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Remember, if you grow your cucumbers with other vines, it will be a bit harder to see them. I grow mine with morning glories, and I've missed one now and then until it gets too big to eat (I like them small.) Great article!
Since I seem to be too dumb to tell MG sprouts from bean sprouts, the MGs took over my pole bean fence and smothered them out completely for 2 years. Finally I dug holes, put in styrofoam cups filled with good rich loose soil, planted green bean seeds and if it wasn't coming up in the cup it didn't get to live until the beans stopped bearing. Be sure to cut off the bottom 1/3 - 1/2 of the cup so the roots of the bean plant can escape out into the surrounding soil. My MGs have hybridized with the local wild ones so there is a wide variety of colors out there. My tame ones were a bright deep pink, a solid white, and GrandPa Otts. You can imagine the combinations we now have.
I let my marigolds go to seed so they have reverted to whatever it was they were years ago before they were hybridized. They grow in among nearly all my veggies. I grow basil, tomatoes, marigolds, lettuces, and sometimes cukes together along a stretch of 6' tall chainlink fence that surrounds the bird yard. I have to put chicken wire on the inside and outside of this 'bed' which is also slightly raised. I use old trailer skirting to hold the soil somewhat in place. This bed is only about 12" wide and about 5" deep but I grow a lot of stuff in it. I may do a raised bed along the south side of the bird yard too but it has done fine so far as a soil level bed.
Last year I raised some butternut winter squash in 2 beds that didn't have a lot in between the perrenials like iris, daylilies, spiderwort, etc. They went wild and produced wonderfully. I find that if I have veggies in a bed I will be more apt to keep it weeded. One bed of the squash only had Mexican Sunflowers in it so I put down cardboard over the bare soil to hold moisture and keeps grasses and weeds down. Rain soaked thru the cardboard fairly well, but in beds where I felt it wasn't because of the kind of cardboard it was I slipped in soaker hoses so I could control the moisture and where it went. Almost no moisture loss to evaporation. This kind of interplanting makes the most of your limited areas and has lead to the term yardening.
