Gardening Season is almost here

Some advice.  Start small.  Starting small will help keep you from getting discouraged, which is what happened to me last year.  Here is my garden from spring of 2009:

Pretty nice, huh?  The garden, as pictured, measures about 18'x20'.  You see my neighbors shed, in the top right part of the photo?  Well, turns out a family of groundhogs made their home underneath it.  By the time they were eradicated, they had eaten about 2/3's of my garden, and I was just pissed, and gave up on it.  By the end of the season it looked like this:

 

Pathetic, huh?  Well, If I would have planned it better (such as having a fence at the get go) and kept it smaller, I think I would've been more apt to keep up with it at least.  

Now, forget about feeding yourself entirely from a garden.  It's not going to happen.  Not unless you have 1) a good bit of land (I've heard it takes about an acre to feed one person for a year) or 2) a lot of time to do some heavy duty intense gardening.  

The point of a garden is to get fresh fruit and veggies that you KNOW don't have any industrial nasties added, and again, you get just a little bit more independence from the JIT systems.  A little bit here, and a little bit there, and before you know it, you've got a real safety net.  A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  The time to begin that journey is now.  

A word on seeds.   

You really should stay away from hybrid seeds.  They make great plants, but the seeds they produce are hit and miss - the seeds may turn out right, or they may revert back to some plant that was part of the hybridization process.  It's important to start saving your seeds. 

Here are three reputable stores you can get good, non-hybridized seeds from:

Baker's Creek   Heirloom Seeds   Fedco Seeds

And this website offers some great information as far as how to increase the health and output of your garden naturally.