Yes, Katamari is the rolling stuff up game. Its really addictive for such a simple game, and theres three of them. The part I like the most is the amazing effort they put into the music. I found some of it on youtube and it ranges from techno to jazzy lounge music, swing music, Im pretty sure someone even snuck a gospel peice or two in there. While Iw as writing yesterday I stumbled across someone who had done an orchestral version of one of the themse that made my jaw drop. Video game music is constantly impressing me with every passing year. But anyway, back to gardening... Part of my problem with the space issue is theres a movement out here for the "Grow Biointensive" system. While I'm interested that they've managed to do so much with such small topsoil space, I've noticed all the beds dealing with the system need at least two feet of soil, dug down or in raised beds, and thats not what I have. My mum has been trying to push me in that direction, but I dont feel confident with it at this time since I wanted to get more of a feel for the general gardening situation since its my first time and all. Some plants still got pushed closer together than I would've liked but then none of us had seen some of these plants actually growing before. The cukes are doign better than I expected for being about 6 inches closer to each toher plant than I really wanted them to be, but we had such a huge amount of plants to deal with that I did the best I could. I think the funniest part about all this is while it is my first time growing a real garden, I've been growing virtual gardens since I was abotu 19, playing an online game called "Final Fantasy 11", which had a really complicated planting/gardening system most people didnt know about. That game system is actually what got me really focused on the seasons, when to plant, where to plant, when to fertilize, what plants grew better in what geological areas, and I even had a little notebook for a long time where I'd record the weekly cycle of my virtual plants in relation to the moon phase and exact time I made any modifications to the planting space. Even the gamers thought I was nuts, but I loved it! They'd even die off or give terrible results if I neglected them for too long, or give off better results if I got proper gardening tools, workbenches, and diffrent planters had diffrent effects too. Im getting better results with a real garden than I was in my virtual gardens though... Except for that one time I accidentally harvested 122 virtual onions. I can tell you, the cooks sure were happy with me.

I used my poor man's walls of water before I got hoop houses. Use 6 liter soda bottles filled with water and lids and ring around a tomato plant and then set a cage around them. I left them on all season and the ones with the extra heat radiating back would come in 2 weeks before the ones that didn't. I also looked for early season that would withstand the cool nights. Some of the earlier tomatoes are gold nugget - yellow cherry, Taxi & Azchtoka (sp?) for yellow tomatoes. Smaller reds are Kotlas and Stupice and Prairie Fire. I say a small ripe tomato is better than a large green one. Good luck gardening.

Wow, you've really gotten off to a good start at tomato growing! Your plants look great. The one in the container seems to be really healthy and green. Best of luck on the rest of the season. Here is a link that might be useful: Container Gardening in the Desert

" I want to grow lettuce, tomato, pepper, cucumber, bush beans, zucchini, and sunberry (looked unusual). If you can think of flowers or herbs that would be good companions in this garden I would like to hear about it." The first thing that caught my attention is that is all far too much for such a small plot, even for 4x12, unless you want to try growing only 1 plant of each which won't give you much to eat. So I'd begin by paring down the list or plan to triple the bed size. You can also eliminate the 'companion planting' aspect as that is just a well proven misleading fad. " Should I box it in with a wood frame or other border, or try a trench or mulch border?" How you frame it is less important than how deep you make it so use whatever you can afford to make it 12-18" deep. So do you want a raised bed or an in-ground bed? Can you easily dig and amend a bed that deep? If it is to be framed in raised bed what you fill it with counts more than your native soil nature. Yes, squirrels will require some garden fencing of its own and even then they can climb most fences. As for plant lay-out, much of that will depend on the specific crop and the direction the bed runs - N-S or E-W so that the taller plants don't shade the lower plants. Lastly, as a fairly general rule, fences such as yours and roots from all the surrounding trees are problematic so the further away from the fences and from the trees, the better. Hope this helps some. Dave PS: you might also want to read through some of all the previous discussions here about planning a new garden. https://www.gardenweb.com/discussions/query/planning-a-garden