Worryingly, I have detected some onion white rot on my overwintered onions, which are now just about ready to be picked. It's a very mild case - the bulbs are hardly affected - but it is a problem. The fungus responsible can linger in the soil for up to eight years and could make mincemeat of future onion crops, depending on weather conditions and so forth.
It means I'll need to be extra-careful about crop rotation next year. What is crop rotation and why is it so important?
Fruit and veg can be divided into a few basic groups with similar characteristics - the brassicas, the potato family (which includes tomatoes, peppers and aubergines) and so forth - this HDRA page lists them all. The idea is that by planting your veg in these blocks, and by planting each group in a different location each year, they take - and give back - different things to the soil, and any diseases that are present in the soil - such as onion white rot - are not allowed to thrive. Simple, eh?
I do practice crop rotation, but I also allow for a bit of, um, serendipity - so if for some reason I decide to pop in a line of beetroots where I have a spare patch, all well and good.
Also, some awkward plants just don't fit into any of the groups - lambs lettuce and sweetcorn among them. My sweetcorn is growing under a modified version of the Three Sisters approach to growing squash, beans and sweetcorn used by native americans. The idea is the corn grows up, the beans grow up the corn so they don't need staking, and the squash grow happily underneath. All three are quite heavy feeders, so they work well together on really well manured or fertilised land. My method was to cordon off an area of the allotment - maybe a quarter of its total size - and over the winter, we dug several trenches of a couple of spades' depth and bunged in raw compost - ie kitchen waste in the form of veg and fruit peelings, leftovers (no meat or fish) and some shredded waste paper and exhausted potting compost. When each trench was full we covered it over with soil. By the time we planted out the corn and squash in June the contents of each trench would be well rotted down, providing loads of nutrients for the greedy plants. It's composting at its absolute easiest.
(It's also the method used to produce the rather fine pumpkin (vif d'etampe) that is pictured with me at the top of this blog.)
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