A culinary bundle - grown together for the kitchen, with no interspecies claim made.
Chosen for the kitchen. No interspecies mechanism — a co-harvest for the salad bowl. What it teaches is timing: the quick radish and cool-season lettuce come and go (both carry bolt risk, so succession fires) while the warm-season tomato and cucumber are still ripening. This bed is really two or three successions, not one planting.
At least 3 m²32.3 ft². A bed smaller than that does not get this guild quietly substituted for something else — the planner greys it out, says why, and offers the nearest adaptation that does fit.
Nothing is left living in the bed over winter; the whole planting is re-established.
No interspecies mechanism is claimed. It is grouped for a reason, and that reason is written below rather than dressed up as biology.
Rotation history attaches to the ground, not the bed, so this is what the planner remembers about this patch after the guild comes out.
This is a claim the planner refuses to enforce — recorded here with what is actually known, rather than dropped.
What is actually known: A guild asserts a mechanism between its members. A culinary bundle asserts only that you will want these things in the same bowl. Both are legitimate. Only one is a polyculture.
Evidence: settled without a trial - definition.
Mechanism: Soilborne inoculum and overwintering pest stages disperse across the bed. A guild dominated by one family forecloses that ground for that family's rotation interval.
Evidence: confirmed against 2 sources in the research-based literature.
Same soilborne-persistence basis as other rules here (read 2026-07-11): NC State Extension (Verticillium microsclerotia 'can survive in the soil without a host for up to 10 years'; Septoria/early blight 'overwinter on infected tomato debris and solanaceous weed hosts') and UMN/Ohioline (squash bug overwinters 'as adults in sheltered places ... they fly to growing cucurbit plants'; squash vine borer 'overwinters in the soil as a pupa').
Those sources establish that inoculum and pest stages persist in the ground and are not confined to the exact spot a plant occupied; this rule applies that persistence across the whole guild footprint. The whole-footprint attribution is the corpus's rotation geometry (history attaches to ground, not to the individual plant — see the data model), not a claim from an external source.
Rotate the whole bed the guild occupied, not just the rows that family grew in.
Mechanism: Sowing the same crop in batches two to three weeks apart staggers when each batch matures, so the harvest arrives as a continual succession instead of one glut. It pays off only for short-DTM crops, whose quick turnaround lets several sowings ripen within a single season.
Evidence: confirmed against 1 source in the research-based literature.
Penn State Extension Master Gardener (Lancaster Co.), 'Succession Planting', extension.psu.edu/programs/master-gardener/counties/lancaster/idea-gardens/the-raised-bed-garden/succession-planting (read 2026-07-11): 'Succession planting extends the vegetable harvest'; 'Plant one crop, then approximately 2 weeks (or more) later, plant the same crop in another area to have a continual harvest.'
