Chris - Then I misspoke, I just remembered keeping lettuce and radishes under my taller vegies, maybe it was cukes and peppers.  The AP setup I had a few years ago was zoned, lettuce on rafts, taller plants in gravel, and third was herbs, carrots, radishes and such in a pea gravel/hydroton mix.  You can see that since my current garden is much smaller that I have a lot of different things on the raft; tomato starts, peppers, cabbage, herbs - and all is doing great with the exception of the occasional damping off problem.

Thank you Chris for the correction - memory isn't what it used to be.  Main reason I want to get off the drugs and eat healthier!

Gotta go, picked up a beautiful Canna Lily I need to add while its still overcast.

David

Joshua, I am not sure about other nightshades in raft systems since I have not tried. I prefer to keep long term plants like peppers in elevated media beds to minimize my harvesting labor. I keep my short term crops in rafts where I harvest the entire raft by picking up the raft to a harvest station to do my work standing up. Once I have a cleared raft I re-plant the raft with 3 week old seedling to replace the harvested plant and drop into the trough at the opposite end.

I have a system that has had a serrano pepper plant growing for more than two years. Around that plant(now a tree) I have grown kale,chard,cilantro and now basil. The basil has grown here for more than 6 months as with the others (except cilantro) with intertwined roots. I can say that my peppers are not affecting the other plants in the media based system.

Chris,

Interesting.  It's a bit hard to tell what the culprit of my leafy greens' poor production is, since the heat and humidity of the Florida Keys is not really too conducive to their growth anyway.

 I do grow and clone basil all around my habanero tree and banana pepper in a media bed so I guess it's just the tomatoes that are toxic.