The year change is how you start your new growing season in grove. Your existing beds from the previous year are carried over into the new year – including all plantings. So you don’t have to start from scratch and can get straight into planning.
A year change only works if no beds have been created in the new year yet. If you want to expand your garden and add new beds, do the year change first – then create the additional beds afterwards. This keeps the link to previous years intact and grove correctly recognises the beds as continuations, allowing it to show the effects of plants on each other in the crop rotation.
Starting the year change
Go to “Beds” in the navigation and select the new year from the year selector. In the overview you’ll find the “Year change” action.
Note: If you don’t see this option, you’ve probably already created beds in the new year. In that case you’ll need to delete them first before you can start the year change.
Row companion planting on beds
If you work with “Row companion planting on beds” in grove, the year change lets you not only carry over your plantings but also deliberately move them from one bed to another – in other words, rotate them. This is especially useful when you’ve set up a multi-year plan and want to swap your beds around from year to year.
The principle is straightforward but effective: during the year change, you drag a bed from the previous year onto a bed in the new year using drag & drop. This tells grove which new bed should receive the plantings from the old bed. A line shows the connection – the rotation path. For example, the plantings from bed 1 could continue on bed 2 in the new year, those from bed 2 on bed 3, and so on.
One thing to keep in mind: grove carries over the plantings exactly as you set them up in the previous year. A sensible crop rotation does not happen automatically. It depends largely on how you originally designed your beds. For the rotation to really work well, you need to think about which crops make good successors when you’re planning your beds in the first place. That’s demanding – and not always easy even with experience. Grove can support you, but the planning decisions are yours.
To make sure you don’t miss any unwanted crop rotation effects, grove automatically checks for good or poor predecessor plants at the new positions when you connect a bed. The app looks not just at the immediate previous year but also several years back. The position of plants on the bed is also checked. A poor predecessor that was on the other side of the bed won’t be flagged – because it generally won’t affect your new planting there.
This feature helps you spot crop rotation problems early – before you finalise the year change. You get a kind of preview of whether the planned rotation makes sense, or whether it might be better to connect beds differently or rethink the planting.
Tip: Once you’ve made your first bed plan, you can open the year change for the following year before you even start planting – and test whether your plan will also work in future years.
Gertrud Franck / Langerhorst family
If you’re working with one of these carefully thought-out companion planting systems, the principle of crop rotation is already built into the method itself. The division into A, B and C rows virtually eliminates problematic predecessors. This makes the year change particularly elegant.
For Gertrud Franck:
- The rows move forward by half a row in the new year – that’s 25 cm with a typical row spacing of 50 cm.
- If a row falls off the back, it is reinserted at the front.
- This means every plant stands on soil that received surface compost in the previous year.
For the Langerhorst family:
- The rows move forward by three-quarters of a row – that’s 30 cm with a row spacing of 40 cm.
- In addition to surface compost, the clover paths also enrich the soil with phosphorus.
Completing the year change
Once you’ve checked and drawn all the bed connections, click “Save” to carry out the year change.
Here’s what happens:
- The beds for the new year are created automatically.
- The plantings are carried over – to the correct new bed according to the rotation.
- The tasks for the new growing year are also created straight away.
If you don’t connect a bed to a new one, it stays empty in the new year – the plantings are not carried over in that case. But the information about previous growing years is still retained.
Important: If you create a bed manually without using the year change, grove won’t recognise it as a continuation of the old bed. All crop rotation information will then be missing – grove treats it as a completely new bed.