You have to leave some space between plants anyway, so what I generally do is place some inexpensive pavers here and there to walk on--they also make an impermeable "mulch" around veggies that don't cast much shade. Right now it's probably still cool enough for you to be planting peas, radishes, lettuce, spinach, and cabbages/brussels sprouts/broccoli/cauliflower, none of which enjoy hot weather. The peas and radishes will be gone first, and eventually the spinach and lettuce will also give up to the summer heat, so do your spacing with that in mind. Swiss chard and beets can also be planted now, but will last longer...chard will take some frost so is a good veggie to plant if you like it. Onion starts and green onions (from little bulbs) can also be planted early. For your space allotment, you would be better with peas (and later, green beans, if not tomatoes) as climbers on tripods or netting on the side of your bed away from the sun so they don't shade other things. You could plant your tomatoes (or green beans) where the peas were, as they should not be planted until comfortably after your last frost date, but a few weeks later will still get you tomatoes. You could plant zucchini where the lettuce and radishes were. Etc. If you plant peppers, which generally have a similar growth habit to tomatoes, but a bit smaller, plant then about the same time as tomatoes--when it is consistently warm with no possibility of a frost. Plan to plant any vining crops like cucumbers, winter squash, zucchini, etc. on the edge of your bed which faces the sun the longest. The sun will draw them away from the bed so that they won't compete as much with whatever else you have planted. They are the most susceptible to cold, and are usually planted some time after tomatoes and peppers. Bush zucchini can also get quite large and cast a lot of shade. Someone else will have to advise you about carrots, celery, potatoes...I am not experienced with those. If you like artichokes, though, you should try them. You will have faster results if you purchase pregrown cabage family, tomatoes, and artichokes, but it's a waste to spend money for starts of lettuce, spinach, and most other vegetables...most of the vine ones do fine direct seeded asa the weather is consistently warm, which is when tomatoes also do best...but it does stretch the growing season to use plants for those with the longest times to maturity. Tomatoes will survive before the weather is consistently warm as long as there are no frosts, but not do as well as if you had waited. Ones planted at the optimal time will usually get just as large as those planted earlier, and be more productive. If you plant full sized tomato plants, tomato cages are advisable, and they would also be helpful to pepper plants and Brussels sprouts. Obviously, you will not be able to plant all of these, but will have to choose which you like the best and go from there. Tomatoes are usually a priority for most, and three or four well grown plants properly spaced can yield a good quantity of tomatoes. If you like hot peppers, the Thai ones make a small plant and produce quite a few little red peppers toward the end of the summer. Brussels sprouts take up quite a bit of room, but can be picked over a period of time, unlike cabbage. Some varieties of broccoli are especially good at producing side shoots when the main head has been cut off. You can get quite a few green onions with one short row, if you like them. Peas and green beans, if kept picked when ready, will keep producing (peas only until it gets hot). Ditto with zucchini and cucumbers. The winter squashes are usually not ready until late summer, but if you pick some green for summer use it will sometimes stimlate more to be developed. The vegetables that don't do well in heat either die (peas) or start producing seed (lettuce, spinach, broccoli, etc.) In some countries, radish seed pods are pickled, I have noticed. Also, I think radish leaves make a tasty vegetable, either steamed or stir fried. So do beet greens.

My soil is brick hard, heavy red clay with a thick Bermuda grass lawn. so I wanted to plant in raised beds rather than fighting this soil and invasive grass. I covered the existing sod with 4 layers of cardboard boxes to smother the grass, and put everything on top of that. In the thread "Reheat old pile in new composter??", I posted a comment "Cold vs Hot Compost" where I explained how I simply piled 6 feet of leaves and grass clippings inside my raised beds last fall and left them all winter. By spring I had a foot of rich leaf mold in the 3 raised beds where I planted herbs, tomatoes, and peppers. Last week I was removing a few of the determinate tomato vines that were past their prime and replacing them with some suckers I had removed earlier and rooted in pots. The roots of the old plants I was removing were anchored very well into the clay soil beneath the bed. The earthworms, soil microbes, and plant roots together have already begun to improve the tilth of the hard clay beneath the bed. There was no sign of the grass sod or cardboard boxes; the worms had eaten them all up. Last fall I had originally planned to double dig the area beneath the raised beds, until I found that I could not dig a hole more than a few inches deep. After only 9 months since I piled up the leaves, using only a hand trowel, I was now able to easily dig 6 inches into the original soil beneath the beds. It would have taken a jackhammer to have dug 6 inch last fall. This fall I'm planning to mix in more leaves to compensate for organic matter that has decayed this summer. As soon as my neighbors rake their leaves and put them by the road, I'm planning to drag them home with me to start a 4th bed for strawberries next spring. While double digging beds used to be considered the "gold standard" by which to get great results, new research is increasingly going the other way. I was reading a report on the Rodale Institute's website recently about mycorrhizal fungi and its benefits to crops. To maximize mycorrhizal colonization, their research is showing that you should plant cover crops which you mow down rather than turn under. By disturbing the soil as little as possible and keeping cover crops growing whenever fields are not in production, the soil supports development of more beneficial microbes that maintain the tilth of the soil better than plowing does. I've got a long discussion going about mycorrhizal fungi in the container forum. While soils often contain enough of the fungi so that inoculants are not needed, there has been some debate of whether plants in containers could benefit from inoculation with mycorrhizal fungi. Some said that the high temps in containers would destroy the fungi, but new research suggests the fungi survive the high temps of soil in containers during summer and are a great help to plants in containers during hot weather. Once you establish a healthy soil climate in the raised beds, recent research suggests that the microbes and plants will take over and do everything that is needed to maintain improve the soil beneath the bed as well.

At my last house I had raised beds - 4' wide by 12-20' long with wooden sides about 1 1/2 foot tall. Over two or three years we built 8 of these large beds plus several smaller beds for perennial crops like stawberries, rhubarb, and horseradish. For that situation, there were several advantages. It allowed us to have flat areas on a hill; we terraced with rock walls and put the beds on those flat areas, surrounded by woodchips for mulch, so there was no weeding at all. The beds were sunk about a foot below the grade, and we had to sift the soil, which was shallow over fractured ledge, to get rid of all the rock, and then we filled the rest of the beds with composted cow manure, thanks to our local dairy farmer. So, we ended up with no weeds & great soil in flat beds from an area that started out mostly rock on a steep grade. Other pluses were sitting on the bed sides to plant, screwing trellises for beans, melons, cukes, etc. directly into the bed sides, and the ablility to plant early due to good drainage and early season warm-up. We also sometimes put plastic hoops over the beds, tucking the hoop ends inside the beds to hold them, to cover with spun-bond or plastic. On our strawberry beds, we put hinged wire mesh covers so the chipmunks couldn't eat the berries. Between mulch and the high organic content of the soil, we only had to water when it had been dry for a couple of weeks or more. Our current house had a pre-existing ground-level garden which we simply took over as was since the house needed a huge amount of work, so that's where our efforts and energy went. I miss the raised beds, and find that I have more difficulty with soil-living bugs like wire worms in my potatoes and cutworms crawling in from the surrounding field. I can't work in the garden as long since I have to bend more or sit on & scoot along the ground. (I'm no spring chicken!) The grass and weeds migrate into the veggie garden from the surrounding field, and the soil needs to be prepped in the fall so I can plant peas, potatoes, etc. earlier in spring since the soil stays cold and wet for much longer. There are two only advantages I can see to the ground level garden: it's easier to till with a machine like a big tiller or tractor if you want to be able to do that, and any crops that need winter warmth can be well mulched and will stay warmer in the ground. Garlic, which is a bit borderline as far as hardiness here, has better survival rates, and my leeks and root vegetables overwinter better with a thick layer of mulch when they are in the ground rather than in a raised bed. So, like Lisa, I will eventually have some of both, but with most of my garden as raised beds and a smaller part of it in the ground.

Patience IS the important thing to remember. But I can tell you that if you have enough worms in that landscape (eventually), those worms will turn it into black gold. It just takes time. To maximize the reproduction rates of both your VC and worms, you'd be a lot better off to control the environment those worms deal with. Temps, moisture, predators. You'll make more worms and VC faster with bins in protected environments. After you've got more worms than you know what to do with, you can unleash them on all that bad soil. Chuckiebtoo