Growing shrubs from seed is tough. I've tried with little success. Unless you kill off all of the weeds, they tend to smother the shrubs. Clover and herbs might be easier to grow from seed. Herbs may spread (though the ones that spread tend to be invasive). You can sometimes get cheap shrubs when Lowes has an "end of season" discount bin, and some county soil conservation offices offer sales where they sell shrubs cheaply. Don't know if you can do this in your area, but if you can burn what's there, the ash would encourage the growth of Blueberries and certain prairie species. This post was edited by edlincoln on Tue, Jul 30, 13 at 12:31

no you'll be fine. The only problem is if you or someone else mistakes a poisonous plant for an herb, which is unlikely. One plant producing poison doesn't affect the toxicity of a plant nearby. The only way I could really see a problem is if you like have castor bean as an ornamental, which apparently also has nasty allergenic foliage besides its deadly-poisonous seeds, the foliage might rub against that of the herbs and transfer some irritative stuff, and this could happen with ouchy-leaved things too, I guess. But very unlikely.

Susan, I love your light stand and always will love it. I realize it was the best solution for you, but if I told Tim I wanted to buy one of those, he'd hand me a hammer and tell me to build my own....which is why I have the one that I have. : ) Mine is hidden away out of sight in a room where guests rarely venture, although anyone who knows me and who knows I raise my own seedlings always asks to go upstairs and see it in the spring. So much for putting it out of sight....I just should have set it up in the dining room or breakfast room or something.... I am sure you'll be deliriously happy with it and will have many wonder seed-starting adventures and I look forward to hearing all about them. I think you got a great deal considering it was Gardener's Supply. I never buy anything of theirs for full price. They have sales often enough (and especially in November when, I think, some of us gardeners are shopping for ourselves) that a person can be patient and get a good price during their periodic sales. I've noticed that prices often are not as good in December when gardeners' spouses or family members are doing what I call "panic Christmas buying" and cannot afford, time-wise, to wait for a sale. I don't think you were repetitive at all. The more we all share about what we do, how we do it and why we do it (as well as pointing out what didn't work for us!), the better for all of us to learn from one another's experiences! Carol, Our weather is just like yours. Our high was 70 degrees yesterday and it was so gorgeous outside I could hardly stand it. I wanted to jump up and down and scream "Spring Is Here!". That was exacerbated by the smell of the orange blossoms on my little orange tree. However, I controlled myself because I knew it was a false spring and that winter was returning today. It was 56 degrees around 7 a.m. here at our house and now it is 36 degrees and we have had very, very light rain but lots of thunder. Phooey on winter! I think you showed those folks at the co-op that one benefit of being a gardener is that it keeps your muscles and joints strong, healthy and fit. I'd rather "work out" in the garden any day, than walk on the treadmill or work out on the weight machine. Who wouldn't? Trees, Nope, sorry, I just haven't gotten to it. I am trying. Watch for it in a couple of hours or in the morning. I'm about to start typing mow after I close up the chicken coops, put out the deer corn for my favorite deer, refill the bird feeders (those little birdies are eating nonstop today trying to stay warm), etc. I'm kind of dreading going out into the cold wind but I need to do it now before it gets dark. I have to warn you that I don't use the same planting schemes every year because I don't want to get stuck in a rut, but I'll try to mention some of the planting schemes in my usual rotation. Dawn

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