Norfolk Four-Course System (Arthur Young, 1780s)
Rotation Preset
How many garden beds or plots you have (2-8).
The year your rotation begins.
What this planner achieves
✅ Every bed productive every year
✅ No crop repeats in any bed for 4 years
✅ Pest & disease cycle disruption
✅ Balanced soil nutrition across all beds
✅ Harvest variety every season
After year 4, the cycle repeats from the beginning.
Crop Legend (Norfolk Traditional)
Each bed enters the cycle at a different starting point.
| Bed | 2026 | 2027 | 2028 | 2029 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bed 1 | 🌾 Wheat | 🫛 Turnips | 🌿 Barley | 🍀 Clover |
| Bed 2 | 🫛 Turnips | 🌿 Barley | 🍀 Clover | 🌾 Wheat |
| Bed 3 | 🌿 Barley | 🍀 Clover | 🌾 Wheat | 🫛 Turnips |
| Bed 4 | 🍀 Clover | 🌾 Wheat | 🫛 Turnips | 🌿 Barley |
✅ Validation passed: No duplicate crop families within any single year across all beds.
Data Source: The Annals of Agriculture (Arthur Young, 1780s) • Public domain • Solo-developed with AI
🎯 A Simple Example: Planning a Four-Bed Vegetable Garden
You have four raised beds and want to rotate tomato-family crops so no bed grows the same thing twice. Select Tomato Focus above and set the starting year to this year.
Here is how it works:
1️⃣ Set Number of Beds to 4 and pick the Tomato Focus preset
2️⃣ The SVG grid instantly shows all four beds across four years, each a different colour
3️⃣ Read the table: Bed 1 starts with Tomatoes, Bed 2 with Root Crops, Bed 3 with Corn, Bed 4 with Peas & Beans
4️⃣ Next year every bed shifts one step — Bed 1 moves to Root Crops, Bed 2 to Corn, and so on
5️⃣ After four years, the full cycle completes and you can start again from the top
Pro tip: Label your beds physically (Bed A, B, C, D) and tape the schedule to your shed wall. A quick photo of the table above works perfectly as a reference all season long.
🌿 Garden Soil Health Tools
From One Field to Many Beds: Arthur Young's Norfolk Four-Course System was originally designed for single large fields that cycled through wheat, turnips, barley, and clover over four consecutive years. But modern gardeners rarely work with just one plot. A typical backyard might have four, six, or even eight raised beds, each growing something different at the same time. The multi-bed planner takes the same proven rotation logic and spreads it across all your beds simultaneously, so every plot is productive every year while still respecting the four-course cycle.
The Mathematical Elegance: The formula behind this planner is beautifully simple: each bed starts at a different point in the four-crop cycle. Bed 1 might begin with tomatoes while Bed 2 starts with root crops, Bed 3 with corn, and Bed 4 with legumes. The next year, every bed advances one step. This is modular arithmetic in action — crop = (bedIndex + yearIndex) % 4 — and it guarantees that no bed ever repeats the same crop family two years running. For gardens with more than four beds, the pattern simply wraps around, so Bed 5 mirrors Bed 1's schedule.
Why Multi-Bed Planning Matters: When you grow different crop families across multiple beds at once, you harvest a wider variety of produce every season rather than waiting four years for a single crop to return. Your soil health improves bed by bed — while one bed is being depleted by heavy-feeding tomatoes, another is being replenished by nitrogen-fixing legumes. Pest and disease pressure drops because pathogens in one bed cannot simply hop to the same host plant next door. The entire garden becomes a self-balancing ecosystem.
Your Garden, Your Rules: The presets here are starting points, not commandments. Swap in your favourite vegetables, adjust the number of beds to match your actual garden layout, and keep a simple journal noting what went where each year. The most important rule is the one the Norfolk farmers discovered two centuries ago: never plant the same family in the same soil twice in a row. Everything else is up to you and your appetite.
🐱 From the Lab Cat's Garden Patrol Division: I have personally inspected all four beds and can confirm that Bed 3 receives the best afternoon sun for napping. The humans may plant whatever they like in the other three. I have claimed Bed 3 for strategic surveillance purposes. 🐾