Crop rotation planner

The problem

A rotation plan is easy to write and hard to keep. After a season of successions, swaps and a bed that went to something else at the last minute, last year’s map rarely matches what was grown. By the next spring nobody is sure whether the tomatoes went in bed 4 or bed 5.

Fertility is tracked even less: what each crop took out, what went back in, and whether a bed sat bare over winter.

How it works

Soil mode reads the beds you already planned, so the rotation record is the plan itself. Over the field it lays a lens, with a short family code on every bed:

• Rotation: how long since each family was last in that bed, with “too soon” hatched.
• Crop family, in fixed colors chosen to be told apart by color blind eyes.
• Nitrogen: a planning budget per bed: the crop’s sourced need, less the credits it can count on.
• Bare soil days: how long each bed sits with nothing growing.

Select a bed and its card shows:

• its history, typed in place for years before the planner;
• rotation warnings for each crop, and what can go there next;
• cover crops that fit the gap after its last crop;
• the amendment calculator, which turns a typical rate into how much to buy for that bed.

The field summary keeps a soil test log and a checklist of practices such as compost, living roots and bare soil. When the season ends, Start next year copies the plan to the next year, keeps the perennials, clears the annuals, writes this year into each bed’s history and suggests a rotation that you can take, change or ignore. Everything prints and downloads as a CSV.

What it does not do

A bed is read by its main crop, the one longest in the ground that year, so companions tucked among it are not in its history. Soil tests are logged for the whole field, not per bed. A suggested rotation carries crops, not successions or dates, so those are planned again in Season mode. The nitrogen budget is an estimate from typical figures, not a soil test.