Plants For A Future (www.pfaf.org) has a lot of info about the edibility of plants. I have seen conflicting and incorrect information there though, so verify before accepting their info as fact.

Mia, Yes , I think it will work. Interplanting tomatoes with other crops is something I do all the time. I often grow smaller plants like lettuce and carrots underneath and between tomato plants, essentially using them as a living mulch beneath the taller tomato plants. I also mix all kinds of herbs into the tomato beds as well, and think those herbs help explain how I grow so many tomato plants and yet only rarely see even a single tomato hornworm or fruit worm. You sometimes will get less yield per plant when you interplant multiple kinds of crops together using close spacing, but since you have a lot more plants occupying the soil, you still get a good harvest . The best carrot crop I ever had was a result of me broadcast sowing lettuce and carrot seed randomly into the tomato bed after the tomato plants already had been transplanted into the ground. My garden was smaller then and I had run out of space, so was packing as much into each bed as I possibly could. I just thinned carrots and lettuce after they sprouted. When I grow onions with tomato plants, normally I hammer a stake into the ground where each tomato plant will be planted later, and leave a small unplanted spot there as I plant the onions. When it it time to transplant the tomato plants into the ground, I put one tomato plant next to each stake. If I have to pull up a couple of onions to make room for a tomato transplant, it isn't a big deal . We eat those onions as scallions. I started interplanting multiple types of plants together long ago, after reading John Jeavon's book "How To Grow More Vegetables...." book. It is amazing how much you can pack into even a small space when you interplant. Even when I grow tomato plants in molasses feed tubs, I generally have pepper plants, herbs and flowers mixed into each container with the tomato plants. Look at how Mother Nature mixes everything up together. On the eastern edge of our woodland, for example, we have native pecan and oak trees growing as the dominant plants, but underneath them we have wild cherries, American persimmons, possumhaw hollies, and redbuds, and beneath those understory trees we have American beautyberry bushes, native blackberries, inland sea oats and brushy bluestem, peppervines and several native wildflowers which ebb and flow with the seasons. All of them happily co-exist. Why can't our gardens be the same way? To garden bio-intensively in this manner, you need to pay careful attention to soil fertility and irrigation (if adequate rainfall is not being received). Obviously when you interplant several types of edible crops together, the plants will be competing with one another. I get smaller onions in interplanted beds than I get from onions grown in a monoculture with recommended spacing, but still get tons of onions. We still have several dozen onions from last year's crop, though now they are starting to sprout. There pretty much is nothing grown in our veggie garden that isn't interplanted with several other things. If I ever were to plant even one single monoculture bed, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like the way it looked and would be out there trying to fix the bed by adding more stuff to it. In fact, I do have my onions planted as monoculture beds right now, but that is because they are the only thing I've put into the ground so far this year. The onions will not be alone in those beds for long. Hope this helps , Dawn

Thanks for the feedback, bboy and Reg. I'm just curious about growing the Calochortus and Liatris, but am really interested in the Aralia, Spikenard. Mountain Rose herbs sells the powdered root for $26 per pound. I'm just in the research stage of deciding what to grow next year. I've been using the USDA database to look up plants, and they don't break the maps down below the state level, so I was not aware of the difference between B. deltoides and sagittata, thanks for pointing that out. I guess I need to find better sites for information. My interest in sagittata is because it is rated better on the Plants for a Future website, 4 for edibility and 2 for medicinal than deltoides, which only rates 1 for medicinal, and also because 2 seed companies I have found offer B. sagittata, none deltoides. Also, it may be wet here in the winter, but it is very dry in the summer, dry enough to satisfy plants that do not want any summer water. My objectives at present are to find plants that are successful with little or no irrigation, and hopefully are natives or else useful in one or several ways. Dalea purpureum is rated 2 for edibility, 1 for medicinal, while the white Prairie clover is rated 3 for edibility, but I don't like white flowers as much, so the edibility factor here is just for curiosity. Neither is native here. Geum urbanum is rated 3 and 3. It is supposed to have a spicy or cinnamony tasting root. It is not a native or able to live in dry soil, both strikes against it. Anyway, I'm currently just considering various plants, trying to picture if they could fit in with my dry soil and voles. What is your favorite website that will tell you the locations of wildflowers in Washington? I just found www.pnwflowers.com and http://biology.burke.washington.edu/herbarium/imagecollection.php?Genus=Balsamorhiza&Species=sagittata which do come up with maps. I guess from the standpoint of providing food for local wildlife I should perhaps stick with native plants. That is a consideration but usefulness for me is also a factor, not every plant has to be a native for me to grow it, or I'd have to get rid of a lot of stuff already growing in my yard. And most of the wildflower nurseries I've been finding so far offer mostly eastern or southern natives, which is not surprising after looking at a lot of plants on the USDA site and finding most are not native in the PNW. Here is a link that might be useful: Aralia

Basella alba. Malabar spinach.