I hope the area is well fenced, a deserted garden is deer and rabbit paradise. Mulch, drip (can your mother open a tap for a few hours is the weather is hot and dry?), and one manuring in the Fall will take care of weeding and feeding and watering. One problem you have is what to do with seedlings. They need daily water, no exception, until the first good rain. Do plant them as soon as you get there, soak them early, and soak them again just before leaving. Now for the harvest: tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, okra, and many pole beans are not appropriate, they really need to be picked daily. For tomatoes, grow Roma (which only need two pickings for a complete harvest, and freeze beatifully after blanching) and some of the hybrids which can last on the vine, such as Early Girl. Avoid zucchini, okra and cucumbers but try some of the pole beans which can last on the vine. Definitely try chard, shelling beans, garlic, onion, beets and potatoes. You can try almost any root and leaf crop, for they have a long harvest season. Amongst the fruiting crops the best bets are melon and watermelon, and peppers. Watering needs are highest for shallow rooted crops. So try peppers and lettuce only if you can guarantee a midweek soaking. same for garlic and onions. But chard and beet, which go down 6 ft, will do very well indeed.

Analysis paralysis IS more common, with the Internet and with huge number of choices. There was a thing in the paper that just going to get a pair of JEANS (even a guy, not me) brings 100 or more options. Even this forum can instill paralysis--wait wait, back up, big picture--I know I do that. Back to raised bed. Along lines of making it good enough but not overly good (or expensive), and at risk of incurring more paralysis, you might think about whether you are going to use some trellis, tripod poles for veggies, etc and then think, will I have a problem with what will "go" with my proposed box? So you might want to reserve some $$ for some of these raised-bed veggie-supporting accessories of nicer construction or materials, and/or keep the basic bed from getting so "fine" that you can't grow peas. I'm thinking of something that might remain in the bed during the winter and provide "vertical interest" and so might be designed to be inherently attractive as well.

in the world are you? Some areas have already seen snow, but that melted and they are seeing fairly warm days now that can be used to prepare the garden for spring. What do you mean by "properly pull" things? Those unwanted plants grow in that soil all summer extracting nutrients from that soil and if pulled out and thrown away also throws out those nutrients, The garden can be covered with either newspaper or cardboard (some seem to think there is a difference in them and there is none) and those can be covered with something else to hold them in place and hide them. You may also want to mulch mow them, if they are somewhat tall before placing the paper barrier. Mulch mowing may help speed up the digestion of those unwanted plants more than simply covering them with a paper barrier. kimmq is kimmsr

Most of your cool-season crops (potatoes, carrots, onions, lettuce and other salad greens (including spinach) and edible podded peas can be planted (per OSU's Spring Garden Planning Guide) from February 15-March 10. For radishes, the recommended planting dates are March 1 - April 15 ,and the best way to plant them is to succession sow by planting a certain number of radishes every week during that week. That will spread the radish harvest out over a longer time frame since you can only eat so many radishes per week and don't need or want the whole harvest at once. Potatoes will be your tallest cool-season crop, unless you plant vining edible podded peas, so they should be planted in the northernmost part of your garden to keep them from shading out everything else. If you plant a vining form of edible podded peas, like Sugar Snap or Super Sugar Snap, then their trellis also should be on the northern side of your garden plot so they do not shade shorter plants. I'd have them north of the potatoes because they'll reach 5-7' in height, and potatoes won't get quite that tall. Carrots can be slow to sprout and often the soil crusts over and it can become hard for the tiny carrot plants to break through the crusty soil. One way to get around that is to sow a radish seed in the same rows as the carrots, placing a radish every couple of inches. The radishes will end to germinate more quickly and break through the soil's crusty layer, paving the way for carrots to follow them. Since some radishes mature in just 3 or 4 weeks, you pull them out once they are mature, and the smaller carrot plants gradually enlarge and fill the void left by the harvest of the radishes. Lettuce and spinach are strictly cool-season veggies that will bolt once the air and soil temperatures reach a certain point. Bolting is partly a function of dry soil as well as being temperature-driven, so keeping the ground they're growing in evenly moist can help prevent bolting to some extent. Some lettuce varieties withstand our heat better than others. You should mostly ignore those litle blurbs on seed packets or in seed catalogs that describe one variety after another as being "heat tolerant" or that say "produces all summer". That may be true of cooler climates where the folks think it is insanely hot when temperatures hit the 80s, but it is not really true here where hot weather means 90s-100s and beyond. Some of the lettuce varieties that have performed the best for me here include Anuenue, Australian Yellow Leaf, Jericho (a romaine lettuce from Israel), Red Sails and any of the oakleaf types. Batavia summer crisp lettuces probably are the most heat tolerant types I grow, and some examples of them are Cherokee, Cimarron, Crispino, Jester, Mottistone, and Red Ball Jets, With Spinach, I often grow Bloomsdale Longstanding and Teton. Sometimes hot weather makes them bolt pretty early, but then you can grow them again in the fall and winter. It is not too early to get your lettuce going. If there's anything I like to plant really early, it is lettuce because all too often we heat up way too early in the year, so I'm always in a race to grow as much lettuce as I can before the heat sets in and makes it bolt. My early lettuce plants are in tall containers (so that if rabbits sneak into the garden in winter, the plants are elevated higher than the rabbits can reach) and already are about 5-6" tall. I'm getting ready to sow the seeds of the summer crisp types into a cattle trough on legs this weekend, which is a method I use to grow them near the house (far from the fenced-in garden plot) and keep them planted high enough that rabbits cannot eat them. I have hoops over the top of the catle trough and generally drape bird netting over the hoops to keep the turkeys, chickens, rabbits and cats from getting into the cattle trough and eating the lettuce. I often have trouble with wild birds, which are very plentiful here, pecking away at the early lettuce because there's just not a lot of green platns available to them at this time of the year, so row covers or bird netting help protect them. With your edible podded peas, you can grow vining types or shorter bush types, depending on whether you want to erect a trellis or whether you have a fence they can climb or not. I generally plant Sugar Snap and Super Sugar Snap on a trellis (made of T-posts and woven wire fencing, so I can move it from one raised bed to another every year). For a shorter bush type, I really like Cascadia. Sugar Lace or Sugar Lace II, and these get about 30" tall, produce heavily and are disease-tolerant. They are, however, basically leafless (so they can put all their energy into producing peas, not leaves) so if you want to grow edible podded peas partially so you can use the young pea shoots in salads, then Sugar Lace isn't the one you'd use for that purpose. Because potatoes, eggplant, tomatoes and peppers all are in the nightshade family, they can be affected by similar pests. I like to plant the cool-season nightshades at the northwest end of my garden, where a pecan tree will partially shade them beginning in mid- to late-afternoon, and I plant the warm-season nightshade family plants as far away from the cool-season nightshade family plants as I can. This is because the pests get a head start on the cool-season plants and then can easily move to the warm-season nightshade plants. By putting some distance between them, I keep my warm-season nightshades a little safer from attacks by pests already on the cool-season nightshades. I usually grow my tomatoes and peppers together in the same raised bed, or in adjacent beds. When I grow eggplant (which I usually don't because we don't like it....but I did grow it back when I was trying to get us to eat enough of it to like it), I plant it as far away as possible from the rest of the nightshades because it tends to be a flea beetle magnet early in the season. I'd rather have the flea beetles to flock to it instead of having them all over the potatoes, tomatoes and peppers. When you use a plant like that to draw the pests away from other plants and towards it, that's called a trap crop. You're likely to have flea beetles on eggplants, so why not use them to try to keep the other plants flea beetle free? Keeping a distance between your potatoes and tomatoes also is good because that helps keep any Colorado Potato Beetles that might be on the potato plants from moving directly to the tomato plants later in the season. I'll come back later and talk about your warm-season plants. I need to go finish making dinner and this is long enough as it is. Dawn