Please slow down and get a basic gardening book. It will save you a lot of frustration.

I recomend The Gardener's Bible by Ed Smith (available on amazon.com).

You *might* be able to get away with mellons in your area from seed if planted now, but broccoli is a cool season crop and you have no hope of that right now. Maybe for a fall/winter garden in your area. Asparagus takes about 3 years from seed before you have anything worth talking about and 2 years if you plant crowns.

My *strong* advice is you spend the July reading a few gardening books. Spend the August designing and planning your gardens and Sept/Oct building them. Dump all the organic matter you can into them and let them sit until spring of 2007 and then get started.

You will be far more successful at gardening if you take the time to learn the basics first and construct the gardens well before planting in them.

To do it now would be to rush. Gardening isn't a rush thing. It rarely works out. Patience learned now as you learn and build and plan for next year will serve you very well in the subsequent years.

If you have made yourself a shade house/area you could use that later in the season to start your seedlings of broccoli, etc.

You've mentioned that your property is windy so you might want to make getting wind protection a high priority. Wind will whisk away water from your plants like you wouldn't believe.

Also do a check around for making yourself some plant shaders. Homemade trellising, horticultural mesh and shade cloth - even ancient bedsheets (at a pinch, and out of sight of the curious!) can all help to protect young plants until they are well-settled.

If you plan to grow from seed - it definitely pays to have a set up that lets you start plants under shelter (wind, hot sun, any frosts) ready for setting out later. Some plants need to be direct drilled (sown straight into the soil) because they don't transplant well but others you can grow from seeds out of the ground and move in as land becomes free of the last crop.

Some of the crops you've mentioned - asparagus and artichoke - are perennial and really need their own custom-assembled grow-site to give you great results.

Some of the others - pumpkins and melons - are in for most of the growing time - particularly if you have several varieties on the go. You might want to consider setting up a separate place for crops that aren't going to be around for months at a time. One way past that is to get the vines to grow up a frame. I think there's information about this style of growing in the Square Foot Gardening forum.

As summer seems to be a 'quiet' time because of the heat - you could use the interval to set out your beds and build some of the shelter and workspaces you could find useful. (Better than winter, for true!)