name is Siri, but I had to go. Yeah. Yikes. Yeah. That's a tough one. That's a tough handle. Yeah. I had to change it up about, you know, iPod one. That's weird. My middle name is Hey Google. So there you go. Oh crap. We're very free-spirited parents. Yes, we're very technologically savvy.
00:04:10
Speaker
Well, crop rotation. That's what we're talking about today. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So before we before we jump into this, because you all are all these plant nerds and I'm an honorary plant nerd. I just want to make sure I've heard this term a lot. I think in some ways the early extension was built around
00:04:29
Speaker
trying to get people to do things like crop rotation and understanding that maybe you shouldn't plant the same thing in the same place over and over and over again. So when we talk about crop rotation, are we talking just about planting my corn in a different place every year? Is there any sort of like groupings of things? And it is just rotating in terms of the actual plot. Is that right? I mean, is that what we're talking about with crop
00:04:52
Speaker
rotation. Oh, man, you said so if you could rotate it to a different spot every year, Brett, that would probably be wonderful. But that's probably not the case with especially most small based gardeners, they probably don't have that luxury. But the idealized version is, is not planting the same thing in the same place every year. Is that right?
00:05:15
Speaker
Absolutely. And there's a whole host of benefits to talk about and reasons why you go to this extra effort for moving things around. I've heard people talk about like plant families. Is that part of this or?
00:05:27
Speaker
Yeah, so you don't want to plant your corn in the same place, but it's more than just straight up corn or straight up your tomatoes and you're moving them to a different area. You don't want to plant the same plant family. So one that a lot of people don't know is that a tomato is related to a pepper, is related to an eggplant.
00:05:46
Speaker
plant is related to a potato. So if you plant all, what that means is they all are susceptible to the same diseases, same insects, usually the same, they have the same nutrient needs. I mean, a potato is going to be different as far as how it grows versus something like a bell pepper.
00:06:05
Speaker
Overall what they need it's kind of like their cousins right and so they all can have the same the same problem there for their first generation cousins right. The nightshades cousins right we all have cousin so rotating those families is what we're looking for.
00:06:21
Speaker
For some people, that's as simple as just moving your tomato around if you're only growing one of a family. But you want to kind of, you want to move these babies around. Let them explore the garden, explore the field a little bit more. So this is like if I had tomatoes in one spot one year, I wouldn't necessarily, I wouldn't want to put any of those things you just mentioned. Peppers.
00:06:43
Speaker
uh, eggplant, et cetera, in that place. But I might put something like my squash or my cucumbers in that spot. Is that, is that what we're getting out of here? Right. Because we go from nightshade family into a cucurbit family when we go into melons and things like that. And this is where I really love to direct people. Uh, if you're like me and don't like to memorize things, I mean, so many of these garden families are common crops. We kind of know like the nightshade family, or if you're an avid gardener and you're into
00:07:10
Speaker
looking up information. You'll know some of these, but there's all sorts of garden families that work well together as far as they work into a rotation. But this is where charts and things online can be so handy. And you can probably readily find those if you use a keyword search, such as a garden rotation family, something like that. You're going to quickly get some pretty solid charts.
00:07:40
Speaker
to reference and that's one of the first things I think that's a good starting point for home gardeners that are maybe are not used to or accustomed to doing crop rotation is to lay your hands on one of those charts. I mean that's a great starting point, really good starting point. And so just to make sure I'm understanding here, we can treat plants that are in the same family as if they were the same as far as within our rotation.
00:08:04
Speaker
Yes. So that means that... And Ray, you mentioned there's some common ones out there. So we mentioned the nightshades. What are some of the other ones that you do have committed to memory? Yeah. Well, I am looking at a chart. Now, I should not have told the viewers this, but there are... I mean, you know, cucurbits, we all know those as our vining crops, but the carrots... We don't all know those. So cucurbits, what would be in a cucurbit family?
00:08:28
Speaker
That's like you're talking about cucumbers, squash, things like that. And when we talk about plant families, we're generalizing here. It's not like a panacea. It's not saying that if we do these rotations, things are going to work out perfectly because there are just some opportunistic insects or diseases that's going to cross over. But if you use these families, whether carrot family, broccoli family,
00:08:53
Speaker
not shade onion if you work within these families and set up your crop rotation which you know we'll talk more about this but should probably ideally be a minimum of three years four years would be much better because a lot of these diseases and insects persist at least that long
00:09:10
Speaker
But if you set up your garden or your commercial plots within these families, it's going to take you a long ways towards avoiding some of these problems. Not all of the problems, because some of these diseases will cross over broad ranges of families, but you will be in a much better shape than if you had no rotation at all, crop rotation. When I work with, it's usually home gardeners.
00:09:36
Speaker
that really struggle with crop rotation because I mean that's just a stock answer in the job is if you're having issues in your garden disease build up like blots on tomatoes that typically are soil born and they start in the spring mid-summer with rain splash and move up and that accumulates in the soil or rhizoctonium beans things like that our stock answer is to say well crop rotation but I've worked with so many people to get frustrated I don't know about you guys but they get frustrated when I tell them that because they say well we have a small garden plot
00:10:06
Speaker
And we can't really do a lot
Implementing Crop Rotation in Small Gardens
00:10:09
Speaker
of rotation. How do you guys handle that? Some tips and tricks if you have a small, I mean on a commercial scale, we're usually planting large blocks of
00:10:18
Speaker
certain plants, maybe just a monoculture of one plant, not even a family of plants, and then you've got your rotation, your four, five, six-year rotation set up. But how do you guys work with small producers when they just have a little small garden plot? I mean, what strategy do you have? I would say if you're talking about home gardens, raised beds are a really good way to go because you can, Ray said this earlier, compartmentalize. You have
00:10:42
Speaker
Bed one, tomatoes, bed two, cucurbits. I don't know if anybody just heard the thunder outside my window, but that was a little sketch. Anyways, you know, bed three, you have your, your, uh, aliens, which are, you know, your onions, uh, things like that. One little note.
00:11:01
Speaker
It's easy, sometimes it's easy to guess a plant family, right? Because if you think about how a squash grows versus how a watermelon grows, they're very similar, right? If you look at just the leaves and you didn't see the fruit up close, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference a lot of time between these plants. And so that can be pretty easy, but not all of them are that easy. So a beet is in the same family as spinach is, and so we know that those
00:11:25
Speaker
grow very differently, right? But that's also in the same family as its amaranth, the amaranth family, which is what pigweed is in. It's also what silosha is, and so the flower person here, silosha and amaranth as- There's also, there's also edible forms of amaranth seed that are grain staple for some people around the world if you're vegetarian or-
00:11:45
Speaker
You're just looking to expand, try little amaranth. Exactly. So definitely look those up and that's easy. Just put like beets, plant, family. I just did it a bunch of times because I couldn't remember what some of them were in. But anyways, where I was getting at, you can compartmentalize when you've got a small garden, you can rotate those beds from time to time.
00:12:04
Speaker
If you don't want to do raised beds, sometimes it's just an added expense. You've already got your garden good. You've got some really good soil going on. You're like, why would I do raised beds? And you need to rotate. Really try and add something in there that's really different. So maybe you don't usually grow onions or something in the Lily family.
00:12:28
Speaker
grow them and figure out how to eat them, enjoy them, but get those into your rotation every three years or so.
00:12:35
Speaker
and try and diversify your families. And so if that means you have one area that is not something you maybe normally would grow, that's okay because you can think of it as, well, I'm going to help my soil. It's almost like a cover crop that you can also eat off of. And we're going to talk about cover crops next week. But you can almost think about them that way for the people who don't necessarily want to do like a raised bed situation is what I tell them.
00:13:00
Speaker
I worked with someone the other, well, I think it was last year. And they do a fantastic job with, of all things, heirloom tomatoes. And I thought, I'm going to have to talk to this person. They always have beautiful heirloom tomatoes, which are susceptible to a lot of diseases. Even if you rotate, it is difficult to grow heirloom tomatoes. And they just have a small plot of land. And so I spoke with this person. I finally got around to asking them, how do you guys do it?
00:13:27
Speaker
social media posts and your heirlooms are beautiful, the tomatoes are beautiful, the fruit is beautiful, but also the plants themselves and what they said they did, and they just had a small plot once again. They were already using a four-year rotation on the raised beds, but specifically for highly susceptible crops, like an heirloom tomato, they put those in containers. They were using fabric planters, 10 gallon fabric planters that they could easily move around, but they could also easily isolate those from native soil.
00:13:56
Speaker
And that's how they were growing those. They just kind of, that was a specific consideration to them. And they were, you know, sort of advanced home gardeners and market gardeners to an extent, but they extended their planting plots with individual containers. And that's just sort of the next level, even above a raised bed garden, whether with or without sideboards, you know, that that's awesome using raised beds, but they were using individual containers. And I thought that was really cool.
00:14:23
Speaker
And that's how they dealt with those prized plants that they could individually manage and water. And even if they had to move around, they could do that. I thought that was really cool. Yeah, that's a good novel way to approach that. I think a couple other things for the small gardener or folks who don't have a lot of space.
00:14:42
Speaker
One is that managing your disease in this year can help to prevent the amount of spores that get created that may create disease next year. So if you're averse to spraying, you're probably gonna have some issues that will just persist over time. But into that point, it won't get all of it, but I think fall cleanup as part of your plan. You need to get every scrap, especially of diseased leaves or diseased,
00:15:11
Speaker
parts of the plant, you're probably gonna pull the roots up, you're gonna wanna get those plants out of there and don't compost them, put them in the yard waste container, et cetera, to get as much, because that's what we're trying to avoid in part, is that there's other things that you're not gonna be able to completely avoid, but if you can keep your plants healthy and you can get any material out of there at the end of the season, those are two ways I think that small growers, backyard gardeners might be able to
00:15:38
Speaker
help manage some of that. But for the folks who are maybe a little bit larger scale and they have plots or they have beds, there's more than just the extension people said this. What are some of the benefits or what are the reasons why we might want to do that or things that we're trying to help encourage? Alexa, Josh, I think we were talking a little bit about that.
00:16:00
Speaker
Yes, I would say that, so we know this, we've seen this and it was, you know, really pushed, Brett mentioned, you know, Extension really pushed this when Extension began, you know, 100 years ago. We see this with corn, soybean wheat, right? So they rotate these plant families, soybean fixes nitrogen, you know, grass is a, or corn is a grass, it's a very heavy feeder. So we rotate these,
00:16:25
Speaker
To help with nutrient management as well as disease and insect issues but nutrient management is one way so not only are we using those soybeans or alfalfa or whatever for nitrogen fixing but also different plant roots.
00:16:43
Speaker
Make partnerships with microbes so you know corn may make best friends with you know microbes a and then soybean comes in and makes best friends with microbes b and then we have both a and b in the soil when we bring in wheat or we bring in something else later on and so
00:17:03
Speaker
Those help to fix different minerals, so not just nitrogen. They break down organic matter. They improve soil tilth, so different types of root systems are going to do things differently. A beet is a root crop versus something like a tomato that's going to be more fibrous versus something even like a pepper, even though it's in the same family, has a really shallow root system.
00:17:29
Speaker
Carrots and turnips have a deep root system. They're going to bring minerals up and nutrients further up into the soil profile so that when you plant your tomatoes there the following year and your peppers, those nutrients are accessible. And so we have this kind of partnership with breaking down nutrients and making these partnerships with microbes, but also improving that soil along the way just by rotating that family. What do you think, Josh?
00:17:58
Speaker
Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, essentially you're trying to help the soil ecosystem have a lot of diversity
Advanced Crop Rotation Techniques
00:18:05
Speaker
to it and by putting different plants in there to form those different relationships.
00:18:10
Speaker
at different times of the year, you're kind of facilitating that, you're introducing and maintaining that kind of diversity among the soil microbes and all their different kind of metabolic processes that they exchange with the plant. So yeah, it's kind of a, you know, if you just plant the same thing over and over again, you're sort of only feeding one group of your soil microorganisms and that just leads to kind of a,
00:18:38
Speaker
less resilience and a soil that is less healthy in the context of being able to plant different things in it or being able to provide different kind of nutrient profiles for you. These people cannot go one week without talking about soil and it's making me inspired.
00:19:02
Speaker
Like it's the foundation or something. Yeah, it's like it's important, something crazy. And we're going to talk about cover crops, like I said, next week and kind of how you add these into a crop rotation, right? Because a cover crop has its own plant family. And so you don't necessarily want to put, you know, even a cover crop in. I don't want to jump too much into that, but that is something that you can work into your crop rotation.
00:19:24
Speaker
Also, for some of those large growers, like Ray, I have people who do heirloom tomatoes. They know that that is their money crop and they have them in their high tunnel. That is what they have to grow. They sell them. They have their market cornered for that.
00:19:40
Speaker
And so they really can't, or I don't want to say can't, they won't and it makes sense why they won't change what they put in their high tunnel. So to combat that, you know, constant tomato after tomato after tomato situation, what they have started incorporating is
00:19:59
Speaker
crop rotation in the winter. So they're going to do their summer tomatoes every single year, but they need to have something in that soil feeding those microbes, improving the soil. So they're rotating by using a cover crop, or they can go in with something even like a spinach as an example that they could harvest off of if they wanted to, and they're rotating those. So sometimes it is hard for some of our larger commercial growers who have a market for something.
00:20:26
Speaker
to rotate between plant families because you need to grow that and you may only have one space or two spaces to grow that. So it's really hard to rotate in the cut flower world.
00:20:38
Speaker
a lot of our major flowers are in the same exact family. So the Asteraceae family is huge and that's the sunflower family or the daisy family. Daisies, yeah. Which is also lettuce. Which is also lettuce, exactly. So it can be really hard to rotate out of that family because what you need to grow and what might grow well in your area, especially in Kentucky
00:21:00
Speaker
are all in the same family and now there are others there Lexus uh do you uh I mean that's a great point that's an awesome point I hadn't thought about it that way but uh what do producers do do they just let the soil fallow or with the cover crop and just go away from it from any production crop or what's the best way there if if like producers I never thought about that producers may it's such a like they don't have options
00:21:21
Speaker
Yeah. Is fallow coming to that? There's always options, but I would say fallow is, I mean, truly fallow, the way I think of truly fallow is literally nothing on the soil and that's never a good option. Yeah, so cover cropping can be something that you're rotating with. I try to encourage people who
00:21:43
Speaker
you know if they have the time to make money off of that area so if they can so rotating and trying to find another crop and figuring out the market for it but sometimes that takes a lot we know that marketing takes a lot of work so it can be easy.
00:21:59
Speaker
Easier sometimes to throw a cover crop in that you don't have to sell and then you till it in or you smother it or however you decide to Get rid of that And you know you at least are improving your soil, right? So you're not mining it of anything if you're giving back to it So yeah that that can be one reason but it can be hard. There's always another family though Like it's just whether or not you're gonna be willing to market it There's always another family
00:22:26
Speaker
Can I ask a little light question from the dumb hot peanut gallery over here? The bald boy category. Yeah. Well, do you all have a favorite type of root structure that you would find really beautiful and cool? They're talking about paintings on a wall and we're talking about culturally in a garden.
00:22:47
Speaker
Oh, well, you know, I'm a big fan of the radishes that I'm using as a, uh, like a dinner crop because I can just, I've been eating them as I go out. Like they're just starting to get ready and I get to go out of the tunnel. Um, and then daikon radishes in the winter. Cause in the summer when you see these like enormous, um, just.
00:23:10
Speaker
pathways where soil and water and things can get down in there and they break up the compaction. I find that fascinating how strong roots are.
00:23:22
Speaker
It's fascinating how capable nature is and how we think we have our handle on it. And she's like, watch this. Johnson grass. Rizomes. Yeah. And we don't want to discount from a management standpoint. Many years ago, I was on a production farm.
00:23:41
Speaker
And there was a lot of management into crop rotation because interestingly enough, we didn't have on the farm just one soil type or profile. And it really took, if we added anything new, because we had vegetables in addition to tobacco and some other crops on the farm, but it really took a lot of consideration and especially with new crops, more management to get a handle on rotating crops if you add something, because we were on like a six year rotation roughly.
00:24:12
Speaker
to manage things, and the crops don't always rotate really well, so you have to take that into consideration. I know managers already know that, that's out there producing something on a little bit larger scale, but it takes a lot of thought, and you guys have already mentioned it, because different crops have different root structures, they have different nutrient profiles, different biomass that's left behind, which may or may not add to problems later. It may help things, it may hurt things. All these are big considerations with crop rotation.
00:24:42
Speaker
on a farm so it's just not sometimes as easy as just saying we're gonna switch this to this field because I mean I'm sure Lexus said you know when you're moving things around not every space on your farm I mean is it completely uniform or there's different spots for different crops.
00:25:02
Speaker
I mean, all these are considerations to me that we had to make. So yeah, crop rotation, it absolutely has to be done to scale when you're larger, I think, or else you just have a buildup of problems that no amount of variety selection or synthetic chemicals is gonna take care of. This would probably be just a good time to do the classic extension PSA of if you have not already or you have not recently, get your soil tested so that you can at least know where you're sitting, you can see
00:25:32
Speaker
uh what nutrients you have available right now you can track your organic matter and all that kind of fun stuff across time because as Ray was saying and if you have a big area and I mean by big I mean even a couple of acres take a couple of soil samples from several different places so you can get a sense of what that soil type is maybe if the nutrients the land use history is different or whatever yeah the nutrients might be different so this is a good time to at least
00:25:56
Speaker
to encourage you to engage with a little bit of science so that you can know what you're working from in the first place and then across time maybe think about working in. If it's an area in your field doesn't have a lot of available nitrogen right now, you may be able to start out with something that doesn't need a ton of nitrogen in that area and then think about later supplementing ahead or thinking about a cover crop as we'll talk about next week.
00:26:22
Speaker
Um, it's just that classic extension thing of go get a soil test if you can. Yeah. And crop rotation, we've been talking about families, right? Rotate those families. Um, yes, absolutely. That's your kind of number one goal is to rotate the families. But when I started, so when I went from a really small space of rental property, um, several years there learning to rotate, learning, you know, what's really small, what's really small for the, what's really small. I think I was.
00:26:52
Speaker
40 by 30, two 40 by 30 plots, 40 feet by 30, so small. So when I was learning that and then I scaled up and
00:27:04
Speaker
Like one thing, the first thing I did when I scaled up and we bought our farm was- Scaled up how big? For the people out there? Well, it's kind of hard to say. So if we just talk about annual production, you know, 100 by 100 right now, a lot of what I do is perennial production, tunnel production. Intensive. Intensive, yes. So for the sake of crop rotation and the easiest way to think about it in these summer annuals, we're thinking about our annuals in general.
00:27:33
Speaker
I kind of thought about it as three plots.
00:27:37
Speaker
In these three plots, I would always have one in a cover crop of some kind, depending on whether I was cover cropping for a summer cover crop or a winter cover crop. The other two would be in two styles of production. With cut flowers, and I think you could look at this from a vegetable perspective too, a lot of our summer crops are in one or two families. If you think of summer crops, you think of beans, tomatoes, and
00:28:05
Speaker
you know, cucurbits, so three families there, versus your winter crops would be your brassicas, so those are your Brussels sprouts, your cabbages, your spinages, your beets, or that amaranth family, and then maybe your lettuce, salsify, and those are gonna be your asteraceae family, okay? So same thought process with flowers as vegetables. So you have, I had one always in a cover crop, and it may have two cover crops in a row, might have a summer and a fall,
00:28:33
Speaker
I'm not looking at my spreadsheet right now to really say and then the other two are going to be one's going to be that you know winter cover crop or early spring and the other or I'm sorry not cover crop winter crop and the other my cash crop and then a summer cash crop and then I just rotate those through
00:28:52
Speaker
So your cash crops are constantly moving, and then your cover crop spot is constantly moving. So you're never completely mining out those nutrients, and then you're rotating those disease issues, your insect issues. So that's kind of how I set mine up, was from the get-go. So just to follow up, or to ask you some more about that. I know it's hard without a visual, sorry. So let's say plot one. You mentioned plot one. What is in it? Plot one right now.
00:29:21
Speaker
So plot one is getting summer annuals. Summer annuals. And then in, when will that change to something else? So it will change to a summer, it will change to a winter, it will change to a winter cash crop in September, October.
Planning and Documenting Crop Rotation
00:29:40
Speaker
And then next spring it will go into. It will go into a cover crop of probably a summer cover crop of buckwheat.
00:29:49
Speaker
And at that point, plot B will be going into summer annuals for the first time after coming out of a rotation. It may be plot B, maybe plot C. How far out are you planned right now in terms of these rotations?
00:30:03
Speaker
Um, about three, I mean about three years when it comes down to two and a half to three, uh, depending on how many cover crops, but you know, you could even go out before, you know, sections. And so when you're thinking about that, you're like, wow, that's a lot of space. Uh, but I'm only.
00:30:19
Speaker
actively farming one and a half space at a time because the other is with cover crop and so I have planned if I know I want to have say you know you want to have a quarter acre in production and you want to farm a quarter acre every summer then you have you know three quarter acre plots that you rotate through and get those record keeping is really important for you.
00:30:43
Speaker
Yeah. Um, I used to think my brain was good enough, but now I care. I literally packed around a notebook, um, everywhere I go. Like I, this thing goes on vacation with me. Like if I want to know, if I want to know at any certain time where I ordered something or what crop, what crop is going in next, I have it with me because that's the way my brain works. I don't know if any of you all are, you mentioned the notebook. Do you use, do you use any particular programs or methods for plotting out your,
00:31:10
Speaker
uh your rotations and and and a question open for everybody what they've seen people do
00:31:17
Speaker
I'm still old-fashioned, and I like to write it all down, and I like to map it out. It's soothing for me, I guess, from an anxiety point, I don't know, but I like to write it all down. Get a little chamomile tea, suck your thumb, and do some prop planning. Do some prop planning, and I have several of these notebooks lying around from over the years, but I know there are some really great ones out there, especially when you're planning, when you need to seed things, and then how those mix into your
00:31:45
Speaker
Crop Rotation. There are some good ones out there. Johnny's has a really good calendar. That would be helpful for people wanting to do Crop Rotation. That's Johnny's Seeds. I'm sure most people listening to this have heard of them. And then UK has, go ahead. I was going to say, our friend Chris from Gorapalacha shared a nice little tool that they had put together in concert with their
00:32:08
Speaker
site folks and it's just a, it's Excel based and I'm an Excel boy. Those who know me will attest and it's, yeah, it makes sense to me, but I, and I find that soothing. I find the spreadsheet soothing.
00:32:23
Speaker
Oh, I love a good spreadsheet. Don't get me wrong. I work with home gardeners and commercial gardeners. They're into journaling. And those folks are not only very talented at using colors and shapes drawn by hand, but yeah, they're like looking at a beautiful English journal. It's not a notebook fan for me. They said, this is our journal. Don't get the too confused. Yeah, don't get it confused. Maybe I'll show some like photos once this, like for this episode.
00:32:51
Speaker
on our, like our Instagram stories or something. It's all smiley faces and just squiggles. It's a lot of, it's a lot of colors. You all can't like see this listeners wise, but it's, it's colorful. Um, so you do use colors. Awesome. Yeah. Most folks that I've worked with, they incorporate color into those rotations somehow, whether or not they're using a computer program or, uh, just churnling. It seems like colors are involved in there at some point. Did that say Mrs. Alexis Timberlake?
00:33:28
Speaker
I've seen kind of a combination where I mean, you know, writing in pen out in the field.
00:33:36
Speaker
can work, but it can also get wet. You know, so I used to be very disaster averse. And I always just had different small notepads that I would write in pencil with. And then I had kind of a master spreadsheet back in the home office that I would transfer things to. And it kind of gave me an opportunity to make sure I really understand what I wrote down while it was like fresh in my mind.
00:33:58
Speaker
I take notes on my phone and then I transfer them into the notebook. I see. I have to write things down too. There's something about that pen and paper process in my brain that makes me remember things. And it's funny that I'll jot down notes on my phone, but to remember them, I have a notebook and I will write them down. What's your sign? What's your astrological sign, Ray? It's Scorpio to be, to be sure. What about you, Josh?
00:34:29
Speaker
Taurus. Oh, what are you Brad? Oh, he had a you had a theory and he just blew it out of the water. Both Virgos but very different flavors. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not I'm not a pen and paper person. I like I like the feeling of pencil against paper, but
00:34:45
Speaker
It doesn't really, it just is a more of a tactile thing anyway. Yeah, like what I liked is that I had just some dumb little notepad that I could lose because I was transferring the information to the master sheet regularly. And I don't know, electronic stuff like breaks and you sit on it or run it over and adios.
00:35:09
Speaker
Whatever gets the job done on this, but I think keeping those records, however you do it, chisel and rock, whatever works as long as you're extreme. Yeah. And Alexis pointed out that she's keeping, and obviously she is operating a business, so it's doubly important.
00:35:29
Speaker
keeping a record of like where you got the seed from and what varieties you grew and that sort of thing. It can be really helpful because if you grow, I know we, for instance, grew some butternut squash and it was the first, first, uh, variety that we had that didn't get decimated by squash vine borers. And I was like trying to remember where, and then I finally found a note of where I had gotten it from. We were able to order it again, and we had really good success with those.
00:35:57
Speaker
But in the middle, in the one year where I couldn't find the record, I bought some from, I don't know, some box store and they were yeeted almost immediately. I was like, oh, they're putting on squash. Awesome. And then just like somebody pulled the plug and they just.
00:36:14
Speaker
melted into the ground. Belair Blooms is a, most everybody on here knows them, but they are a flower farm, commercial flower farm in Wadi, Kentucky. And they have, like, I always think my record keeping is like fairly impressive. And then I saw Anna's record keeping, she does most of their seed starting. And so she keeps there, she does just like a three ring or a spiral bound
00:36:41
Speaker
notebook because she likes that process, but where I just keep a sheet that says like, okay, I bought all my seeds from this place every year, but then I have a separate spot where I say when I seeded them, she combines those all into one. And I was like, that's so brilliant. And every year she says, you know, adjuratum from store be seeded on this time. And
00:37:05
Speaker
One thing I'm trying to also do in this, if you're ever going to sell veggies or whatever it is, and maybe you're just trialing this year or you're trialing something new this year, one good suggestion will be to, when is your first marketable crop? So whether that's marketable to your table, as in I can make a meal out of the spinach I had versus just picking a little bit at a time,
00:37:27
Speaker
or when you could take it to market and you had enough to go to farmer's market more than a bunch or more than that or wholesale or however it is that you're selling it. When was your first harvest and when is your last harvest? I went many years without doing this and every year I was mad at myself when I was trying to predict
00:37:45
Speaker
when I would have stuff available. And so this year I'm keeping track of it. And it's not a bunch of notes. It's just when I started and had a marketable crop and when I ripped it out of the ground, essentially. And if I have little notes to put out there, like I might put, we had spring came three weeks early or something.
00:38:03
Speaker
So that next year, Alexis, future Alexis can kind of do some predictions, but I highly recommend that for you, even if you're just doing, you know, a garden for yourself. I think it can be helpful to know if you are behind or if you have other problems, you know, are you having nutrient problems because your tomato still hasn't produced and you'll know that last year it produced, you know, a month ago. So maybe it's just, it's more data that you can mine. Josh is a data mining magnet and I am as well.
00:38:34
Speaker
I want to know everything I can talk and a lot of it is just my own.
00:38:40
Speaker
For those of you data hoarders and those of you that likes visualizations, I guess this would be a good point to, and I believe it's up and going now at the University of Kentucky, is the Garden Sow app that is spelled S-O-W. And it has a journal feature, it has crop-specific information, specifically to Kentucky, and it's a newer app.
00:39:03
Speaker
Oh, you say it's released. Yeah, I'm beta. I've been a beta tester, but I want to say that it's either released or getting ready to be released. I think it'd be more of like as an alpha tester, you know? I'm strictly the beta. I'm at the caboose so nobody sees me. Sigma grind set. Sigma tester grind set.
00:39:28
Speaker
Yeah, I'm strictly the follow-up, exactly, but it could be another good tool to either journal or lay out your garden. It's just one of those for the folks that like to visualize and have tables and work with electronic things. It's just another tool.
00:39:44
Speaker
Oh, but you know, it's geared towards home gardening. Yeah. Really good that I just remembered is Mother Earth has one and you can use like, you can plug all that in visually see it from year to year. I don't know. There is a paid feature, but I'm not sure how and I'm not sure how much of it is free versus paid. It's been a while since I've used it, but
00:40:05
Speaker
If you like online versions and something that you can save in the cloud or print out and you can like use, you know, little eggplant, like emoji looking things. Like what kind of slick conversation took it. Yeah.
00:40:21
Speaker
It did not take any kind of turn. You said eggplant emoji. I thought you said something else. I thought you said that. Sorry. I was going to say it's probably worth mentioning that if you are a spreadsheet person but you don't want to shell out money for a Microsoft Office product or don't have access to it, you can also always use Google Sheets. That's real common.
00:40:50
Speaker
And it's something that's saved in the cloud, too. So if you, you know, run over your iPad or whatever, you're still you're all right. It exists. Another like we were talking about figuring out how to rotate crops. We've talked about this before, but I it's probably one of my favorite publications from UK and it is The Home Vegetable Gardening in Kentucky.
00:41:16
Speaker
for those of you who are vegetable gardening, this can be good even on a larger scale. So I think a lot of time when people see this, they think, oh, I'm just a family of four and I'm gardening for myself, which is fine, awesome, great. But if you're even larger in market gardening, the way it breaks things down, it has great tables. All of that information is applicable to you no matter what size you're at. It has all kinds of stuff. But page seven has crop rotation in it. And it gives you those crop families and helps
00:41:45
Speaker
walk you through, you know, that thought process if you're in need. And this is this is ID 128. So if you Google, if you just Google I, I the letters ID as in dog 128, you might throw in a UK why it'll bring up the publication, you can download it anywhere, even if you're outside Kentucky, though, just tell them you know, Alexis, and they'll let you download it from Google.
00:42:06
Speaker
And apparently if you do Google ID 128 by itself, I mean, this might be because I'm on campus. It's the first hit. Surprising. That's kind of a vague descriptor if you don't add any keywords to that. If you are in the state of Kentucky, please remember that every county has an extension office in it and all of us have
00:42:28
Speaker
of copies, like nice printed glossy copies most of the time of this ID 128. Or if you are the kind of person who wants to see something in paper versus looking at it online, they can print you out one. And if they fight you on it, call me or Ray, and we will mail you a copy and then- They will go fight them, maybe even in color.
00:42:50
Speaker
There is no, they can print one out for you, they should be completely free. And if they're not, I'm in Boyle County, Ray's in Bourbon County, find us and we will go on a hunt for some. Do not Google ID 129 because it will activate Josh like a Jason Bourne type figure. It's happened before, it gets messy real quick. The Josh rotation.
00:43:17
Speaker
Yeah, 128 is a hugely useful and like covers a ton of ground in that publication. Like chapter based and it's a little bit more, it feels more a little more narrative or like, I don't know, like it's not quite as definitely much more pleasant to read. I would definitely. It's an accumulation of just years of research and years of on the ground data from Kentucky, both Western Kentucky, Central and Eastern.
00:43:42
Speaker
So everything is so customized to the local growing environment and it's one that it's one of the few that i keep at home just for reference um because there's awesome planting charts and things in there yeah i know that i know that sometimes universities get a a wrap for being uh i'll just say shills for corporate agriculture and uh
00:44:00
Speaker
certain practices. But ID-128 and a lot of other things that exist at the university in an extension, it covers some things that are not just chemical, you know, spray and pray kind of things. That IPM stuff we've talked about before, it covers that, it covers some aspects of organic production and other types of things like that. I think, yeah, insect ID, it's not just a, you know,
00:44:22
Speaker
get your seven out and blast everything with it. It's definitely a really cool, well thought out. And there's a lot more resources like that from the university than people sometimes realize. So if you haven't taken a look and you're skeptical of the university side of things, I would recommend that one as well. We're really proud of it. Yeah. So all right. I want to kind of summarize this because I think we kind of
00:44:44
Speaker
I don't want to say we jumped around, but we went in depth on some very- We jumped around. We jumped around. But I think in the best way, and I think with cover cropping, I mean, you're jumping those crops around, right? So it's appropriate.
00:44:57
Speaker
Yeah, we rotated between topics. We rotated between topics. Okay, so reasons to cover crop, okay?
Conclusion and Community Engagement
00:45:04
Speaker
So we're managing for soil-borne disease and insect problems by moving plant families out of an area and into another one, all right?
00:45:15
Speaker
We also talked about plant families. So it's really important that you know of all, you know, decide all the things you want to grow this year and then look up who's in what family, throw them into a little bit of a category there and write down, record where you put those families at so that you can rotate them next year. Because I know you think you're going to remember that all of your tomatoes were in that one corner, but by the time spring rolls around,
00:45:41
Speaker
You're probably not going to remember, and if you do, I don't know, you're better than all of us on the podcast because none of us can remember anything. You've had friends who have thought that and forgotten, right, Alexis? Never happened to you. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Just friends. I know a person. Yes, friends. Another reason to rotate your crop is for nutrient management. We try and rotate our
00:46:02
Speaker
We didn't say this specifically, but I'm gonna say it now our heavy feeders So things that really really love a lot of fertilizer So tomatoes and corn for example, we want to rotate them hopefully with a different plant family that are lighter feel feeders or
00:46:19
Speaker
nitrogen fixers and like our bean family. We can also rotate for root structures to help with our soil tilth. So we rotate our carrots and our underground structures like beets with something like a leaf lettuce or a bell pepper because they have a shallow root system and they're going to use those nutrients in a different way.
00:46:42
Speaker
Uh, and then just overall do your best, whether you're a small gardener, large gardener, um, you know, market style, several, you know, a hundred acres, whatever that is of rotating those plant families around, whether you're using raised beds, uh, or you're doing, you know, mixing in your cover cropping in there, which again, you're going to learn about, uh, next week or, you know, whatever it is, just try your best to write things down and move those things around from year to year.
00:47:12
Speaker
Does that kind of get the gist of it, guys? That's it? Yeah, I think you nailed it.
00:47:18
Speaker
Awesome. Okay. Well, we hope as we grow this podcast that you will also grow with us. And like I said before, join us next week for cover cropping. And we are excited to hear you. If you want to follow us, we are on Instagram at Hort Culture podcast. If you want to find us there, we're all always eager to hear what you have to say. So if you have any ideas or questions for upcoming podcasts, please let us know and we would love to work those into our rotation. So thank you all and have a great time.