Dusk is one of my favorite times to visit the garden. In early spring, when the growing season is barely underway, the evening is a time to plan and envision what’s to come.

The soil is still cool to the touch, and the insects still belong to the future tense. I am struck by the garden’s limitless potential.

A few months from now, when the days have grown warmer and longer, dusk won’t come until about 9 p.m. By then, the garden will welcome sunset’s reprieve. As I study the still-barren parts of the garden, deciding what to plant where, I look back on years of garden evenings, when I’ve weeded and watered until dark, and I imagine what this same place will look like when it’s leafed-out in June.

What sounds like aimless fantasy and an excuse for an evening stroll is really important work this time of year. At certain times in my gardening life, I’ve drawn a map of the garden before planting and on paper apportioned the square footage among the crops I intended to plant. I haven’t been into precision the last few years, because I don’t need to plant all of the space in my garden and it doesn’t matter if I overplant and spread out a little. However, I am concerned with water conservation, so I want the garden fairly tightly organized.

The areas designated for early-spring crops such as lettuce and carrots are already occupied, so I’m concerned now with the space for the hot-weather crops, which I will begin planting in April.

Some gardeners who are pressed for space try to reuse the areas of the garden where early crops grow by replanting late-season crops there. The term for this is succession planting. For the average home gardener in Kansas, the concept is difficult to implement because of the length of our growing season.

Because we generally don’t plant our early-season greens and cole crops until March and we plant our hot-weather crops in April and May, we don’t have adequate time to plant twice in the same spot. Seeds and transplants have difficulty getting started in the summer heat, so the first practical opportunity to replant is in fall. In this part of the country, fall gardening is complicated by the arrival of frost in October.

Most home gardeners who use succession planting as a space-management strategy are located in more temperate climates with much longer growing seasons. If we could plant our greens and cole crops in early February, this would be worth trying. As a practical matter in Kansas vegetable gardens, every crop needs its own space.

When I’m deciding where to put my hot-weather crops, my biggest concern is rotation, so recent history is a factor. There are two issues here, and the first is bugs and disease. In my garden, the crops most susceptible are squash and tomatoes. The squash bugs and soldier beetles that visit my garden one year leave their eggs in the soil, and there’s no point in serving up next year’s crop for the progeny. The following year’s bugs should at least be forced to go find their host plants.

In the case of disease, most tomato varieties are resistant, but particularly in wet years, the intensity of molds and blights can taint the soil. It’s best to put the tomatoes somewhere else for a couple of years.

The other argument for rotation is nutrient depletion. Different varieties of vegetables make different demands on the soil, and planting the same crop in the same spot will leave plants in subsequent years undernourished. The rule of thumb is a three-year rotation. This is why a farm field that has corn in it one year will be planted in soybeans the next and wheat the next.

It’s helpful to have beans and peas as part of the rotation in a vegetable garden. Legumes fix nitrogen into the soil, so moving them onto the space occupied last year by the okra or tomatoes will actually help to replenish the nutrients depleted by those crops.