Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth by Cindy Conner

before peanuts for just that reason. Now I know better. Become a student of your own garden and let it teach you.
    Read all you can and make a list of guidelines you come across. You might keep that list in your garden notebook so you’ll know where it is. At the same time, begin a list of guidelines drawn from your own experience in your garden. The companion planting charts list potatoes and cabbage as friends. Since the voles cause problems for me, I thought planting potatoes with cabbage might offer some protection. Not a chance. The voles took out the potatoes every time I tried that. I had also tried oilseed radish as a cover crop before potatoes, thinking it would offer an early fertile seedbed for the potatoes in the spring. That’s when it really hit me how much the voles like to hang around the cabbage family plants. There were vole holes galore, just waiting for my potatoes. One item on my personal list of guidelines is to keep the potatoes away from the cabbage family. If you don’t have any problems with voles, potatoes and cabbage might just work well for you.
    I map out my beds with arrows to show how they will rotate. The examples of garden maps with crops, complete with the times they will be in the beds, are here to get you started thinking about how you can plan your garden. I will explain my reasoning behind the choices, how I would manage the cover crops, and give suggestions for variations on what is presented. When trying to decide how much space to give everything, it helps to map it out on graph paper. You can find suggested spacing in the seed catalogs, on the seed packets you buy in the store, and in How To Grow More Vegetables. The more intensively you plant, the more important it is to make sure your beds have enough fertility and that you provide enough water if rainfall is lacking. The dates on these maps are based on the frost dates in Zone 7 — last frost April 25 and first frost October 15. The Plant/Harvest Schedule ( Figure 7.2 ) will help you determine the times to plant in your area.
    Transition Garden
    The three bed garden in Figure 8.2 is called the Transition Garden because it shows a garden with crops most people are already comfortable with, plus some new ones and cover crops. It combines what you already know with growing staple crops. The spacing of the main summer crops is shown in detail. What you see is the beds with what they contain for the calendar year. The rye and hairy vetch cover crop in Bed 1 was planted the previous fall when the combination of crops that have now rotated to Bed 3 were in Bed 1, leaving the rye and hairy vetch to overwinter there. In this plan the rye/vetch cover crop is cut and left to lie on the ground as mulch on about May 7, or when the rye is shedding pollen. The vetch would be flowering by then. Vetch can get pretty rangy and tangle in the rye. I only use these crops in combination if I’m going to be cutting them early like this. If I was to leave the rye go to seed, I would have planted Austrian winter peas as the legume and pulled out the winter pea plants for compost material when they flowered, at least a month before the time to harvest the rye seed. In this case, it doesn’t matter. I like vetch before tomatoes and sometimes plant only vetch as the cover crop preceding tomatoes. The legumes don’t have the heavy root system that the grains do, so when they are cut, the bed is friable and ready for planting the next crop. I always leave the roots right there in the soil. With the grains cut at pollen shed like this, you need to wait two weeks for the roots to start decomposing before you can transplant into the bed. Even then, it would be transplants only. The grain bed, cut at this time, is not ready for seeds even two weeks later. If hairy vetch was the only cover crop, I could transplant the tomatoes the same day I cut the vetch, leaving the vetch as mulch. The legumes don’t have as much carbon, thus don’t have the staying power