While stuck indoors over the last several days because of the cold weather I thought perhaps designing a couple vegetable garden layouts might be a fun use of my time. This particular vegetable garden design fits into the classic parterre layout. A vegetable garden with the parterre garden design would easily lend itself to a good crop rotation plan with its four main sections. The middle circular bed could be used as a decorative planter with flowers and a fountain or as an herb garden.
This garden layout is relatively small and could fit in most backyards. The center paths are about 4 feet wide to easily accommodate wheel barrows or those with wheelchairs. The outside pathway is only 2 feet wide in the layout but could be expanded to four. If I were building this layout for my vegetable garden I would use reclaimed brick or decorative stone for the borders of the raised beds.
The different sections are labeled for easy crop rotation tracking based on the vegetable families.
Here’s how the vegetable crop rotation* could start:
A) Legumes and Pods
B) Alliums (Onion family)
C) Solanaceous, Roots and Tubers
D) Brassicas (Cabbage family)
Crop rotation helps to reduce soil diseases and fungi by giving them time to die out before replanting a similar crop in the bed. Each year a new crop group goes into the next bed. The vegetable family that starts in A in year 1 will move to B in year two. In four years the first group of vegetables will end up back in bed A.
Do you try to rotate your vegetables?
*This rotation is based upon the one found in the
American Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Gardening (Amazon)
This is a very beautiful and useful garden layout. I like it! This design can give you many possibilities for adding your own customizations as well. For instance, you could add some small flowers as borders (where the brown lines indicate a border) around each bed. Perhaps something like nasturtiums or marigolds. This could add a nice burst of color to the vegetable garden.
I like your ideas for the center bed as well. You could also make this a possible sitting area too.
I have a small area to garden, so it makes it difficult to rotate. I have two gardening areas on opposite sides of my yard, so I swap vegetables from one side to the next each year.
I liked your suggested rotational garden and started looking back through your other designs as well. I appreicate a blog with practical information that gardeners can use. Your propagation tips will be useful as well for I too hope to grow a lot of my own stock to save money. Best of luck in 2010. I hear that temperatures have gotten pretty low down there recently.
Hi,
I also practice crop rotation, but I have found that I need more room for legumes than alliums (for example) and therefore, I can’t have all 4 parts same size… This requires then some additional planning every year, but I don’t mind.
Hi Dave, this is a very useful layout. It is similar to our knot garden, with the center here being a quatrefoil rather than a circle the only difference. Crop rotation has been the order of the veggie bed, don't know if it makes any difference or not, since new mulch and compost is added every year. Maybe for the tomatoes. Hope our cold is over!!! For a while anyway.
Frances