Crop Rotation for Vegetable Gardens: What to Plant After What
After tomatoes or peppers, choose a crop from a different plant family—but check the season and that bed’s earlier crops before buying seed. Lettuce, spinach, garlic, or beans can be candidates in the right conditions; none is a universal next crop.
Garden.gg now tracks which plant family grew in each plot each year and warns you at planting time when you are about to repeat one too soon. The intervals are per family, because the reasons families need rotating are not the same.
Rotate families, not plants
The unit that matters is the botanical family, not the crop. Tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, eggplant, and tomatillos are all Solanaceae. University of Minnesota Extension recommends planting tomatoes where none of those crops has grown for the past three or four years. Swapping tomatoes for peppers does not create a nightshade-free year.
This is the part people get wrong most often. A bed that grew tomatoes last year and peppers this year looks rotated on a garden plan and is not rotated in the soil.
The intervals Garden.gg uses
These are Garden.gg’s warning intervals, not a guarantee that a bed is disease-free after the interval expires. Extension recommendations depend on the crop and disease; the RHS rotation guide presents both three- and four-year systems.
| Family | Common crops | App interval |
|---|---|---|
| Solanaceae | Tomato, pepper, potato, eggplant | 4 years |
| Brassicaceae | Cabbage, kale, broccoli, radish, turnip | 4 years |
| Alliaceae | Onion, garlic, leek | 3 years |
| Apiaceae | Carrot, celery, parsley | 3 years |
| Cucurbitaceae | Squash, cucumber, melon | 3 years |
| Asteraceae | Lettuce, sunflower, artichoke | 2 years |
| Fabaceae | Beans, peas | 2 years |
Check the family of the replacement crop too. Radishes and turnips count as brassicas, not a separate “root crop” break; kale and mustard are not interchangeable with lettuce just because all can be harvested as leaves. A rotation can avoid last year’s tomato family while repeating another family from the year before.
What to plant after tomatoes
First decide whether you mean another crop this fall or next year’s main crop. A tomato bed cleared in midsummer has different options from one that stays productive until frost.
If you want another crop this fall
The following are planning examples, not records of harvests or promises of what a bed will produce. Minnesota Extension’s fall-planting guide gives the maturity and cold-tolerance ranges used below; adjust for your variety, local frost dates, and slower autumn growth.
| When the tomato bed becomes available | A possible next crop | What to check before planting |
|---|---|---|
| Early enough for a cool-season crop to establish and grow | Leaf lettuce (Asteraceae) or spinach (Amaranthaceae) | Minnesota lists about 40–60 days for leaf lettuce and 35–45 for spinach. Both tolerate light frost, but those ranges are not guaranteed fall deadlines. Lettuce can bolt in lingering heat. |
| Early enough for a complete warm-season crop | Bush beans (Fabaceae) | Minnesota lists 45–65 days and notes that even light frost kills beans. They are not a good default after tomatoes removed at frost. |
| At your region’s autumn garlic-planting window | Garlic (onion family) for the following season | Check earlier onion-family crops, winter drainage, and local variety advice. The bed remains occupied into the next growing season. |
| Too late for a vegetable crop to establish | A locally suitable cover crop | Minnesota recommends green manure when another vegetable crop is no longer practical. Ask local extension which species can still establish; cover crops have planting windows too. |
For garlic, use the fall garlic planting guide to choose a regional window and prepare the bed. Do not use its Zone 8 save-plan example as a date recommendation for another climate. Minnesota specifically notes that garlic can follow a late-maturing crop, but its September timing and July harvest are regional advice.
Before sowing into a cleared bed, remove old stems and roots or allow them to break down; Minnesota advises a one- to two-week wait where debris remains. If the tomatoes had a suspected disease, identify the problem with local extension before choosing a replacement. A different family does not automatically make a crop safe from every soilborne problem.
If you are planning next year’s crop
Peas or beans, carrots, onions, and brassicas are possible non-nightshade choices, subject to each family’s history and your growing season. RHS includes legumes, onions, and roots after the potato group in its example rotations. There is no single compulsory order: choose crops you will use, and keep each family’s return interval visible.
For example, if a bed held tomatoes this year and kale last year, choosing radishes next year avoids nightshades but brings brassicas back quickly. A lettuce crop would change families, but still needs a suitable planting window and a check of the bed’s older lettuce-family records.
What to plant after peppers
Use the same family check as for tomatoes: peppers are nightshades, so tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, and more peppers are not a family rotation.
- Peppers removed while enough cool growing time remains: consider leaf lettuce or spinach using the maturity checks above, rather than assuming every green will finish.
- Peppers kept until frost: do not follow them with frost-tender bush beans. Consider garlic if its local planting window and the bed’s onion-family history fit, or a cover crop that can still establish.
- Next spring: peas or another suitable non-nightshade crop can be part of the plan. Record the pepper year even if a short fall crop follows it.
A quick succession does not reset the rotation clock. Tomatoes followed by autumn lettuce still mean that bed grew nightshades that year. Use the year of the last tomato or pepper planting when deciding where next year’s nightshades go.
The warning fires when you plant, not when you review
A rotation chart in a notebook only helps if you open the notebook. The point of putting this in the app is that the check happens at the moment you are about to make the mistake.
When you add a plant to a plot, Garden.gg looks at that plot’s family history and compares it against the interval for the family you are adding. If the same family grew there inside the window, you get a warning with the year it last grew and how long the interval is. The warning does not block you. Sometimes you have four beds and no good options, and you plant the tomatoes anyway with your eyes open.
The same check runs in the garden designer, so placement-time warnings appear while you are laying out a bed rather than after you have committed the plan.
Where the history comes from
The grid above is the case worth catching. Nightshades grew in that bed this year and three years ago, which is inside the four-year Solanaceae interval, even though the two seasons in between look like a tidy rotation.
There is no separate log to maintain, which was the design constraint. The rotation history is derived from planting records you already create: each plot plant carries a date and a plant, and each plant carries a botanical family. Group by year and you have the grid.
If you have been using Garden.gg for a season or two, your rotation history already exists. It was there the day the feature shipped.
This is also the feature that separates a garden planner from a garden drawing. A layout tool tells you where the beds are; rotation history tells you what those beds have already been asked to do. If you are still choosing between options, it is worth checking which of the free garden planners record history at all rather than just geometry.
That also means the quality of the warnings depends on the quality of your planting records. A bed where you logged three of eight crops will produce a history with holes, and a hole reads as “nothing grew here,” which is exactly the case where you want a warning and will not get one.
Record this bed before choosing its next crop
Sign in, then open your plots in Garden.gg and select the bed. In Plants, use Add Plant for the crop actually grown; edit its Sowed or Planted date and notes to reflect your records. Choose the correct catalog crop so its botanical family is available. Do not enter an intended harvest or disease recovery as something that already happened.
Open the bed’s Rotation tab to review its family-by-year history before adding the replacement. Keep both tomato and pepper records, including short same-year follow-on crops. If you do not know what grew in an earlier year, note that gap rather than treating a blank history as proof the bed is safe.
Small gardens and containers
A four-year cycle is harder when most of your growing space is devoted to tomatoes and peppers. RHS notes that formal rotation systems are not well suited to very small vegetable gardens. Rotate where practical, keep accurate records, and combine rotation with sanitation and locally recommended disease management rather than treating an app warning as the only safeguard.
A container can provide another growing location, but fresh potting mix is not a guarantee against disease: planting stock, plant debris, tools, and growing conditions still matter. Ask local extension for advice on an identified problem rather than assuming a soil change cures it.
Worth knowing before you start
Rotation is a preventive practice, not evidence of a particular harvest or a disease cure. Weather, varieties, drainage, and other management decisions affect results too. The history grid shows what you recorded in each bed; it cannot tell you which problems were prevented.
Review those records before ordering seed, then revisit them when you plant. That turns “what comes after tomatoes?” into a decision about this bed, this season, and its known history.
Crop rotation history and planting-time warnings are available on the web app, with the same warnings surfaced in the garden designer.
Sources
Gardening guidance checked September 11, 2026:
- University of Minnesota Extension: Growing tomatoes in home gardens — three- to four-year nightshade rotation, sanitation, and disease identification.
- University of Minnesota Extension: Planting vegetables in midsummer for fall harvest — fall crop maturity and frost tolerance, garlic after late crops, debris management, and cover crops when vegetables are too late.
- RHS: Crop rotation — crop groupings, example three- and four-year rotations, and small-garden limitations.
