Susan, JenEllen, Jeri - Thanks for the advice.

I usually water in the early morning, but I've sometimes watered at night as well. That's something I can try to avoid. I've avoided watering during the heat of the day, so as not to shock the plants.

I rotate my crops, and dig in compost and some manure every year. The soil probably started in very bad condition, since there was probably never anything there but lawn until I started a garden, but I think that it's slowly improving.

I asked an organic gardening expert about "three sisters" companion planting (corn, squash, beans) once. He said that it worked well if you did it the way the Native Americans did it. They planted hard corn for grinding into corn meal, winter squash, and dry beans. In the fall they collected their winter food supply. But if you plant sweet corn, zucchini, and green beans, then how are you going to get into the field to harvest them without crushing your plants?

Nevertheless, I tried it last year in a small plot. The green beans never came up, and a few zucchini leaves lasted all summer but never flowered let alone fruited. The corn did all right, but since we didn't know how to tell when it was ripe, we waited too long before picking it, and it was pretty tasteless.

This year, I've tried planting winter squash together with popcorn. Those squash plants are small (less than six inches across) but they're doing better than the zucchini plants, which only have a couple of leaves apiece on the two plants which have come up. I put in some pea plants against the fence, but they have shrivelled up for some reason. The bush green beans are doing all right. We've always done better with bush beans than with pole beans. Perhaps it's part of the vine crop curse.

Some people have told me that they get lots of zucchini without any effort, but haven't been able to grow tomatoes. Tomatoes have been the one thing we've been able to grow consistently. Different soil, I guess. I'll have to keep trying to improve mine. More manure!