Garden Planner Grid
Lay out a square-foot garden on an interactive grid: set your bed size, click to plant each crop, and watch plants-per-crop and total seedlings tally as you plan.
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Crop Rotation Planner
Build a multi-year bed-by-bed rotation: set your beds and starting families, and the planner cycles each bed through legumes, brassicas, fruits and roots so no crop repeats in place.
Crop Rotation Planner
Chlorova · updated for 2026
Crop Rotation Planner
Beds (4)
- Bed 1
- Bed 2
- Bed 3
- Bed 4
Rotation plan
| Bed | Yr 1 | Yr 2 | Yr 3 | Yr 4 | Yr 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bed 1 | Legumes | Brassicas | Solanaceae | Roots & Alliums | Legumes |
| Bed 2 | Brassicas | Solanaceae | Roots & Alliums | Legumes | Brassicas |
| Bed 3 | Solanaceae | Roots & Alliums | Legumes | Brassicas | Solanaceae |
| Bed 4 | Roots & Alliums | Legumes | Brassicas | Solanaceae | Roots & Alliums |
- Year 1: 4 families — Legumes, Brassicas, Solanaceae (fruit), Roots & Alliums
- Year 2: 4 families — Brassicas, Solanaceae (fruit), Roots & Alliums, Legumes
- Year 3: 4 families — Solanaceae (fruit), Roots & Alliums, Legumes, Brassicas
- Year 4: 4 families — Roots & Alliums, Legumes, Brassicas, Solanaceae (fruit)
- Year 5: 4 families — Legumes, Brassicas, Solanaceae (fruit), Roots & Alliums
Each bed runs a 4-year cycle, so no family returns to the same bed before 4 years — the interval extension services recommend for breaking pest and disease cycles.
Legumes · Fixer
Nitrogen fixers — leave roots to release N for the next crop.
Brassicas · Heavy
Hungry on nitrogen and prone to clubroot — never repeat within 3+ years.
Solanaceae (fruit) · Heavy
Heavy feeders needing compost; rotate off where blight or nematodes linger.
Roots & Alliums · Light
Light feeders that follow the manure-heavy years; fresh soil keeps roots clean.
The planner enforces a classic garden rotation of families, not a soil test or pest audit, so treat the sequence as a sound default rather than a prescription. Clubroot, nematodes and specific soil-borne diseases may demand longer than four years between susceptible crops, and small backyard beds often force compromises the ideal cycle assumes away. Where a bed cannot be rested, prioritize moving the heavy feeders and the disease-prone family and accept that a short garden rotates imperfectly.
Rotating crops is the single cheapest way to keep a small garden fertile and pest-free, and the hardest part is simply tracking who grew where in which year. This planner turns that mental juggling into a grid: list your beds, choose a starting family for each, and watch every bed advance through legumes, brassicas, fruiting crops and roots across the season span you pick. It staggers the families so the same plant never returns before the cycle wraps, giving you a concrete multi-year map instead of a hopeful note taped to the seed shed.
Setting Up a Rotation in Minutes
- Choose a four-year classic cycle or a five-year one with a rest year.
- Set how many growing beds you want to track.
- Pick the starting crop family for each individual bed.
- Select the plan horizon from four up to eight years.
- Read the bed-by-year grid to see each season's family.
- Stagger starting families so beds grow different crops each year.
- Check the yearly line for how many families are in play.
- Save or print the grid and pin it where you plan the beds.
How the Cycle Advances Each Bed
The planner holds an ordered list of rotation families, then assigns every bed a starting position in that list. Moving one year forward simply steps each bed to the next family, and the list wraps around at the end, so a bed that starts on legumes returns to legumes only after the whole cycle has passed. That wrapping arithmetic is what guarantees a family never repeats in the same bed sooner than the cycle length allows.
You control the two inputs that matter: the cycle you pick and where each bed starts within it. A four-year cycle spreads four families so each bed grows a different group every year and returns to the first family on year five. Staggering the starting families across beds keeps the whole garden biodiverse in any single season, which is the point that a lone rotating bed quietly misses.
Worked Example: Four Beds on a Five-Year Plan
- Select the five-year cycle that adds a cover-crop rest year.
- Enter four beds, then assign starting families one through four.
- Bed 1 opens on legumes, bed 2 on brassicas, bed 3 on solanaceae.
- Bed 4 starts on roots, leaving the rest year to rotate in.
- Set the horizon to five years to see one full cycle complete.
- In year two each bed has stepped forward one family.
- By year five every bed returns to where it began.
- The yearly line shows four or five families active each season.
- No bed ever repeats a family before the cycle wraps, as designed.
- You now have a five-season map to follow bed by bed.
The Rotation Families and Their Role
Each family the planner rotates, what it asks of the soil and what it leaves behind for the next crop.
| Family | Feeding | Role in the cycle |
|---|---|---|
| Legumes | Nitrogen fixers | Recharge soil nitrogen for hungry crops |
| Brassicas | Heavy feeders | Cash in the nitrogen legumes left |
| Solanaceae | Heavy feeders | Follow manured beds; break pest cycles |
| Roots and alliums | Light feeders | Clean up residue in lower-fertility soil |
| Cover and rest | Soil building | Restore structure and break disease |
Key Terms
- Crop family
- A group of related plants that share pests, diseases and nutrient needs, rotated as one unit.
- Rotation cycle
- The ordered sequence of families a bed passes through before repeating.
- Clubroot
- A soil-borne brassica disease that long rotations and rest years help suppress.
- Green manure
- A cover crop turned under to add organic matter and fix nitrogen.
- Staggering
- Starting different beds on different families so the garden diversifies each year.
What Long-Term Growers Insist On
- Rotate by family, not by plant name, because tomato following potato spreads the same blights and beet following chard carries the same leaf miners even though they look unrelated.
- The heavy feeders should always sit where the manure or compost went, so place solanaceae right after a well-fed legume or rest year and let roots clean up the tail of that fertility.
- A rest year under cover crop is not lost productivity but an investment, since it rebuilds structure and breaks disease cycles that two decades of short rotations quietly erode.
- In a very small garden where you cannot move a family far, the rotation still earns its keep by never repeating in the same square, even if neighboring beds share a border.
- Keep the map for several years rather than one, because the value of rotation compounds and shows up as fewer failures and steadier harvests you can only see in hindsight.
Common Mistakes and Fixes
- Rotating by specific vegetable instead of by whole plant family.
- Starting every bed on the same family, so the entire garden grows one group at once.
- Dropping the rest year and running heavy feeders back to back until the soil stalls.
- Keeping no written plan and genuinely losing track of what grew where last season.
- Letting a permanent crop quietly break the cycle without noting it on the map.
- Assuming rotation alone fixes a disease that also needs pH or drainage correction.
When to Use This and When Not To
Use this planner whenever you manage more than one bed over more than a season and want a written rotation instead of a memory, especially where brassicas, potatoes or soil-borne disease have been a recurring problem. It maps families across time, not nutrients or quantities, so pair it with the soil, lime and fertilizer calculators to feed each year's crop, and fall back to a simple good-big-bad bed plan when you only have a single small plot to work with.
Crop Rotation Planner: Frequently Asked Questions
How many years should a crop family wait before returning?
Three to four years is the common extension guidance, which is exactly why the classic cycle uses four families and returns each bed to its start only in year five. Longer gaps matter most for slow soil-borne problems like clubroot, where a fifth rest year buys extra protection.
Do I really need a rest or cover-crop year?
Not always, but a five-year cycle with one cover year is the gentlest on fertility and the best at breaking disease. In a small productive garden you can skip it, provided you feed the heavy-feeders well and never run the same family back to back in one bed.
What if my beds have permanent crops in them?
Treat asparagus, rhubarb or a berry row as a fixed bed that sits outside the rotation, and mentally remove it from the count. Plan the rotating families around the permanent planting rather than trying to force perennials through a cycle they will never follow.
Can I just repeat one family across several beds at once?
That is how you concentrate pests and drain one nutrient band, so avoid it unless the beds are far apart. Stagger the starting families so a given season shows several different families spread across the garden, which is the diversity rotation exists to create.
Does this tell me what to plant each year?
It assigns families, not specific varieties or dates, so year two might say brassicas for a bed and you still choose the cabbage or kale and its timing. Use the planting calendar and seed-starting calculators to turn each cell of the map into a concrete sowing plan.
Sources & Further Reading
- Crop Rotation for Home Gardeners — University of Minnesota Extension. Family grouping and the three-to-four-year return interval this planner enforces.
- Rotating Crops in the Vegetable Garden — Royal Horticultural Society. Four-group rotation and the role of a manure or cover-crop year.
- Managing Soil-Borne Disease Through Rotation — Cornell University Vegetable Pathology. Basis for rotating by family to break clubroot, blight and nematode cycles.
Chlorova Gardening Team
Builds, checks and documents every tool we publish
Chlorova editorial review
Checked against extension-service publications
Formula verified against published references · Updated
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