emmie9999, try corn if you want to and have some extra room (particularly if you expand your beds). I live in the country in PA, with lots of corn around. There's a farmstand a half-mile up the road that always has great corn, but I still grow some of my own, just becauase it feels good to look out and see a little patch of corn in my garden. (But I've got a pretty big garden, so I'm not so worried about the space.) This year I'm increasing the fun factor by experimenting with a couple of open-pollinated heirloom varieties along with a regular supersweet hybrid type. You can plant a small patch of corn, but then it helps to hand-pollinate it to get good ears. When the silks show up, cut off some bits of the tassles from the top and dust it over the silks. CAVEAT: I haven't tried that yet, but I read somewhere here that it works well. I'm going to try it this year. Last year I had one very small patch of late summer corn that didn't pollinate well -- I didn't know about hand-pollinating then. A lot of my gardening is just aimed at getting fresh veggies, but a lot of it is also just for fun. I grow some dried beans, for instance. From the perspective of food, it doesn't make any sense, since you can buy a pound of dried beans in the market for about 80 cents. But I grow old heirloom varieties, like Steuben and Amish Knuttle, which you can't get in the market. I don't have room to plant enough to get more than about 1-2 pounds of dried beans per variety, but the beans are pretty and it's just fun. With green beans, you might consider pole beans. You get a much larger harvest from a small amount of garden space. You also can harvest a lot of it standing up. And the teepees look lovely -- I make mine out of 7- or 8-foot lengths of bamboo. One of the downsides is that you can't use row covers (at least not easily), if you're planning on using covers. You also have to make sure the teepees don't shade something else in the garden. One last downside to teepees is that occasionally a good wind will make them start leaning, especially in the early summer before the beans are strong enough to anchor them. Have fun and good luck with your garden.

but quickly, what is your opinion? As I have posted in the other discussions, I have no dirt here unless it is trucked in. We are rocks and glacier scrub otherwise. So all my gardens are raised beds of off-site soil - about 1 to 1 1/2 acre total in several locations around the farm here. In some 40+ years I have never rotated crops except for succession planting with different crops. Tomatoes have gone in the same beds in the spring for years, so has most everything else with no problems. But I am a big advocate of both fall and spring tilling, heavy mulching, and of home composting so no, I don't rotate. Not to turn this into a long discussion on composting which best belongs on the other forum, but we have the space and components to do heavy composting and we don't restrict our compost to only healthy ingredients - if it is organic it goes on the compost piles. Wife and I come from long line of farmers and grew up composting that way. All our gardens get several inches of fresh compost each spring and more as it becomes available for mulching and mixing in between crops and another layer in the fall. I do not have chronic disease problems except during the rare soupy spring we may get and in that case the compost isn't the cause - the airborne fungi and humidity is. No nutrient problems and never have. That said, I recognize that many cannot compost in the amounts we can nor as effectively as we can but I still maintain that if they make the effort to compost properly (get it to 'cook' even 1x) OR allow it to cold compost for at least 1 year, the compost will not be the cause of any disease problems they may have. How to tell if it is hot? Easy - it steams and you can't stick your hand in it. You can feel heat radiating off the pile. As Dennis said, proper composting takes some learning. While coffee grounds are ok, they sure shouldn't be your primary source of nitrogen for a hot pile. If you don't have the resources to hot compost or don't what to invest in or use any of the many high N kickers, then go with long-term cold composting or elect to not compost diseased materials. Either way, crop rotation is not required IMO. Dave

Ha, ha, 100x100! Someday..... but this ate up the majority of the open lawn space and all of the sunny area in the new yard. And it's a 10x increase in garden space over what I had before! I'm already nervous I've bitten off more than I can chew. My daughter was begging for 5 pummpkin plants today and I told her OK, but only if she commits to 3 hours of weeding and watering a week to help out! Thanks for your advice. I won't stress about the rotation, then! I wonder why just about all of my organic gardening books (which are mostly aimed at people with this size garden) advocate small scale crop rotation?

Stephynb, In all reality, as blocks come open, you'll do like everyone else... you'll pick up your seed packets and see what "fits" in that spot best. Will carrots or radishes grow quickly, or do you need a square of beans to make up for the ones that aren't producing yet? Oh, or would lettuce be better there because the tomatoes are getting big and the lettuce likes the shade better than the beans like it. You can plan your crop rotation and everything else to your heart's content, but your garden will tell you when it's ready for something else...and that something else may not fit the "plan" you have drawn. I rotate the heavy hitters from year to year. I planted my maters in a different bed this year than last year. I used what I learned last year about the sun patterns on my beds to lay out this year's garden.