[shokkyy]

I'm reading my way through the book How to Grow Food in Your Polytunnel, which I'm finding a very useful book, given me lots of ideas. But there's one thing that's puzzling me a bit.

In the book they suggest a four group crop rotation, and give four groups of crops for doing so. But they also say to keep the tall things, like tomatoes and cucumbers, on the north side of the tunnel so as not to shade the other crops. I don't really see how you can do both. If you've got a tunnel with four beds, two on the north side and two on the south (which I can't do anyway in my tunnel because it runs north to south), then if you kept the tall stuff on the north side the best you could do in the way of rotation is essentially a two year rotation, i.e. keep swapping the toms and cukes between the two beds on the north side.

Have I misunderstood this?

[mumofstig]

IMO You get enough light in the tunnel to grow tall stuff on both sides, so don't worry
about it

[Swing Swang]

Or you could have eight beds - and run both a 'tall crop' and short crop' rotation system.

I start off with good intentions and often try this outside with climbing beans/tomatoes/sweet corn/and squash up trellises for the 'talls' as my garden is on a shallow slope and it makes sense to have the talls uphill/further north.

Of course then I get given some strawbs, buy fruit tree or two , think about a permanet asparagus bed etc etc and it all goes to pot

[RichardA]

my tunnel is 14 foot wide with three beds and two narrow paths all running east west. I try to keep taller stuff to the back ie the North side and smaller to the front ie south side but in reality if I cant I don't worry about it. I think the PT is certainly warm enough and very light. After problems with birds sitting on the top and pecking through at insects crawling under I ran a piece of debris netting along the ridge and even then sunlight is very good in all parts of PT
R

[shokkyy]

Oh good, that's a relief. I'm going to have to see how mine works out for light. I've put it on a piece of ground that was the perfect size for it, couldn't be used for anything else and is extremely well sheltered from winds. The bad news is it runs north to south and is quite close to the house on the west long side, so it does get some shade in the afternoons. On the other hand, because it has max exposure to the east that does mean it catches all the morning sun, which should heat it up nicely for the day. It isn't permanently sited and if it doesn't work I can move it, though I'm not going to enjoy moving the raised beds

But I think I'll start off with the tall plants along the west side, to make sure they don't take any light away from the rest. Whether it'll be doable to put them on the east side or whether that would take too much light away, I don't know until I've tried it. I would have thought they'd still get plenty of light from directly overhead, but I'll have to see.