Evening y'all,

We're expanding our family's vegetable garden in 2011 from a test plot of 16 ft2 to about 60. Somehow we managed to keep our crops alive and producing last year during our first attempt growing anything to put on the table, so we'd like this year to try and produce enough to make an actual dent in our produce needs.

We have 2 hungry boys plus us so we go through a lot, hopefully the garden will help a bit.

I'm hoping the vets here won't mind taking a look at the layout we had sketched up and let us know if we're missing something in the plant placement or if we're just botching it altogether somehow.

We tried to pay attention to plant needs and 'companionship' as much as possible and plan based on our favorites. The varieties are all recommended for the Dallas area by the extension office here. The unlabeled smaller box at the bottom of the linked image will contain various flowers for cuttings along with some 'trap' plants which we'll harvest like Dill, Borage, Nasturtium, Sunflowers, and Marigold. We'll use all those random plants in one way or another but we weren't sure if we actually needed to plant them among the crops or if having them that close by would suffice. Will be about 3' between boxes for pathways. The nearby tree (not to scale) will provide good shade in the worst part of the day but they'll still get 6-8 hours of direct sun -- we weren't sure if that'll help or be a hindrance.

Thanks in advance, we really appreciate any criticism or input y'all might have.

Here is a link that might be useful: Veg Layout