Growing a successful vegetable garden will require a bit of a paradigm shift in your current landscaping mentality. Normal landscaping mentality focuses on things like drought tolerance, deep roots, lush foliage and the like.
With vegetables, the focus needs to be on giving the plant what it needs in order to produce food fast! The normal care you give for landscaping plants might not be the same care you want to give your vegetables if you are interested in having them produce food within the constraints of the growing season that’s available in your area.
One of the best recommendations I could give would be to get and read the Mittleider Method Gardening Course published by the Food For Everyone Foundation – a non-profit foundation dedicated to encouraging and fostering the development, understanding, and distribution of the most efficient scientific non-polluting and ecologically sensitive food production procedures throughout the world.
I purchased the course book a couple of years ago and implemented it’s directions in my own backyard vegetable garden. My results have been 10 fold the previous efforts using several of the popular methods that are out there over the years. I have found it to be truly the only book I need to be a successful vegetable gardener.