Corn will grow well with squashes, peas, beans, but don't plant onions or garlic near peas or beans. For corn make sure the roots never show on top, it is disastrous, grow them in a small ditch 6 inches deep row, plant the seed in the row, and as the corn grows to 3 1/2 feet tall, fill it in 8 inches , 2 inches over the normal 6 inch height of your ditch. Use lots of fertilizer with it. Don't plant tomatoes next to corn, I've read opposite, but half and half of the sites you find say not to grow them next to each other. Collards are cool weather crop and mine did better in the fall. Maybe plant them under something bushy and tall to shade them. Some grow the tall, I pick them at 3 to 6 inches, so if you pick them small, you can have more above ground space and they will fit nicely under something. The sun rises east to west, plant all your tall stuff North, short stuff south.

If you are planting strawberries from seed the first year, you are supposed to pick the flowers off until July 1st so the roots can grow and you will get a bigger crop. You are also supposed to get rid of 1/3 of your crop keeping only 1/3 of your runners, next year do the same of your older plants replacing 1/3 of them, etc., each year keeping your strawberry plants at between 2 and 3 years old at all times. Always move them to a different location because of bugs each year, cut them back to 1 inch tall in fall and move to their new location. This is from books and internet and most say the same, but that is for everbearing strawberries. If you have June bearers, you never cut your runners because that is where your crop comes from. Do you know what kind of strawberry you have? It will help, there are 3 kinds, everbearing, june bearing, and another I can't remember similar to everbearing. I thought when you bought plants, they were on their second year? I might be wrong, but you can ask your nursery where you bought them how old they are. And speaking only from books, the cucumbers do not like wind either, they call them ridge cucumbers because you usually plant them in a ridge, a few inches deep in the row, this gives them a sunken bed and protection from wind. I can't say from experience this is true, and my cucumbers did better as ground cover producing much more than the year before, but location is probably the reason why too. I changed them to a different row the next year and on the ground you can say they may have sprouted more roots making more plants.

Rent a Rototiller or buy one (link URL below). It will rip out all roots, rocks and weeds. You can then till in some compost, add organic nutrients like Rock Phosphate, green sand, Blood Meal, Bone meal and you have a great start. If you have very bad soil, add in some vermiculite (expensive) but it will greatly improve your soil quality. Alternatively you can use raised beds but that drives the cost up as you have to buy soil as well as the hardware for setting up the raised beds. Here is a link that might be useful: Light weight but powerful tiller

This is a question for which there is not necessarily a universal cut-and-dried answer. The primary consideration when deciding how to orient your rows should he the slope of your ground if it is not level. With sloping ground, you want to orient your rows so they run across the slope in order to prevent or at least reduce erosion. I have land that slopes from uphill at the south to downhill at the north and also from uphill at the west to downhill at the east, so I run some beds in each direction, just trying to cross the slope well enough to slow erosion. If your garden plot is perfectly flat and is in full sun, you can run the rows either way in our climate. For gardeners in latitudes further north than ours here in Oklahoma, there may be a slight advantage to running the rows north-south. As far south as we are and with the angle of the sun we get during the growing season, I cannot tell that it makes a difference, and I have some gardeners near me on flat ground who run their rows north-south while others run them east-west and they seem to get good yields either way. What is more important than which way the rows run for light exposure purposes, is just to remember to put your taller plants at the north side of the garden and shorter plants at the south side, no matter which way the rows run. That is the standard advice given so the taller plants are not on the south end of the garden shading shorter plants to the north. However, I don't necessarily follow that advice myself. Sometimes I deliberately interplant taller crops with shorter ones that like some shade so that the shorter plants benefit from the shade of the taller ones. In our climate, 6 to 8 hours of full sun can be brutal on plants, especially in the hot summer months, so I often arrange my plantings so some plants get shade deliberately from taller ones. If we lived in a cooler climate with less intense sunlight and heat, we'd likely need to try harder to keep every plant from being shaded by something near it, but here in our climate some shade is beneficial to some vegetables. Also consider your prevailing wind patterns when deciding how to run your rows. Look from your garden plot at nearby fences, trees, buildings, etc. and understand how they will or won't cast shade on the garden or block wind from it. Remember that the angle of the sun in winter is different from the angle of the sun during the warm growing season. This is why there's no standard answer to this question---because there are many variables involved and each gardener has to work with the site they have and make their choices on what will work best with their garden plot and with the surrounding area. Truthfully, though, based on my experience over a lifetime of gardening I feel like the direction the rows run on flat ground in full sun exposure in our climate is irrelevant. With fertile soil and proper watering, you'll get good yields either way. Dawn