The story of our garden: I had always wanted to be able to grow my own food, but the idea was quite intimidating, and my thought was always, "I'll try that next year, or sometime." But in July 2009, my son and I got inspired to plant some pumpkin seeds to see what would happen, and then we added cantaloupe in there, too. Every seed we planted germinated within 2 days, and they grew at a tremendous rate. We had no beds set up for them, but we had some 40 or so seedlings. And suddenly I was researching everything I could about what I had gotten myself into, and we began a mad dash to create homes for these little seedlings. It was the start of our veggie garden, and we've been loving every minute of it ever since.
The garden set-up: Our main veggie garden consists of raised beds. We are following the square-foot gardening method, which I highly recommend. For two of our beds, we have 8-foot trellises (love). We also have trellises set up along the fence, and we are setting up bamboo teepee poles for additional vining plants.
In our first three raised beds, we used Mel's Mix (1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 compost). For our next three beds, we plan to try a compost-based mix from one of our local nurseries. Our raised beds are currently made from untreated pine, and our 8-foot trellises have galvanized wire fence material, with the openings large enough for me to get my hands through. Below the beds, the soil was cleared of all grass and weeds, and we tilled in compost to amend it, just in case any crazy roots might reach all the way down to it. The beds are about 12-inches high, and I love the higher beds (typical raised beds are 6-inches high).
If you care to learn more about the early stages of our little farm project, please visit the links for the crazy start to our veggie garden, the building of the raised beds, and cantaloupe sex ed. For even more veggie garden info, visit the Great Stems blog categories "fruits and veggies," "bugs," "pests," and "what was I thinking?".
Elsewhere in the garden, we are growing various herbs and citrus trees. Yum!
The Veggie 3-Year Plan (to come):
I am in the process of creating a 3-year plan for my garden, but currently we only have 3 of our 6 beds built, and two of them are being used with some late-grown summer plants, so the "plan" is potentially going to change and soon. In the meantime, I have to get plants going for harvesting purposes, so I'm working with what I have until I have more boxes ready. So here is a diagram of my current garden. The color pictures are of the cool-weather plants I have or will have started soon. The late summer plants are just typed in.

As I get the "future" diagrams finished, I will post them here. I'm pretending to know what I'm doing, and I'm hoping that the diagrams will keep me thinking ahead. Once the additional beds are ready, I'll be able to set up a good crop rotation with future plants. Right now, I'm just working with the space that I have, and the fact that in my first attempt at veggie gardening, I filled my two trellised beds with two cucurbits and lots of corn. Oops. Well, actually it's been just fine, but I know to plan ahead better from now on.