Don't put any of those out until the average nighttime temperature is above 55 F or they will get stunted and possibly never fully grow. I also have a small concrete backyard with some sun and for any of those plants 5 gallons or larger should suffice per plant, or smaller for dwarf and patio varieties. Cynthia, I too wonder about the effect of frost and temperature on containers that are above the soil line. It probbaly depends on the size of your containers and even the color of them (black will absorb more sunlight and stay warm, but may get too hot in summer).

OK, some more comments, and some comments on comments. First of all, from the list of veggies you supplied, it looks like you're a good traditional home cook. Most of what you list are easy in your area, but melons are not. There are some shorter season cooler climate varieties, but flavor is often disappointing. Try them in 3 years, when you have some experience under your belt. Lettuce, broccoli, and onions will do fine for you, but you should buy a few plants in the beginning and some seed for each. Plants will get you started earlier, but you will want to plant onions a few times during the growing season, broccoli every month, and lettuce every week. This gives you a continuous harvest, and not too much of anything all at one time. Next year you will include planting some crops for canning and freezing and of course tomato sauce, but this year potatoes and carrots and onions and garlic are what you should grow to enjoy in the winter - if they don't get eaten before then. Garlic may be an issue. Most growers in this climate start garlic in late fall, to harvest in summer. You can plant it in the spring, but it will be a later crop and you will get smaller yields, and the time for curing it will be limited, so it may not store as well. If during the planning process you are getting short of space, wait till October to buy and plant garlic. In late summer, you may find some locally-raised garlic at a farmers market. This will be adapted to your climate, and may be a good source for your seed garlic. Once you plant garlic, you should always keep some of it to plant the next season, because it readily adapts to the soil it grows in, and will get better every year. Onions must be carefully considered before buying, because they are also dependent on climate and season. You need to get the right variety for your uses as well, some don't store as well as others, and some are hot or mild. Remember too that they are reasonably inexpensive - if a large part of your motivation is economic, it is important to grow the crops that you would otherwise spend the most money on. Potatoes are fairly easy and very satisfying to harvest, but are also a relatively inexpensive food to buy. It is best to grow a good number of varieties, because you will be surprised at how different they can taste and their different cooking qualities. Potatoes grown for French fries aren't as good for mashing, and the small oily varieties are the best for roasting and baked potatoes are another, so it takes some planning. Almost all potatoes store well, which makes it worthwhile to have a large late crop and a few small crops to harvest through the summer. Carrots are sometimes difficult for new gardeners - hard to germinate at first, and hard to plant at the right thickness, and unlikely to be properly thinned. They are also sensitive to soil type, which can affect sweetness and size. They cannot be transplanted. There are lots of good strategies that can make this easier, starting with the soil that you build your beds with, but we'll deal with that later. Celery is often tricky for growers, because a big issue is water, and second is fertility. it is not fond of transplanting. It would likely do well with your high water table, but your soil may not yet be ready, so give some thought to this, Celery root has better flavor, is easier to grow, and stores well, so that's one alternative. There is also a European plant known as cutting celery, which has a great celery flavor, looks like parsley, and is simple to grow, but harder to find. There's also lovage, which is similar to celery, if celery only had 1 stalk and grew 7 feet high. The leaves and seeds are used like celery's, the stalk can be cooked and pureed, but it is otherwise very fibrous. It can be used whole to add flavor to soups, but shouldn't be left in large pieces. You should buy tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers as plants. In your climate they need a good head start to give a reasonable crop. Get a few varieties of good indeterminate tomatoes for eating fresh. Indeterminate varities can keep groing and producing as long as the season permits, and the variety will give some for sandwich slices, some for salads, and some for cooking. If you want to make sauce, buy determinate paste tomatoes and use those. Determinate tomatoes are smaller plants, and ripen pretty much all at one time, so you do one harvest and can all at once. The paste tomatoes have less juice, so there's less cooking time and richer flavor. All of these plants want warm soil, so don't plan on putting them in the ground until April. Buy them a few weeks after you see them coming out at the nursery, and plan on transplanting the tomatoes into larger pots before they go in the ground. Cucumbers don't like to be transplanted, so look for healthy plants in large pots, a little later than the tomatoes. They want lots of water, even more than tomatoes. Peppers are the hardest of the three to grow well in northern climates. Hot peppers generally need less water, and stress makes hot peppers hotter. Italian varieties often do better in New England, both hot and sweet. Tomatoes and peppers will do well in pots too; one large pot of small hot peppers and a pot of cherry or plum tomatoes will be nice on your new deck. Pumpkins are easy, but take a lot of space. A good way to grow pumpkins is to go somewhere away from the main garden with a 4' string and a stake. Put the stake in the ground, tie a loop in the string, and use it to mark out a few circles. Dig out the dirt in the circle about 4" deep and make a low mound in the center. There should be a flat space all the way around the outside bout 4" deep and wide, sloping gently to the middle. Plant 3 or 4 seeds at the top of each mound. Once they germinate, cut all but the two best looking ones, and if they are fertilized and watered and the bugs leave them alone, you'll have plenty of pumpkins in October. Strawberries can be complicated, but they are a great crop. You have to choose the variety that suits your needs, and they should go in an area where they can stay in the same place for 3 or more years to get the best yield. There are some interesting raised bed methods for strawberries that would probably work well for you, the one that comes to mind is a series of concentric rings that are stacked inside each other. This eliminates some digging, improves drainage, and makes picking and propagating the plants easy. Lets talk infrastructure. Your beds should be 8 to 12 inches high, built on the highest area. They should be bordered with 2" wood, not pressure treated. Recycled lumber is fine, but remove any nails or pound them flat. You will not find cheap redwood in New York, trust me, unless it's recycled, but you may find cedar, and if you're really lucky, black locust, but if you're buying wood, go to a decent lumberyard and get #3 2x10 softwood, and you will be fine for a few years. Don't worry about getting nice clear lumber, bows and knots and cracks are fine, and will save you a lot of money. Don't build frames wider than 4 feet. You will have to build paths in the bed if you do, and the most economical way to use framed raised beds is to only use them for growing things, and not for walking. Make the paths between the beds wide enough at least for a lawn mower. If your husband is going to work in the garden with you, the beds should not be wider than the combined length of both your arms, so you can reach the stuff in the middle easily. When you are on opposite sides of the bed, you should be just able to hold hands. If you are dedicated to a long-term garden, look for plastic composite decking boards. They will last many years, and are easy to re-build with somewhere else if you or the garden move. Masonry is the most permanent of all. Wire mesh at the bottom of the bed can be an advantage, 1/2 inch is fine. If you put down cardboard first, you won't have to dig up the grass. If you are going to spend any money, spend it on the soil you use to fill the beds. Buy it by the yard and have it delivered. If you can get it while the ground is frozen the truck may be able to dump it close to where you need it. You should be starting a compost pile now. I would put it just behind the apple trees. Take a good strong leaf rake and really rake your lawn vigorously, and you will have a lot of material to add your kitchen scraps too, and the grass will grow better, too. Compost should be a major part of your planning, it is free fertility, one of the best ways to improve your soil, and saves trips to the dump. It's one of the few gardening activities you can enjoy all year, and for many people it really is enjoyable. And gunnersm8 is right, a garden will increase your property values, feed you well for the least money, keep you healthy and tanned and satisfied with your creation, and make your backyard more beautiful and productive. As your son grows, a garden becomes a school. He'll learn geometry and basic math, ecology, biology, chemistry, history, English, and philosophy if it becomes a passion for him. Gardeners tend to be life-long learners, and are frequently very generous and optimistic, and view their world with gratitude and reverence. It's where we started.

"after all why let the grass have all the fun" Grass roots to a depth of 2-3 inches and works like a wick for pulling moisture out of the ground (part of how a septic field works). The grass also keeps your field from eroding. It's not "having fun"...it's helping the system do it's job. The fact that grass over a lot of fields looks rather lush when it's only pulling nutrients from 2-3" of soil via upward movement of water/nutrients says a lot about a field and the job it does wicking moisture from the septic output into the field. Putting a few low-water/low-shade/low-intensive plants on the field (or preferably on the border of the field) probably won't hurt much, but if your septic field can't handle what stresses you're adding to it...especially if it blocks water transpiration while you're adding more water to the field to grow plants...it could get ugly. It all depends on so many things...your field size, how much you use it, the type of soil in the field, how well it transpires water on it's own, what and how much you plan to plant on it, and a hand full of other things. It's important to remember that the field is part of the system. It's "just dirt and grass", but it serves as much of a function as the tank. This post was edited by nc-crn on Mon, Mar 18, 13 at 16:00

I second George's suggestion that you start out with something that you like. If you like tomatoes, Black Cherry is a great one to start with because its flavor is outstanding, it is a heavy producer and it is relatively fast--you'll get ripe tomatoes within about 55 to 57 days of transplanting it into the garden. Sungold is another wonderful one with those same qualities, but it produces golden-orange tomatoes and takes about 60-63 days. Both of those are cherry types. If you want a larger slicing type, there are many hybrids that have some disease-resistance, produce well and produce heavily, including Jet Star, Better Boy, Whopper, Goliath, Celebrity, and Supersonic. If I were planting a 6' x 4' bed for a first garden, I'd put a trellis across the back of it and raise pole beans or something else that climbs on the trellis. The trellis would be simple...a couple of fence posts and either woven wire fencing, twine that you've run back and forth (pull it tightly between poles because with time it will sag) or lattice. On your trellis you could grow any of the following: pole beans, vining cucumbers, black-eyed peas (don't plant until the soil is really warm), a small-fruited vining winter squash or mini-pumpkin like Jack-B-Little (ornamental, but fun for kids), gourds (ornamental), luffa gourd (make your own sponge) or relatively small-fruited cantaloupe (muskmelon). You eve could have pole beans on most of the trellis and a couple of vining cukes at one end of the trellis. In front of the trellis, you could plant one tomato plant, using a tomato cage to support it. Divide you bed in half, and plant that tomato plant and its cage in the middle of one half of the bed so it won't be too crowded. That would leave you three more feet of space beside the tomato, and in that space you could plant any of the following: two pepper plants (one sweet, one hot, for example) or a couple of small eggplant plants, like Hansel and Gretel, or a bush cucumber like Saladbush or any combination of 2 of these 3: pepper plant, eggplant, cucumber or bush-type summer squash (like zucchini, yellow crookneck or straightnect squash or a pattypan squash). In the very front of the bed, you could plant a single row of radishes, or one of the short carrots like Short 'N Sweet, Petite 'N Sweet, Parmex, Tom Thumb, or Little Finger or a half-row of radishes and a half-row of carrots. You'd be surprised how much you can cram into a small space and the plants will shade the ground beneath their roots and help keep their own space cool. Mulching will help keep weeds down and make it a very low-maintenance bed. Above all else, have fun with it. Dawn