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Rotating your veggies helps reduce insects and plant disease, and allows the soil to recharge and rebalance its minerals.

• Step 1

  Get a guide to vegetable plants from a home store or garden supply shop. It will list the different plant “families” or groupings.

• Step 2

  From season to season, avoid growing vegetables from same family in the same garden.

• Step 3

  For the best results, develop a three-year rotation plan, such as legumes like peas, beans, and peanuts the first year; onions, carrots, and tomatoes the second; and turnips and kale the third.

• Step 4

  Follow your three-year plan and plant seeds from a different family in each garden plot at the start of the growing season.

• Fact

  Did you know? George Washington Carver, who developed hundreds of uses for peanuts, introduced the concept of crop rotation in the American South.