Deep Winter has been about planning, anything planted out has had a miserable stunted look to it, a bitter reminder that I should have planned my planting earlier when the weather was still sweet. There are still some sorry looking tomatoes and capsicums clinging to their withering stems, the eggplant lingered long enough to shelter a brood of ladybird larvae until they grew wings flew away home, and it curled itself up. A better time for dreaming about gardening than actually doing it.

One rainy day I logged into Google Analytics and noticed my post on the 4 Year Crop Rotation gets at least one view a day, often more. It gave me a delicious thought, would you dear reader like to walk through a year in my plot?

A week by week plan of how the rotation actually works?

 
Since November the garden has been busy settling in to its new digs, Legumes have been occupying my plot, taking nitrogen from the air and enriching the soil for a new year of Solanaceae.
So come on a journey with me a beautiful year of growing juicy tomatoes, chillies, capsicums and eggplants!

In Australia where the sun runs screaming past plentiful and sprints headlong into harsh, bare earth is an absolute crime. Space is also at a minimum (1x2m) so a plan was absolutely necessary to cram as much in as possible. I’ve divided my plan into Solanaceae and Companions and this works beautifully as these fall neatly into the categories of

tall and low level plants and early and late planting. I read somewhere that tomatoes really shouldn’t be rushed into the ground until the temperature is reliably over 10C and according to the BOM this doesn’t occur until November in Melbourne. So while my Solanace seedlings wait to be planted out the companions will have the opportunity to

establish themselves as a nurse crop to shelter the young Solanace plants when they go in. When the weather grows spitefully hot, in Deep Summer, the tomatoes will have grown tall enough to shade their companions whilst they in turn protect the tomato roots from drying out.