The standard recommendation you will find here is a minimum of 4-6 months of composting is required for all animal manures (rabbit is the one exception made by some) before use in vegetable gardens. Around non-food crops, fine. Food crops, no. This question comes up weekly over on the Soil & Compost forum so you'll want to browse the many discussions there too. The issue is not only the nitrogen levels in the manure but the pathogens. Proper composting over that period of time will eliminate the pathogens as well as any medications the animals had been given and reduce the nitrogen to safe levels at the same time. I know 4-6 months of composting may sound extreme to you, but ongoing research at UC Davis and other AG universities is now indicating that at least 12 months of composting may soon become the standard - especially where root crops or low growing leafy greens will be grown. Animal manures are a great soil amendment but around food crops, they must be used with care and concern for safety of the food you and your family will be eating. Dave

Depending on which grass covering it with newspaper, or cardboard, is the easiest means of creating a new planting bed, but some invasive grasses, Quack Grass, Bermuda grass, St. Augustine grass, should be totally, roots and all, removed with good barriers placed between the grass and the planting bed to keep new growth out. Once the new planting bed is created, or maybe before, a good, reliable soil test can be of help since most plants do grow best with a soil pH of 6.2 to 6.8 and a balanced level of nutrients as well as a soil well endowed with organic matter that is evenly moist but well drained. Your North Carolina State University Cooperative Extension Service offers a good, reliable soil test. These simple soil tests might also be of some benefit. 1) Structure. From that soil sample put enough of the rest to make a 4 inch level in a clear 1 quart jar, with a tight fitting lid. Fill that jar with water and replace the lid, tightly. Shake the jar vigorously and then let it stand for 24 hours. Your soil will settle out according to soil particle size and weight. A good loam will have about 1-3/4 inch (about 45%) of sand on the bottom. about 1 inch (about 25%) of silt next, about 1 inch (25%) of clay above that, and about 1/4 inch (about 5%) of organic matter on the top. 2) Drainage. Dig a hole 1 foot square and 1 foot deep and fill that with water. After that water drains away refill the hole with more water and time how long it takes that to drain away. Anything less than 2 hours and your soil drains� too quickly and needs more organic matter to slow that drainage down. Anything over 6 hours and the soil drains too slowly and needs lots of organic matter to speed it up. 3) Tilth. Take a handful of your slightly damp soil and squeeze it tightly. When the pressure is released the soil should hold together in that clump, but when poked with a finger that clump should fall apart. 4) Smell. What does your soil smell like? A pleasant, rich earthy odor? Putrid, offensive, repugnant odor? The more organic matter in your soil the more active the soil bacteria will be and the nicer your soil will smell. 5) Life. How many earthworms per shovel full were there? 5 or more indicates a pretty healthy soil. Fewer than 5, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, indicates a soil that is not healthy. Here is a link that might be useful: NCSU CES

Okay, that explains the zone 5 designation. Lets proceed on the assumption that you will double the size of your last garden, as you planned, and call it 50 x 200. 200 feet is a long way to walk to get to the end of a row, so you should make your beds a reasonable length... lets say no more than 50 feet. Think about how far you want to carry a 60 pound pumpkin, or a bushel of cucumbers, and you'll see the logic behind this. Divide the space into four quadrants, separated by a road down the middle that is wide enough to drive your truck-load of water down, that will make irrigation much easier. On one side of that road, in the middle of the garden, you will create the first compost pile. That will make it easy to add large quantities of material without having to haul it long distances by hand, and the soil beneath the composting area will be your richest soil next year, where you will be growing tomatoes and corn. Don't wait too long to get the tilling done. As soon as you can get a tractor on there without damaging the soil, you should do it. Once you have the results of your soil test, you can start to design your garden. Some crops, like blueberries and potatoes, prefer a more acidic soil. If that is what you are starting with, you will avoid changing the pH in those areas. In acid soils, potatoes are a good first crop, because you don't have to adjust the pH for the first year, and when you are hilling and harvesting them you will be removing rocks and perennial weeds from the soil. Following the potato crop, you will adjust the pH and plant a quick green manure or a winter-killed cover crop or a short-season fall crop.Most annual vegetable crops prefer a slightly acidic soil; 6.5 to 7.0 is a safe range for most of them, and that is what you will be amending most to the area to get to. By designing the garden with permanent paths and beds, you will reduce the expense of adding amendments to any area that will be a path or a road. If you design your beds and paths to be the width of the tiller, you can eliminate some labor as well, but a tractor-mounted tiller may be wider than you find comfortable to work - most people end up with beds that are 3 or 4 feet wide, because it is easier to reach the middle. I build my beds only 21/2 feet wide, because it is easy for me to step over that width or straddle the bed without stepping on the soil. Either way, you should do all of your designing with the size of your body and the size of your tools as fixed elements - how long your stride is, how far you can reach while crouching, how long the trip is back to the house if you are being chased by a swarm of bees. Your wide paths should be as wide as the garden cart or wheelbarrow that you will use to spread compost, or load the bushel baskets into to take to the kitchen. Narrow paths should be as wide as a flat-bladed shovel or two times the width of your hoe or as wide as your iron garden rake - in other words, an efficient size for the tool you will use to maintain the path. In subsequent years, if you want more garden space, you can make the paths narrower and use the same footprint, or make the garden larger. Either way, you will need more tilling, more pH adjustment, and more compost. If, on the other hand, you find it is large enough for your needs, and you have managed the weeds properly, you may not need to till anything but cover crops. You will notice that many people, including me, put a strong emphasis on compost. That is because it is the best way to build all of the good things you need for the garden with the least expense. It will make your soil more fertile, easier to work, both better draining and better at holding water simultaneously, will stabilize pH over time, reduce insect and disease issues because the plants are more resistant to them - it's pretty good stuff. Since it is made from plant material in various forms - including plant material that has gone in one end of an animal and out the other - it helps to replace all of the soil nutrients and minerals that you will be removing from the garden whenever you harvest something to eat. For these reasons, you'll want to have a good composting system in place. For this size garden, you will want a few small piles (in this case small is a relative term) that are about 4 feet wide, four feet long, and four feet high. These will be made of smaller materials as much as possible - shredded leaves instead of whole, grass clippings instead of hay, rabbit poop instead of cow - you get the idea. Because you will be moving this stuff a few times, smaller bits are easier to manage. Don't bother with bins or fencing or frames, just build piles. Once you have a pile that big, stand next to it, stick a pitchfork in it scoop up some of the material, turn around 180 degrees, and dump it on the ground. The distance between the little pile you just made and the edge of the big pile is wide the space should be between your compost piles, because that will be the most comfortable distance to move material. You should try to build and turn a pile every week, until you have six piles, each 4x4x4. By the sixth week, the first pile will have been turned twice (on the second and fifth weeks) and will be starting to look like rich potting soil. Let it sit for a few weeks more, and you will have your first "hot" compost.You will spread this on any bed that you harvest a crop from during the main growing season, so you will want to have more compost every time you plant a new crop. You will also have larger materials - a truck-load of horse poop, hay bales that get rained on, bags of leaves that your neighbors raked, or a barrel of spent mash from the still up the road a piece, (western PA was big moonshine country at one time) these will go in a long pile called a windrow, and they are just going to sit there for a year, and maybe get turned once if your tractor guy has some time and a bucket loader - or maybe it doesn't get turned. This will be your "cold" compost, and you will use it for large-scale applications in the fall, after your primary harvests are done. It will be along one side of the big bed of potatoes you will be planting - that bed may stay potatoes next year, or it may have a pH adjustment and be used for an early crop of peas followed by broccoli or kale or cabbage next year (I know they're not on your list but you will be ready to expand, and these are all "good keepers" as far as storage crops go, plus, there's sauerkraut). So how do you get all the stuff to build your compost piles? First, you use what you have, which is basically a field of grass. You want to harvest as much of that as possible, starting with the area you want to make a garden. Before the tiller gets there, mow the garden area, starting with a straight line down the middle with the mower deck at the highest setting. That will be the middle of the road that you will drive your truck full of water and manure and compost in, and truck-loads of vegetables out. After mowing a 200 foot long straight line, from east to west, turn 90 degrees, so the clippings get blown into the garden, not out, and mow 5 feet. Now turn 90 degrees again, so the clippings are blown towards the strip you just mowed, and mow another 200' strip parallel to the first till you are back to where you started. Turn 90 degrees, and mow 10 feet parallel to the 5 foot strip on the other end. At the end of the 10 feet, turn 270 degrees, and PULL the mower 200 feet, so the clippings are blowing AWAY from the first cut you took. This defines the width of the access road down the middle of the garden (I'm assuming your truck is less than 10 feet wide). When you get to the end of the third 200 foot strip. Turn 90 degrees again, and blow the trimmings into the center, and just keep cutting into that rectangle until you have a long mowed patch with a pile of grass clippings in the middle. That will be the beginning layers of your first compost pile. Now cut a path down the middle of the garden on the north south axis. This is your primary access path for the ends of the beds. You can make it as wide as you want, depending on what tools you want to use on it - wide enough for a truck, or just enough for a wheelbarrow, whichever works for you. follow the same procedure until that rectangular section is mowed, perpendicular to and bisecting the first. These are the four quadrants of the garden; one of them will be potatoes, a fairly easy crop to manage that stores well in a cool cellar - you will have food all winter that requires very little labor to keep, unlike tomatoes or corn, which must be canned, or frozen, or dried. After the potatoes you will plant a fall cover crop, or a quick fall crop like salad greens, and then in October that bed will be planted to garlic. Potatoes will help to remove rocks and weeds as you cultivate them, but they are not heavy feeders, so you can spread a bit of compost and start sewing seeds. The second quadrant will be for pumpkins and squash, which need lots of room. This bed will be potatoes next year if you decide to move them, or it could be peas and corn, or short-season rotations. The inside edge of the potato bed will be the long cold compost windrow, and the inside edge of the squash and pumpkin bed will be the hot compost piles which you will build starting with the grass you just mowed. The other two quadrants, north-east and north-west, will be this years' annual crops. You should mark where the roads and paths are, and then start mowing the quadrants,cutting rectangular spirals, and blowing the clippings toward the center. When the pile of clippings gets too large for the mower to handle, move the mower inside the pile of clippings and continue cutting inside the original rectangle. Eventually, you will have mowed the entire garden area, and will have some long low windrows of grass clippings, some brown, but some also green. These will be the bulk of your first "hot" pile, in the northwest corner of the southeast quadrant, closest to the center of the garden. You will do a subsequent mowing of the entire garden area at a much lower setting, and this will give enough material for the second pile. You should build the first pile 4x4x4. Measure the width of the comfortable space you need for turning the pile 180 degrees, and that is the western edge of the next 4x4 space. on the eastern edge, add the comfortable turning width and that mark another 4x4 space. This will be your second pile, and the 4x4 space between them will be where you turn the first pile, on the third week after you built it. Given the size of your garden, and the diversity of crops, in addition to John Jeavons' book you should get The New Organic Grower or Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman. You may not be planning to be organic, but either of these books do an excellent job of explaining how to think of the garden on the scale that you are contemplating, and like Square Foot Gardening, take a remarkably complex system and break it down into a series of comprehensible practices and manageable tasks. This is intended primarily as a design exercise, not a hard and fast blueprint to build your own garden, but I hope that you see where I'm going. This is the beginning of the process I go through when I'm designing a market-garden system, but the principals aren't that different for any garden, except for the difficulty of what it takes to gather the resources and stamina for a project of this size. As you flesh-out the details, some things will change, but if you adhere to principals of function, efficiency, and aesthetics, the design you do in your mind will make the realization much easier to accomplish. Good design takes into account your abilities and your existing resources. It solves a number of problems at the same time. It serves an immediate function and a longer-term one. It works efficiently, and because it follows a set pattern of rules and measurements, it is pleasing to look at as well as to work in. The more time you spend thinking about how and why you design things in a certain way, the more likely it is that you will come up with an efficient system that makes it possible to manage a large garden effectively. Bad design will result in having to redo certain aspects - there are some advantages to that, as well - but it will also be less pleasant to work in, less pleasant to view, and less productive, all serious issues if you are going to be spending that much time in the garden. I haven't even addressed most of the crops you mentioned. Here is a link that might be useful: Seminole planting guide

Gravel is always somebody's "good idea" that turns into someone else's nightmare. How big a gravel area do you have? Is it an area you want to reclaim and plant something (even grass) in? I don't do vegetable gardening, but would probably leave that to the raised boxes, at least for now, if I did since gravel would be pretty tough on them. And burying gravel under a load of top soil or amendments will only find them resurfacing with the typical Minnesota frost and heave cycles. I still get surfacing glacial rock from the last Ice Age - and I just use my wheelbarrow and compost screener to sift them out. Can you rake, dig, sift or otherwise remove the bulk of the gravel? If not, some things aren't bothered by it - shrubs, many perennials, etc. - if you dig holes, pushing the gravel aside and plant in the dirt below. That might not be satisfactory if it doesn't create the look you want. Even up here I get morning glory volunteers, so chances are good you'll find some too. I have direct sowed after the safe date of Memorial Day (probably a little earlier in the Cities) - nicked the seed coats and soaked them in water for a few hours or overnight to speed up germination.