Why crop rotation can help your garden (and your knowledge) grow

In “Kitchen Garden Living” (Cool Springs Press, 2025), author Bailey Van Tassel invokes an easily memorized rhyme concerning crop rotation in the vegetable garden: “beans, roots, greens, fruits.” 

The idea here is to plant a leguminous crop such as beans that enriches the soil with nitrogen, followed by a light-feeding root crop such as carrots, to be followed by greens (lettuce or cabbage) that will pull a little more nitrogen out of the soil, and then finally to plant a heavy-feeding fruit crop such as tomato or bell pepper.