It's officially autumn here tomorrow and my four sisters (giant sunflowers is the fourth) are doing well, but I think you might be sensible to avoid the sisters for now: the system's really designed for growing storage crops, allowing them to mature and dry in place: winter squash, dried beans and dent/flour corn. Not very kid-friendly food! Snap beans and sweetcorn need to be harvested often and it would be hard not tho wreck the plants. Popcorn's a great kid plant. Strawberry popcorn can be eaten fresh too and it's a cool colour. Maybe they could try a modified three sisters: popcorn, sunflowers and a winter squash like 'Jack be little', that should be ready for halloween, if that's your kind of thing. Corn HAS to be planted in a block and a bonus of popcorn is it can be planted close. It needs an enormous amount of nitrogen to do well, apparently people used to bury fish carcasses under the mounds. I'm too wimpy! I grew leguminous winter cover-crops, chopped them down and smothered them with seaweed and lawn clippings, let that break down and planted the sisters. I've foliar-fed it a couple of times, chucked on more grass clippings and aged sheep poo. Not something I'd do in a large space, but the corn (Navajo black) has between 3 and 5 cobs each. It feels like the Little shop of horrors out there sometimes: "feed me, Seymour". Beans wildly clutching everything, corn in all directions, every morning I have to wrestle the pumpkins off the paths...

Well, they say 12' (bountiful gardens in CA), I'm hoping that it won't get as tall here. It's a southern heirloom corn for fresh and grits. Unfortunately I can't do north-south because of my slope. What I might do is simply double the rows and increase the spacing so I end up with a 15-16" grid spacing pretty much. But the south-slope helps because the corn gets stadium seating, if you will. This is tropical coastal Ma, no problem with the long season here last frost is around may 15 and first often not til mid/late nov. That gives me five months or more. According to anson mills, it's good to let the dry corn freeze on the stalk before grinding.

Suggestions: 1) sounds as if you are suffering from information overload. That only confuses, conflicts, and over-complicates the whole process. So it's time to quit with all the books for now. Sure you can get 100 arguments for why one way is best and they can all sound reasonable. They are all just opinions because there is NOT one-right-way to garden. There are hundreds. :) 2) Pick one thing to focus on - building 1 large raised bed garden (solves the clay issue and you have experience with them) for this year and get started on it as it is rapidly going to get too late to do anything in your zone. 3) Then get that raised bed in good organic gardening shape for planting - haul in lots of good compost - and plant it. 4) recognize that you simply cannot grow everything this year anyway so choose the crops you must have in reasonable amounts and get them planted in that garden. It is too late to plant garlic and corn takes too much room for this year. Plant tomatoes, cukes, lettuce, and beans. 5) recognize that you cannot get all the garden space you want built this year. It is a multi-year project. Put all the expansion concerns aside for now. Once the first bed is up and planted you can then focus on building a second one for the fall garden - the garlic, etc. 6) accept that gardening organically has its limitations for the first few years. It is not magic and it is more work for the first few years. Those include pest problems -they will come and they will do some damage until the beneficials in the area get built up. Look into online ordering of beneficial insects. And you will have nutrient issues until your soil food web gets built up too. Accept those limitations up front so when they happen you won't panic. 7) forget 'companion planting' for now. The benefits are minimal when it even works and it complicates the process. Save it for an established garden. 8) forget crop rotation issues for now. It will help down the road but you can't do it now anyway and one of the big benefits from organic gardening is that it reduces the need for it anyway. Lastly, you say you garden organically. Easy to say and lots of folks say it without even the basic knowledge of what that means. It is much more than just "no chemicals allowed". Unless you really understand all its underlying principles, its willingness to accept less-than-perfection, you become frustrated. So for your reading focus on organic gardening only for now. The Organic Gardening forum here is a good place to start. Hope this helps. Good luck. Dave PS: I read on a forum here not to plant nightshades together because they are heavy feeders. That's hogwash. They are not heavy feeders and millions of gardeners plant them together and have for eons with no problems.

Sounds like you are overwhelmed and confused. Don't be. All gardening is a matter of 'playing it by ear', so have fun and don't get bogged down with science! You'll learn as you go. That's half the fun. (1) Corn salad is a 'green', often called Lamb's Lettuce. See the link below. (2) These are fairly small pots, each of which will nicely fit a mature-sized parsley plant, or 3-4 smallish lettuce. Garden centres like to suck people in by planting out multiple-herb mini gardens, but you should regard them as something for gift-giving and for the short-term only. Nothing to stop you trying, however! For many people, plants in pots is the only way to go. Just don't expect miracles. (3) Design? Does it really matter? You can try to go all formal, with tall plants and the back and groundcovers in the front if you want; or you can do the cottage-garden thing and just jumble everything together willy-nilly; in a small garden bed like the one you're planning, it honestly won't matter a jot. It'll end up beautiful, no matter how you arrange it. But you're not going to end up with everything mathematically arranged like the French formal gardens, nicely manicured. Most herbs aren't like that - let's be brutally honest - most herbs are weeds! The important thing is to be able to reach whatever you want. That shouldn't be a problem for you in such a small area. I suggest you just put plants wherever you like them to be. If the plants aren't happy, you can always move them (well, most of them, anyway!). Herbs aren't quite as fussy as people where they go, in general. I agree wholeheartedly with FataMorgana: veges are herbs. Most of them have medicinal properties. But that's another topic. Here is a link that might be useful: corn salad