I hope I am understanding what you are asking correctly. I think you have a wonderful space started for your cottage garden. It will be so beautiful from the street and from your windows in a few years. Since you have lots of space to fill and cash is an issue (isn't it always?!), the best advice I can give you to fill this space quickly is...Gilbert H. Wild and Son. You can buy daylilys, unnamed, 100/$99.99 I think it is. If you want named varieties they are like 50/$137.00 Daylilies grow wonderfully in dappled shade. They also have simialar deals on hosta, lilys and a few others. They have a website but it's kind of rinky dink unless they have improved it recently....order the catalog instead. Check Ebay for bareroot shrubs and also plants. There are a lot of plants available there for very little money. The plants will be small but they will grow in a couple of years. Just leave them plenty of room when you plant them and then mulch to keep out weeds until they fill in. Also check out the Winter Sowing forum here on Garden Web. Start your own seeds OUTSIDE during winter in containers. They have a very detailed FAQ section that will give you all the details. This is the perfect time of year to start sowing your seeds. Many on that forum will send you free seeds for a SASE. Good Luck! MeMo Here is a link that might be useful: Gilbert H. Wild

Mrscoyle, Don't bag for bag it, you'll go bankrupt, but remember now is the greatest chance to have the best foundation for your garden. Skimp here and forever you'll play catch-up. Veilchen's right, one of the best kept secrets in some town dumps is the compost pile, ours is 10 bucks a pick-up truck load of three year old leaf mold. The best (only) deal in town. Don't just dump in straight loam, it'll compact. Mix sand, perlite or vermiculite, and the nutrients from the start. The work now will pay off big time! Check with a neighboor to split a truck delivery, almost anyone could use a couple yards of loam. Many are 10yd minimum.The more you order, the more reasonable it is. An extra pile tucked away in the corner of your yard will disappear before you know it, but make sure you some sand as well, or you might get frustrated with the results, good luck!

It looks like you don't have enough corn for good pollination. My understanding is that you need at least 4' x 4' of corn for decent pollination. Do you have a plan on how you will get to the plantings in the back for care & harvesting? I think you might want to consider some stepping stones at least. Consider also that your plants will bush out - when we grew cukes & beans on a trellis in a bed 2 feet from the fence they bushed out so much there wasn't much room to get behind them. Also, I have never grown okra, but I've heard the plant can be irritating to the skin. I think it gets pretty big, too. You might think about putting it together & somewhere you won't have to come into contact with it until you want to. Why are you mixing things up? Are you trying to avoid cross pollinating varieties, or going for aesthetics? Or is it for another reason? I would consider putting same plants together because they will have the same needs & you can more easily deal with them as a group. Beans are great & can be very productive. You could substitute them for the corn along the back. Perhaps you could do a block of a short variety of corn (so it doesn't shade other things too much) if you move things around a bit. I am not familiar with your growing area, so I'm not sure what else to add. I see you have cukes growing on the fence, but you have a line of them down into the bed. Will those get a trellis, or are you putting bush varieties in front? Definitely (IMO) put as much organic matter into your soil as you can. We have terrible soil here (sand), but my small gardens are looking lush. We found a local coffee shop that gives us bags of their compostable material regularly. We add that straight to the garden beds (coffee grounds, veggie scraps, egg shells) with some manure (we use quail because it is inexpensive & convenient). Also, we added in some peat moss & vermiculite the first couple of times we were turning over the beds. Hopefully someone with more expertise will give you some good tips. Best of luck!

I used to buy Lambert peat moss based mix which is available at Home Depot. But now I make my own mix. I buy a few of those 5kg block of coconut coir from a local company and get them to sell to me at wholesale price, because they are expensive ordering online. Although a bit pricey, I find coconut coir have superior water retention compared to peat moss. I also buy mushroom compost and horse manure compost. Or I get the horse manure for free from a nursery and compost it myself. I make my own leaves compost with leaves from my neighbor yards, and have worm bins. For the mix, I use my Florida native sandy soil, some peat moss, the coconut coir (one of those 5kg block expand to 2.5 cu.ft.) and the composts. I'm concentrating on making more of my own leaves compost, growing cover crop, making worm casting and getting free horse manure so I don't have to keep buying stuff. My next goal is trying to make some of my own biochar, but not sure if the city will be happy with it. You should look at cover crop and mulching to suppress the weeds, I grow nettle and those things reseeds insanely. I mulch with leaves around their base to prevent them from taking over. Also once the vegetables are already growing, I put down clover seeds, they suppress the other weeds from coming up and does the nitrogen fixing, but you have to watch they don't take over the growing space of the other vegetables. I guess you could cover the raised bed with black plastic and only let the vegetables you're growing go through. My property have lots of weeds before I moved in and my main way to suppress them is covering them with a tarp or some old carpet for a month or two for all the weeds to die, then put raised beds over them. One thing you have to watch out for is trees, or invasive plants or vines, their roots will inevitably go into the raised bed, so I till my beds after each growing season.