Keyhole Garden Part IV: Planting Round II; And Who's the New Kid?

4/3/2012:

Keyhole gardening is intended as high-density gardening, the thought being that plants with less sun hardiness could be shielded by the hardier plants that originated in tropical realms.  So I had an unoccupied corner right of the notch, opposite the tomato corner.  What goes well with tomatoes and peppers?  If you are a fan of, or love someone who is a fan of Italian cuisine...

Eggplant!  I chose the Ichiban variety for its compact size and earlier fruiting.  Good stuff.

A more gaping space than that was the area to the very top of the circle, outside the pepper rings.  Now I'm a fan of summer pleasures so for me, the choice was a no-brainer:

Watermelon.  

Remember those cinder block voids?  These took some thought.

I was thinking strawberries, but here in CenTX those are more of a fall/winter planting.  What's something that should work, and leave the soil in better shape than it found it?

Pole beans... lovely legumes with their nitrogen-fixing properties, should be able to 'mind the shop' until the second growing season.

So back to composting/mulching- when 99 percent of all compostable kitchen scraps end up on the compost pile, you're bound to have a few viable seeds come up with a freshly turned layer of composted mulch destined for the garden.  Given that, it's not that big a surprise when you start seeing these:

Tomato, coming up next to one of the chili plants

What's this- another mystery!  This one is coming up next to the newly-planted watermelon.

So now the garden is in its final configuration... what happens next?

Part V: Progress