Starting Next Year's Plan and Crop Rotation Video Lecture - Learn the art

[Music]
When it comes to planning next year's
crops,
the Garden Planner has some great features
to make the process simple.
You don't need to draw out your plan each
year -
instead, just open the previous year's plan and click the New Plan button,
then select
the Follow-on Plan option.
By default, the new plan will have the
same name as the previous one,
but will be marked for the following
year,
but you can change this if you need to.
A Follow-on Plan will usually make a
copy of your garden layout
and the perennial plants which don't
move.
However, you can also copy any text or choose to
include all plants if you need to.
Once you have your new plan, the Garden Planner remembers what you planted in previous years,
and helps you to choose where to place
them.
Most vegetables belong to one of 7 common plant families,
and these are shown by the color of the
plant Information button
and the color of the area behind the
plant.
Plants that don't belong to these 7 common families are given the gray Miscellaneous background color -
so for example, the Brassica, or cabbage family, has
green backgrounds
and includes broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower etc.
Growing plants from the same family in the same area each year
can cause the soil to become
depleted of the nutrients those plants need,
and can lead to a build-up of pests or plant
diseases,
so it's important to rotate them to new
areas each year.
The Garden Planner makes crop rotation
simple.
When you pick up a plant that belongs to
the Brassica family
a red crop rotation warning flashes up to show where their crop was planted in previous years,
so that you can choose to
avoid that area.
You can still ignore this if required,
which may be necessary in small gardens.
Once placed, the warnings disappear.
Picking up a plant from a different crop family,
such as beans which are part of the
legume group,
shows where plants from that family were placed previously.
When you create a Follow-on Plan, the
system links up to 5 previous plans.
The flashing crop rotation warnings are
dimmer the further back in time they are,
so a brassica plant from 5 years ago
would only show a dim warning area.
If you want to change which plans are
linked,
or want to turn off the crop rotation
warnings,
then you can do so using the Settings buttons.
This is particularly useful if you put
in this year's plans,
and then decided that you wanted to add previous years' plans as well.
Crop rotation used to be very complex to
organize
when you had to remember the plant families for each vegetable
and keep detailed records to hand where
everything was previously planted.
As you can see, the Garden Planner makes
the process simple and intuitive.