I'm making a garden!

I decided a while ago that I should have a vegetable garden. I'm not entirely sure why; I suppose I felt like it would be nice to have something to take care of, especially if that something gives me food in return. Unfortunately, I know nothing about gardening. NOTHING. So I turned to the Internet, which I figured would be of some help at least, and it sort of told me how far apart to plant things and what pH the soil should be. Things like this are sort of helpful, but it doesn't help me know how many bell pepper plants I should grow if I want a steady supply of bell peppers.

I made a list of what I want to plant, and dug a square in my yard, and drew a graph so that I could figure out where to put everything. I want peppers, tomatoes, onions, green beans and zucchini. (I'm not sure if it's entirely good to plant zucchini just so I can have an excuse to make zucchini bread, but that's what I'm doing.) My plan has six tomato plants and nine pepper plants and a row (about 8 feet) of onions and another row (also about 8 feet) of green beans. Oh, and two zucchini mounds. I sort of feel like I might want to eliminate one of the zucchini mounds in favor of more onions, because I basically use them all the time and I don't really use a lot of zucchini but I don't know. AT ALL. This is confusing.

So I remade my garden-plot in GIMP (basically open-source photoshop) and you can see it above. Each square is a square foot. The red T's are tomato plants, and the green P's are peppers, and the green G's are green beans, and the big Z circles are the zucchini mounds. That makes a lot of sense to me. Oh, and the sun isn't really sitting in my back yard. That just indicates the rough direction of the sun (which I didn't take into account at first but Mike pointed out that I probably don't want my tomatoes blocking the light for everything else and I reversed the whole thing).

So, I'll probably have occasional updates about how my vegetables are doing. I'm nervous about it because I have no idea what I'm doing and I might end up with a really weird amount of vegetables, but I suppose all that is learning for next year. I'm also nervous because I watched this video about vegetables and it scared me. Do I have to sing to them?

So if you have any advice for having a vegetable garden and you feel like giving it to me, that would be awesome. And I'll have the lentil recipe up soon; my plans to see the cookbook got postponed so I still don't have the right name for the dish and therefore don't want to post it yet. Soon, though.