Melons and squash need a lot of room. You'll do fine with the tomatoes and peppers, but you'd need another bed if you wanted to grow the melons and squash. If you grow the cucumber on a trellis it'll take up much less space.

Thanks! Is it that they need a lot of room underground or above ground? The plants will not need to confine their vines to the 4x4 space.

Above ground. If you can confine their roaming to outside the box you might be ok. For the watermelon consider growing one of the baby or bush varieties. Those are round and much smaller, meaning they'll take up less room, but they'll still need to roam outside the box.

Also, check to be sure that these melons are self pollinating varieties. Sometimes melons will pollinate each other, and you wind up with funny looking/tasting fruit. If they can roam outside the box, could they not be planted right next to the box, but in the ground?

Janie

The soil outside the box is mostly a bunch of rocks as far as I can tell. I'm attaching the link to the type of watermelon my son wants, it says it has a compact vine but I don't see any mention of pollination. Maybe I'll grow just the one melon type to make sure they don't pollinate eachother. Thanks!

Here is a link that might be useful: Sunshine Watermelon

That's a lot of stuff to plant in that small of a space. If you put the melons somewhere else, only plant one of each other thing and trellis the cukes, I think you might could fit it all in. But maybe it'd all work with one of each if you put the melons at one edge and let the vines sprawl completely out of the box as you said you probably would. I'd pay close attention to watering and feeding, making sure the bed gets plenty of both (but not too much of course! :).

Have you ever heard of square foot gardening? I haven't ever done it just like the book says, but am looking into it in conjunction with my learning intensive gardening techniques. Your plans make me think you may benefit from learning about it, so maybe you can take a look at the Square Foot Gardening forum here at the GWeb? Might be that your plans fit just fine if thinking of that type of garden.

I also want to add that cross pollination won't give you any problems this year. It's the seeds and only the seeds that are affected, not the fruit. If you were to save seeds from your melons and plant them next year you'd likely see melons different than the ones you saved the seeds from. But this year, your fruit will be fine, even if crossed.

I actually started browsing the faq for square foot gardening earlier today. :) I've been looking up the spacing for the different plants I want to see what would fit and how.
It looks like a bit of a tight squeeze but it might work out. I divided the space up into 1' squares. I'm thinking I'll put two of each tomato on the sides. 2 cucumbers in the back where they'll have something to climb. The 8 ball zucchini said it only needed a 12" spacing so they should fit one to a square. Same with the peppers. I'll put a couple of watermelons in the front where they have space to trail into the yard. I dropped the butterscotch from my plans, but I'll keep in mind what you said about cross pollination in case I change my mind about what I want to grow. I didn't order any seeds just yet.
Maybe I should post in the square foot gardening forum to check with them.

Here is a link that might be useful:

Oh, good! I think SFG will be right up your alley. Your plan looks good, too. I'm always amazed at how much stuff one can fit in a square foot garden. I work at an organic-only nursery where the main focus isn't selling plants, but teaching people about gardening (my dream job!), and they have a bunch of 4'x4' square foot gardens planted with all sorts of stuff. It's just amazing to me that they fit it all in and it's thriving. Love that!

Good luck on your garden! Hope you harvest bushels and bushels.

Well I thought it was 4x4 but I decided to go ahead and measure, and its actually 5x5. Good to know. :)
Only thing I need to change on the plan is putting tall things in the back so they dont block the shorter plants from getting light.

Hey, that's great to know! 25 square feet instead of only 16. You can probably fit everything on your original list in that area. Good idea on putting the taller plants to the back. If you're in an area where the sun crosses straight up in the sky during summer it's not imperative, but not a bad idea nonetheless. Not only will they not shade anything, but you'll be able to access them easier to keep them tied up on the supports.