Crop Rotation & Fertilization

Sam Jones

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Crop rotation and no-till gardening seems to me a method borne in snowy Europe and northern America where the land is snowed over half the year. In Australia we can grow crops every day of the year, so we’d return back to the first crop in half the time.
 

ClissAT

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Crop rotation and no-till gardening seems to me a method borne in snowy Europe and northern America where the land is snowed over half the year. In Australia we can grow crops every day of the year, so we’d return back to the first crop in half the time.


I think you miss the essence of the reason for rotation.

Allowing the soil to breathe, rebalancing its fertility and utilizing that left by the previous crop, husbanding the microbiome are all reasons to take the time it takes to keep the soil in peak condition by not overusing it.
Our Aussie soils are ancient, almost sterile and significantly lacking fertility and need far more care and consideration than the fresh soils in the northern hemisphere.

Even when we add huge amounts of compost, manures and whatever else we can come up with, our soils are still nowhere near as fertile as those in the north of the planet.

The rotation method was created in Britain mostly a few centuries ago so one imagines it must work.
The likes of Colin Campbell used the method exclusively for about 40yrs on demonstration gardens in Botanical Gardens in Australia plus on ABC Gardening Australia where it was filmed most weeks. If you compared the huge volumes of ingredients he put on the vegie beds each season down in Hobart, to what they use in London on similar beds, you would wonder why they are putting that amount on the Aussie beds. But the same types of veg, exhaust the Aussie soil very quickly.
 

Robbie

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Also apart of my crop rotation is clean up of the beds weed control, pest control, light tiling of the soil and fertilizing all done with free labour courtesy of the boy and his girls, I have a run going up the back fence only about 600 ml wide with gates going to each bed. I put up a wire fence around the bed open the gate and there more then happy to help. I let them have it for 2 to 4 weeks lock them out and prep for a green manure crop. It works a treat. :)
 

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