Annie Marsh

Brody Ekberg, I have walking onions, garlic, and comfrey interplanted among my fruit and nut trees. I usually plant things about 12"-18" away from the tree seedlings.  My walking onions tend to "walk" that far on their own, so I'm just sticking with what they naturally do.  My comfrey is also very aggressive, but it handles hard pruning very well (4-5 times a year).  I chop and drop it intentionally to use as mulch around the saplings.

Without any specific science to back it up, I aim for as much diversity as possible among my fruit and nut trees. So in addition to the alliums and comfrey, I interplant with perennial medicinal or beneficial herbs and flowers.  This includes yarrow, wormwood, echinacea, rhubarb, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, etc.  These smaller plants do sometimes crowd the saplings, but by the second year, those saplings were firmly established.  Now I'm more worried about the little guys getting shaded out.

I too have a spreadsheet that borders on the overwhelming, so much so I no longer touch it.  As an alternative, during the long gray winter days this year, I spent some time researching my favorite vegetables to grow.  I broke them down into what I deemed the most important categories - frost hardy, not frost hardy, cold season and warm season, short season harvest and regular/long harvest (based on the number of days from planting to harvest).  I hesitate to say those categories are the 'most' important, but in my experience, a killing frost on early tomatoes has been more crucial than the pH of my soil.  I find that only 3 or 4 categories of information keeps it less overwhelming.

I do some season extension with an unheated plastic hoop house, so it was important for me to know which hardy greens I could grow for year long salad (we are zone 5, so it is possible to keep semi-frost hardy plants going under plastic).  I've attached a PDF copy of my most helpful sheet thus far.  Feel free to use and abuse as fits your needs.  

I renovated my husband's lawn into a very successful vegetable garden last year, using just layers of cardboard over the grass and a 6" layer of old compost on top of that. The compost consists of horse manure and bedding from a local horse barn, which has rotted/decayed/broken down for about two years. While the compost is a bit weedy and needs some regular weeding, I haven't had any trouble with plants being "burnt". On the contrary, they look amazing and produced exceptionally well last year.