Hallo Elmar,

I have some experience growing organic vegetables with minimal disturbance. Could you go from clover/grass direct to potatoes? Or are eelworms a problem? Because potatoes anyway involve a lot of disturbance (heaping, harvesting, etc.)

I have been developing the following rotation:

Year 1: Potatoes followed by Rye/Vetch

Year 2: Rye/vetch is roller/crimped, then warm season crops e.g. squash/sweet corn/beans in mulch.

Year 3: Root crops (early root crops are followed by catch crops like turnips, salad, etc)

Before late Roots (e.g. winter Carrots) that are planted end May/June, I plant a phacelia, buckwheat, summer vetch and mustard mix in four rows. These can be eliminated simply by low mowing. The root crops are sown between the cover crop root residue (three rows). The mowings I use as transfer mulch.

After late autumn harvest I cover the ground with mowed grass/autumn leaves.

Year 4: Onions undersown with clover. This works really well. I grew two beds next to each other this year. One bed with bare ground, the other undersown with clover (sown 5 weeks after planting sets). The total harvest weight in both beds was exactly the same. Clover remains to overwinter.

This could be your first clover/grass year?

Year 5: Close mowing clover twice. Cabbages in transfer mulch (although this year I chopped the clover in late spring and undersowed the cabbages with yellow trefoil – should frost kill?).

Year 6: back to potatoes.

I follow potatoes with squashes because this gives me a big window for a cover crop (rye/vetch). In general early harvested crops are followed by late planted crops for this reason. And late autumn harvested crops are followed by earlier planted crops (like onions). This way I leave the ground bare for as short as possible which help against weeds.

I don’t know if any of this helps?

At what scale are you farming?

Do you know about Johannes Storch (Germany)?