I think a good book to start with would be Mel Bartholomews Square Foot Gardening.

Sure, grow now--makes you want to expand! Do easy stuff like most greens, lettuce. etc. you can even start with pots & I'd use big ones cuz once you taste your own produce....Good luck.

Natural, your own local extension service would be a good place to start your education about gardening. I would strongly suspect that they would be a source of work shops, brochures, etc. Also, our botanical garden plays host to all kinds of educational programs and workshops all year round...you might look into something like that, too.

Here is a link that might be useful: Click here to contact your Extension Service

It's difficult to resist the idea that one needs to read books by experts before starting - I did so myself. The truth is, IME, that while interesting or entertaining it's also unnecessary.

Stuff wants to grow and will despite mistakes made by the gardener. Don't get too wrapped up in the endless details at first, that's my advice. Second-most important, give yourself lots of time. An in-ground plot should start being prepared a year ahead, at least.

If a crop is not severely impacted by a problem, namely, too little sun, too little water, too high or too low a temperature, or some extreme soil problem like very low or high acidity, very low fertility, or lack of moisture, it will grow and produce something.

So if you merely plant an appropriate crop at the more or less correct time of year in a spot with 6 hours of sun in soil with some organic matter in it to hold nutrients and moisture it will do ok. This is in itself not always easy to achieve on short notice, which is why people often buy garden soil of some kind and make planting beds.

I respectfully disagree with pn. One is not born with the 'know-how ' needed to get started with even the simplest, smallest of gardens. Unless exposed to gardening concepts by a family member, friend, articles, books, and /or classes it would be difficult for anyone to know what first steps to take. A little bit of good information goes a very long way towards having a successful experience.

Our original poster is a self proclaimed novice. She needs to gather some information from outside sources before she understands what the heck you're talking about, pn.

We all learn from our mistakes, but blundering ahead without the slightest notion of what's what isn't any fun, at all. Natural needs to be exposed to the language, the tools, and the processes of gardening. Workshops and basic books are a great way get started. Then she will be more prepared to experiment.

My education began at the side of my father. I was a little girl when I learned how to plant and take care of our large vegetable garden.

Rhizo, I guess I should have been a little more clear: the necessary info can be obtained from any basic university vegetable gardening bulletin or the like. Extensive reading of books is surely not necessary to get started in a purposeful direction, but of course is interesting. My point is that a total neophyte can get overwhelmed by doing a great deal of reading without any feedback from the real thing.

Or maybe not, some people have large capacities for digesting written material. One of the first books I read when I got the gardening bug was the "One Straw Revolution". It contains lots of interesting philosophy, though not much practical and concrete directions for food production in north america from the beginning perspective. The books by the Nearings have lots of useful info, and not just about food gardens. The Eliot Coleman books are good. The Victory Garden books are good.

Total agreement, my friend!

Hi, NaturalBeauty

Square Foot Gardening is a good choice to start, in that it has you start small. My experience is that after one season of a 4ft by 4ft garden bed, you either want to quit or you want a much bigger garden.

60 Minutes Gardening, by Jeff Ball is also good, and gets into 4-season gardening, which you can seriously consider in Zone 7.

Right now you should be preparing your in-ground beds for next spring, which comes sooner than you think in Zone 7! But you can also grow cool-weather plants right now. I would suggest a couple of big pots/planters, something on the lines of 20-qt volume or more. I have 2 28-qt pots on either side of my (south-facing) front door that are planted with cherry tomato plants in the summer (the toms generally get eaten on the front porch by my 10-yo twins). As the summer ends, I put in lettuce transplants and pansies, which generally supply salads (pansy leaves and flowers are good salad additions) until Thanksgiving. And that's in Zone 5! So, if you have a knowledgeable nursery near you, they may be selling transplants for lettuce, spinach, early cabbage (early=short time to harvest, say 60 days), kale, maybe broccoli and cauliflower. All of those are cool-weather lovers, and will cruise right past early frosts without withering into the ground like heat-loving tomatoes and squash. Use Square-Foot suggestions for spacing plants in the large planters. You can also plant a few radish seeds between the greens for a harvest in less than 30 days. If you like turnips, try direct sowing them between the greens, too, but they take a bit longer. If a hard freeze threatens, or snow or ice, put a little garden fleece cover over the pot(s) and uncover when the weather warms up again. I have had pansies last all winter (and carrots, but they should have been planted last month) treated this way.

In Zone 7, plan on planting your peas (we like sugar snaps and snow peas, it seems like you just throw away too much good stuff with shelling peas) and potatoes in early February, or when experienced gardeners do in your area (the hard part is linking up with those experienced gardeners, I know). At the same time, plant your first seeding of spring cool-weather plants--radishes, carrots, beets, lettuce, spinach, etc. As you gain experience, you will find that some plants that we don't usually let go to seed (oh, yeah, that would include almost all of the cool-weather greens), if we DO let them go to seed ;-) those seeds sprout and start growing WAY EARLIER than you think garden plants will start in the spring. Go with it and you'll get nice early harvests, too.

Square Foot Gardening stresses that you aren't going to eat 40 heads of lettuce in one week when a full garden row of lettuce matures at one time. So in the late winter and early spring when you start planting the cool weather plants, plant a week's worth of salad in several square feet of your new garden bed -- maybe 4 heads of lettuce (I would plant one red head, one loose leaf, one romain, etc), one square of radishes and carrots, one square of spinach, and so on. The next week plant another week's worth of salad. Oh, and one cabbage each week. Or a broccoli. After you plant, cover your garden with garden fleece to keep bugs out, even before the plants are up. It also keeps moisture in (for those of us in dry climates) and keeps birds from eating your seeds or new sprouts.

I live in Zone 5, and our last hard freeze is in early April, last frost is early May. We traditionally plant warm-weather plants (tomatoes, squash, corn, etc) on Memorial Day, although I now start direct seeding before May 1 and transplanting seedlings before Memorial Day weekend (with garden fleece, or sometimes Wall-o-Waters for protection). To find out YOUR last freeze/frost, try the link (oops, it was blocked! Google last frost and look for one that will let you enter your zip code). It will get you close.

But back to cool-weather gardening. Try it, it is great! The weeds don't grow as fast in the winter, I have to water less (but in my climate I DO have to water), and my kids and I can eat something from the garden all year around, EVEN IN ZONE 5! We have one bed on the south side of the house (that happens to be in the front yard, a former herb garden) that we call our winter garden. It is now planted with lettuce, spinach, beets (we eat the greens as well as the roots), carrots (I forgot radishes!), and kale, and is growing in the open. In early October I will put a low tunnel over it (poly pipe and a plastic drop cloth), leaving it open on the ends except when there will be a night below say 25 F. In mid November we'll probably harvest the last of the lettuce before it freezes, and I'll put some garden fleece right on top of the remaining plants in the tunnel. For the rest of the winter I'll open the tunnel on sunny days (desert southwest, most days are sunny and a sunny day in the 30s will cook plants in a garden tunnel) and occasionally harvest some spinach, radishes, kale, etc. February is our month for carrots, for some reason, and I scatter some more seeds for lettuce and spinach at that time. Mid-march I uncover the bed, partly because our spring winds would uncover it anyway, and partly because the plants can mostly take care of themselves again by then.

Good luck, have fun, and think outside of the seasons!

Catherine

with pnbrown here, the knowledge is within us, what is lost is common sense, and sensibility, lots of money spent on books when they are free to borrow from the library, don't be hooked up with a particular author, and at the end of the day what you need is here free.

no raised bed we have ever built has failed to grow the food plants we want. no manures, no fertilisers, no magic.

like catherine says learn about aspect, learn where the sun is in winter, down here looking up our best aspect is north and east, yours is south and east. i would add use heaps of mulch.

len

You don't have to know how to start! Start is the key word here--learn by doing. Just my take on it.

"Learn by doing" is a good way for someone to experience failure. There are gardeners with 30, or more, years experience and then there are gardeners with 1 years experience 30 times. Spending a bit of time with someone like Bartholmew is worthwhile, not a waste of time.
Not everyone, today, has had the experience of growing plants from childhood.

And then there are gardeners who imagine that the entire world is one climate with all the same problems to be dealt with.

I have 20 books on organic gardening & 10 or so that are not organic in the pure form, they all talk about composting.
But I have to agree with pnbrown & gardenlen.
I was growing & harvesting before my 8th brithday & I have learned more from doing then any other way.
I understand the why of something & that some of the claims to not be true in my garden from books. Even after many people told me it could not be done that way.
So read the book & sites, but do not wait to get your hand dirty, it is the best way to learn.

Another good way to get involved in producing food is making sprouts. In this case a book would probably be helpful. You need very little equipment, just jars to hold wet seed for a few days until they turn into salad makings. Give it a try!