Amy, relax and have fun. You probably have growing in your dna, just let it do its thing. Gardening is a natural process, so don't worry about it. I got started after my pregnancy. Just buy the seeds you want to eat and cook. I pick my seeds by reading cook books. For you first year just grow some basics, lettuce, tomatos and stuff like that. You can check out my website, it is still in development, but check out the library page I have lots of videos up.

I will help you girlfriend, as will others here. You have come to the right place.

Patti
www.gardengirltv.com
www.farmersalmanac.com

Hi AmyLea - MY, but you have set yourself a task! Jumping in with both feet, huh? ;)

If I might suggest, start out small, at least till after the baby comes - a garden can always be enlarged but once you have a giant plot laid out and tilled you begin to feel guilty if you don't use it all. That can get quite discouraging. On the other hand, a small successful garden the first year really gives you a big boost of confidence for the following year.

Containers would work great for all the vegetables you listed - many grow all their tomatoes, peppers, onions, leafy greens, etc. each year and avoid all the back-breaking work of tilling and weeding. Pest and disease control is easier too and would make it more convenient for you.

But if containers don't appeal for some reason, perhaps a small raised bed - something along the line of 4X12 feet (you can always add on to it later) - would work for you. Find a good yard site out of the main traffic area, that gets 8 hours of unobstructed sun daily, has easy access to water source, and drains well in case of heavy rains. You'll need something to frame it in, someone to till it up for you, a soil test, and then some amendments added based on the result of the soil test. Another alternative is to do some research on what is called "lasagna gardening" - tons of discussions here about it.

There is another thread here further down the page called "new gardener..." with some great FAQ's, tips, and links in it to check out. There is also a Companion Planting forum here as well as one on Container Gardening, one for New Gardeners, and one on Garden Design to explore for even more tips and techniques.

Well to the forums and to gardening. ;)

Dave

Start small! You can always expand the garden when you learn more. Take inventory of what your family likes to eat (ex: there's no reason to grow beets if no one will eat them). The link below gives you the basics on all sorts of veggies, how to grow them and pests and diseases you may face.

If you want to learn about canning, hop over to the Harvest Forum.

Happy Gardening!

Boo

Well, another newbie. I am starting a new garden after a relatively similar situation as yours. I too grew up with parents that either grew or picked others fruits and veggies. To this day I can count on one hand the times I've had store bought jam or jelly. Before I get too far, congrats on your upcoming delivery!

I have significantly less space than you have, but I still recommend raised beds. You can control what growing material goes in and don't have to worry so much about weeds.

Personally, I got a lot of good information from a friend who recommended the Square Foot Gardening method, but it's certainly not necessary to follow any particular method, just easier for someone like me. There's a forum here if you're interested in checking it out, or go to Ft2Garden.com. I get most of my information from the Veggetable, SFG and Container gardening forums here, depending on the question I need help with. The folks here are very helpful and understanding. Gardeners love to help other gardeners.

I have roughly 120 SF of space to grow and chose a seed catalog from a company in my area that specializes in veggies that grow well in my area. Then I picked the recommeded varieties of veggies I know my family likes. I got sample packets so they were cheap and I will still have multiple years worth of seeds.

Lastly, make sure you stagger your plantings so you don't have a bumper crop one day and nothing the rest of the season. I hope to have fresh veggies for months and months to feed my growing family of 4. As for cheap labor, my 4 year old loves to garden and is helping me every chance I let him. It's fun for the whole family!

Good luck and let us know how we can help.

Hi Amy,
I couldn't help smile reading your posting. Our stories are so similar it is amazing. I won't go into a long post here, if you email me from "My Page" I would love to chat with you and help in any way I can. My husband and I have 4 1/2 acres here in NC and have been gardening now for 4 years. I watched my sister can her harvest when I was young and started canning 4 years ago when we started gardening. We only grow veggie with a few flower beds here and there. Our current veggie garden is 1/2 acre but we are having another acre cleared next week to expand.

I have some great veggie seeds that I would be happy to share with you also, I have some connections to a very large seed supplier.

Email me, we may discover we are neighbors here in NC!

Just start diggin, it is so Great!

Susan

Hi Amy,
I'm in NC too, and fairly new to gardening here (almost 5 years now and still learning). GW has been extremely helpful! I started with small garden beds, read a book on the lasagna method, and am now doing a few new beds each year that way. I do not use pesticides. So far I'm growing organic veggies (adding new ones each year), berries, herbs and flowers.
There is so much you can recycle and use naturally, like leaves, grass clippings and manures from local stables, to enrich your soil. I would suggest reading some of the info on the Compost/Soil forums.
I also winter-sow lots of herbs, flowers and veggies, saving $$ by growing from seed, and that is another great forum to check out on GW.
Oh, and the Harvest forum helped me with canning/preserving questions - and they have great recipes too!
Welcome, good luck and happy gardening!
Rosemary

Congratulations on your soon-to-be newest family addition, and welcome to gardening! There is nothing more rewarding than eating the fruits of your labors. About green beans... they are easy to grow, thusly are ideal for a beginning gardner, but as Sinfonian said, you will want to stagger your plantings. We do a row (about 20') every 2 weeks for a month. My Dad was a "beet-a-holic" and he did the same thing with his beets. Do you like greens? Swiss Chard is also easy and very delicious and nutritious, and is so prolific that you only need to devote a small space to it; as long as you keep picking it it will keep on growing. If you want to get into tomatoes, check out the Tomato Forum on this site, folks there could probably give you the best ideas for varieties suited to your area.

I know, it's enough to make your head spin, isn't it LOL!! Relax and enjoy.

Good luck with your garden. If your parents planted gardens for you and moved on to plant others, that means you were doing ALOT of the garden work yourself after they left. You probably know way more than you think you do. Some real newbies have no idea when to water, how to water, what's a weed, when stuff if ripe, how to pick it, etc, etc. You are way ahead and will should do fine. Plus you have GW to help with the inevitable challenges.

Having small children is a busy time. But it is also a time that you often stay around home more. That is very helpful for a garden. And maybe you can encourage your kids to learn by your side for short stretches. A garden is a great place to spend time together.

I agree that you should start small and expand as your time and skill increase. Also, get a looseleaf notebook and make a plan of your garden, and write down the dates that you sow things and what variety you used. The plan will help your garden rotations and having the dates will help you fine tune plantings, especially successive sowings.

I think most of what I had to add has already been covered in the informative posts above.

One thing that I found helpful when I first started - was buying seeds that had information on the packet about "seed starting times" for my particular part of the country. Because our climate is so drastically different than most - it was always puzzling to me just when to either set out seeds or start indoors.

I found the seed packets that have this information on them and the temperature that seeds like to sprout - was very helpful to me. Although we all have what is referred to as "microclimates" in our yards, finding a spot that these young seedlings like - can be the difference between success or failure.

Seeds and their likes and dislikes are fascinating to gardeners.

Here's wishing you well in your personal coming event and your new gardening venture too.

Just my 2 c's.

Bejay

Well, you have certainly come to the right place for excellent advice and support. One more source I would urge you to check out is the NCSU Ag extension service (http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/) There is a ton of information there and I find myself frequently consulting the site for basic gardening info.

I would also second the advice lacyvail gave about keeping a notebook. I can never remember what I did last week, much less last spring! so it helps to have it down.

I loved your background story, and like others here of a "certain" age, although my parents did not garden, my mom was raised on a farm and I too grew up eating canned veggies from my grandparents' aunts' and uncles' gardens, homemade jams, as well as fresh milk and butter (which we kids always turned our nose up at because it was just too darn flavorful i guess!)

Anyway, good luck with the new youngin' and with gardening... you are very lucky to have 2 1/2 acres to play with- I am very jealous here with my 1/3 acre in Cary!

Definitely keep notes. That way you can learn from experience. Also I "third," or is it "fourth" the advice about starting small. It is a thousand times better to look forward to expanding than to dispair and wish you hadn't gotten into such a thing. Maybe you can time some plantings so that they come into their own after the baby is a couple of weeks old.

Finally, remember what you learned from not having learned. Be thinking how you can instill the love of gardening, and that knowledge, in your own children. My parents set aside, for us kids, about 8 square feet of garden, which was our very own to do with what we wanted. Actually, even before that, I planted a watermelon in my sandbox... But Dad noticed and helped me to nurture it to fruition. Those things got me hooked.

George

Start with a garden of 25 feet in width and 50 feet in length which will accomodate following vegetables.
Okra,Beets, Onions,Beans,Cabbage,Peppers(all sort of),Corn,Bitter melon,Peanuts,Tomatoes,Potatoes,Sweet potatoes,Fenugreek, Corriander and Raddish.There will enough produce for freezing.To avoid heat I usually work during early mornings or late in the evenings.
Good look.

So amylea_2008, is all this great info of any help to you or does it just raise more questions for you?

Please let us know how your plans are coming along.

Dave

Hi, I'm in NC too! Red clay can be a big issue here in NC; its very fertile once you can get a plant into it!! Be ready to add organic material (compost, "nature's helper" ground bark fines, etc). Choose your garden site carefully, you'll need 6-8 hours of sun AFTER the leaves have all come out on the trees. You don't want your plot too far from the house or from a water source. If you know where you want your garden located already, I'd suggest sending hubby out now with a bunch of cardboard to cover over the area. (Weight down the cardboard with bricks, boards, or mulch.) That will start killing back the sod in your garden plot and will make life much easier. Depending on your location, you will also need to consider fencing to keep out rabbits or (heaven help you) deer. Usually rabbits only terrorize pea plants for me, but with last year's drought they ate everything off and I had to put a 2.5' fence around the garden to save anything.

I agree with the earlier posters about starting small but have one suggestion. If you know, for example, that you eventually want a 25' x 75' garden but don't feel like you can swing that this year with the pregnancy I'd recommend using the "future garden" site as a place to stack your cardboard, newspapers, leaves, grass clippings, etc this year. It will kill off the grass in the garden addition area for next year and keep all of your garden amendments close at hand this year. I don't recommend the garden cloth/weed barriers for your garden paths UNLESS you are lucky and somehow managed to get the only yard in NC without couch grass/bermuda grass.

I'd suggest either setting up your garden with paths that are at least 3' wide this year, to allow you to use a stool or rolling garden bench when tending your plants. Mulching the paths with pine needles or ground up wood will keep it relatively weed free (I use several layers of newspaper under the mulch when first setting this up) and conserve water as well. Most city landfills have days or times of the day when you can pull in with a truck and a tarp and they'll load free mulch into your truck for little or no cost. They will require that you tie a tarp over it before leaving. Check with your local landfill site.

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As to what types of vegetables you plant, that's all in what you like to eat. Some things are more work to get going (example: asparagus, artichokes) but you should plant what you are interested in having fresh. I personally don't plant potatoes or carrots because clay soil makes both of these more work and less chance of a great outcome AND they're cheap and plentiful at the store. Tomatoes, lettuce, cukes, beans, and squash are another story. What you grow tastes much better than the store and its relatively easy to have a nice haul. I don't grow corn because we typically get several high wind storms every summer and that cancels out the crop. I love growing flowers and herbs alongside of my veggies for the beauty and benefit. Nothing like weeding with a crowd of butterflies and hummingbirds! Let me know if you are near the mountains of NC, I'd be happy to meet you and give you starts of herbs for your yard. Grow well and prosper neighbor!

Hey AmyLea- welcome and congratulations on the impending arrival! You're certainly in the right place to begin your gardening journey. I only started gardening this year and GardenWeb has been so profoundly helpful- I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am now if it weren't for the extremely generous contributors on this forum.
You have land, passion and a willingness to learn, so you're going to be fine!
I'll echo everyone else on the "start small" (although I might suggest two smaller raised beds rather than one large one, just for ease of access to all parts of the bed). I've had great success with the 'lasagne method' in my garden this year. Of course not everything has survived or thrived but the ones that have done well more than make up for it.
Some other tips from a fellow newbie gardener:
-plant a few things that will give you fast satisfaction. The thrill I got from my first sprinkle of home-grown chives on eggs, first handful of rocket, first radish pulled out of the ground (you can grow radish in 28 days!) was instrumental in giving me the energy to dedicate to plants that took longer to be ready to harvest.
-Take photos. I take digital shots and upload them onto a site called MyFolia (linked below) but I don't think it really matters where you put them- just have them. It's really amazing to look back over a few months and see how fast things have grown. Remember that growing things is an achievement, and worth recording.
-If you feel like you need to extend onto your raised beds in the middle of a growing season, heaps of things can be grown easily in pots to give you a little extra space without the construction work.
-Don't be afraid to buy pre-started plants. Growing from seed is very rewarding but sometimes starting with an already-thriving seedling is less hassle (especially with things that are normally winter-started in your area- I think if I relied entirely on seeds I'd successfully raised myself I might be growing lettuce, radish and zucchini and that's it. "Seed-starting" is something I've got a LOT to learn about).
I hope you stick around, keep asking questions, and let us know how you go- it's so exciting to see other new gardeners take up the call!
Cheers, Slashy