By Obiabin Onukwugha
Fruits and vegetables play key roles in healthy living. Fruits and vegetables contain important vitamins, minerals, plant chemicals and fibre.
There are many varieties of fruit and vegetables available and many ways to grow, prepare, cook and serve them. A diet high in fruit and vegetables can help protect you against cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
Scientific research shows that if you regularly eat lots of fruit and vegetables, you have a lower risk of diseases such as type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart (cardiovascular) disease, cancer – some forms of cancer, especially bowel, stomach and throat cancers later in life and high blood pressure (hypertension).
Vegetables are available in many varieties and can be classified into biological groups or ‘families’, including:
Leafy green; lettuce, spinach and silverbeet
Cruciferous; cabbage, cauliflower
Brussels sprouts and broccoli
marrow; pumpkin, cucumber and zucchini
Root; potato, sweet potato, and yam
Edible plant stem; celery and asparagus
Allium; onion, garlic and shallot.
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Buying fruits and vegetables that meet your daily need can drain your income. So why don’t you start growing your vegetables in your garden.
Is your garden to small to growing a variety of vegetables? One kay way is to employ crop rotation.
Crop families are diverse, so it is important to consider which crops you rotate throughout the years. You can do this by separating the crops into families.
So, knowing the family of a crop is important if you want to apply crop rotation for your farm or garden.
Crop rotation is the practice of changing the growing location of specific crops in the garden each season. Growing the same crops repeatedly in the same spot can lead to a buildup of pests and diseases from one year to the next.
For example, if you grow tomatoes in one piece of the garden, you can grow them in a different area of the garden the following year. This can be achieved byb developing a schedule where every year you rotate the garden so that crops are only repeated in the same area every 3 to 5 years.
Bountiful cabbages, juicy melons, flavorful onions, and dozens of other crop varieties take work to grow healthy every year in your garden. No matter what crops you love, it is important to rotate the vegetable plants in your garden to protect them from pests and allow the best nutrients for growing conditions. This is known as crop rotation, an important part of the vegetable garden planning process.
Crop rotation can have many benefits for your vegetable garden. Planning, therefore is very important for crop rotation and the best way to plan is to separate the garden into a number of parcels or segments,
One of the biggest benefits of crop rotation is that it can help reduce pest and disease pressure in the garden. There are many pests and diseases that will survive in the soil from one season to the next, so rotating crops is an easy way to alleviate this pressure.
Rotating crops also ensures that the soil structure stays intact and it’s nutrients aren’t depleted through growing the same plants each year. Some crops tend to be heavy feeders or use more of certain nutrients than others. Rotating crops helps to evenly distribute the nutrient uptake in the garden and prevent issues.
