yea I was thinking our triple crown blackberries were about 5' wide, wouldn't really want them much wider than that because they grew so tall. Raspberries I am thinking of keeping them around 5' as well for the thorns. I ordered some raspberry plants and some root stock, any suggestion on how far apart to plant my raspberries? I am thinking of spacing them maybe 6' so that I can fill in later.

If the cabinets need to be close to the ceiling it would be best to stay with lower wattage to minimize hot spots. If your entire kitchen is to be high efficiency lighting then you can use warm color LED above the cabinets for a soft glow. Not all LED is Title 24 approved. Much is not all that efficient for general lighting applications. If you are trying to hide enough fluorescent to get some incandescent then you'll want to stick with fluorescent on top of the cabinets and lower the cabinets so it looks nicer. There are low profile fixtures available to help hide behind crown molding. Here is a link that might be useful: old LED message thread

has anyone had any success with interplanting basil? Word on the street is that they can share soil space and nutrients rather nicely, and the basil will help keep certain bugs away? I'm guessing you are talking about the "companion planting" fad? Not much of it pans put in actual practice which is why it never really caught on. They even go so far as to claim it makes the tomatoes sweeter which is well proven to be impossible. Pest patrol benefits - none yet they are very attractive to flea and Japanese beetles and aphids which most of us don't want gathering next to our tomato plants. That's not to say you shouldn't plant basil near tomato plants if you wish. Many do simply because they go so well together on the plate when served and as long as the basil gets enough sun they grow fine although they don't need nearly as much water or nutrients as tomatoes do. Just don't expect them to have any magic side benefits. :) Dave

The tomato lady is right, but I ignore the rules and do what pleases me. So, it depends on your goals. For the most fruit per plant and possibly (this is not guaranteed) for larger fruit per plant, I'd go with 3 or 4' between plants with rows 4' apart, or if you have tons of space, rows 6' apart. I don't do that though. See....I know all the rules about the proper spacing of tomatoes, but I generally don't follow them. I don't care how many fruit I get per plant or how big the fruit are, I just want tons and tons of tomatoes for canning. So, I usually plant my plants 3' apart in two staggered rows in a raised bed that is 4' wide. Some years I have planted them 2' apart and didn't stagger the rows....just had them lined up two by two like they were going to walk up a walkway into Noah's ark. When I was trialing a ton of varieties (150 different varieties in my biggest year, with 600 plants, not all of them inside the fenced garden because the deer hadn't really discovered the garden yet), I had them only 18" apart. Guess what? No matter what the spacing was, I got tons of tomatoes. We had all we wanted for fresh eating, plenty for canning and plenty to give away. So, I say that I think you should do what seems best for you in your conditions, with your specific soil, your growing techniques and your disease pressure. You know, you could plant one row with one kind of spacing and another row with another kind of spacing and see which row gave you the best overall performance in terms of both the amount of fruit produced and the plant health. I will add that last year was perpetually rainy, both before and after I planted tomatoes, and I spaced a lot of them 4' apart for better air circulation to reduce the disease pressure and it really helped a lot in a tremendously rainy year. They did great. I doubt I'll have the discipline to plant them 4' apart this year, and am likely to plant them 3' apart, but I never really know what I am going to do until planting day arrives and I have to make a decision. Then, I try to go with whatever feels right...making a decision that is more intuitive than intellectual. If you never experiment and try different things, you'll never know if you're doing it the way that is best for you. If I was in a tomato-growing competition with someone, I'd likely do things a bit differently because I like winning. My dad used to feed his tomato plants with Miracle Grow for Tomatoes weekly and got huge yields. I don't feed mine weekly. I barely feed them at all. I mostly feed the soil and let the soil feed the plants. I get such good production from the plants that way that I'm sort of afraid we'd be overwhelmed with too many tomatoes if I fed the plants weekly. Honestly, the way I decide my spacing is to look at how much space is left in the garden after cool-season crops, herbs, flowers and corn and beans are planted. Then, I try to fill up that space with mostly tomatoes, saving a little room for peppers, cukes, okra southern peas and melons. The reason we have a back garden is that I have no self-discipline, so I fill up the rest of the front garden with tomato plants and have no space left for peppers, cukes, okra, southern peas and melons. The back garden gives me space for them. If I could get away with it, I'd fill the back garden with tomato plants too and create another garden space for cukes, peppers, okra, southern peas and melons, but we're running out of space that isn't covered with trees. I have a friend who spaces his tomatoes 6' apart, but he only grows 3 or 4 plants so it is not a big deal. Most of my gardening friends plants indeterminates 3 to 4' apart and determinates 2' apart. No matter how much space we have, it is never enough space for all the tomatoes I want to grow, so I do the best I can with what I've got.