Gardening is so fun! First, composting is pretty easy – take grass clippings and shredded fallen leaves and layer them with your kitchen scraps (no meat products). You may have to add a small amt of black dirt at first. Keep it damp as a wrung out sponge, let it heat up, then turn every so often. The thing about compost is that it takes a while. We usually put all of one year’s pile on the garden in the fall which we rototill in in the spring.
Starting plants indoors can be a pain, but very rewarding. Since this is your first garden I suggest just buying plants for tomatoes and peppers rather than growing from seed. Take this year to learn about the process and the equipment you’ll need for seed-starting. A good book is From Seed to Bloom. Other plants grow best being planted right in your garden as a seed. This includes things like beans and cucumbers, pumpkins, carrots, and some herbs. A note on herbs – some are very difficult to grow from seed so its best to purchase it as a plant. A brief amount of internet research on what you want to grow will help you tremendously.
Plants are divided into cold season and warm season, which has to do with when you plant – either before the last frost or after the last frost in your area (determined by your zone – easy to find via Internet). Cold season things are lettuce and spinach, peas. potatoes, I think carrots too. Warm season stuff would be tomatoes and peppers, beans, squash, etc. A note on growing peas – you need a whole lot of room to get anything much out of the plants. This I learned the hard way :).
A really great book for gardening in general is The Square Foot garden. I admit I don’t use his methods completely b/c they haven’t really worked for me. But he has a lot of info on planting and harvesting dates, etc.
Since this is your first year, I suggest starting with only a few things and see how you do, then add more over the years. Gardening is an inexact science – every year is different! That’s something I really like about it! BTW, we live in town with a very small garden and its pretty amazing what we’ve grown for our family. We don’t really look at it as practical for canning and freezing so much – with the exception of tomatoes – but we eat really well all summer long! I buy produce from the farmer’s mkt for freezing and canning. This November we purchased a house on 3 acres so now I can have a HUGE garden. I can grow pumpkins anywhere I want! 🙂
Ok, sorry this became so long – can you tell its a subject I’m passionate about? LOL
Have fun – feel free to ask more questions!
Becky