Newbie Gardener:

I got started veggie gardening not very long ago at all.  Probably a year ago?  The only reason I started is because my parents were getting rid of some small raised planter beds, and I had room for them in my backyard.  So I took them and started planting things at random. Here is a picture of one of those raised planter beds with some Little Gem Lettuce growing in it.  The bed has some nice soil in it and is sitting directly on top of dirt.  I've put river rocks around it to fill in the rest of the dirt area between the bricks and the planter box.

I have been reading and reading AND READING since then.  I've read a ton of books about gardening.   In my Kindle library I've got:

Little House in the Suburbs (Caswell and Siskins)
Folks, This Ain't Normal (Salatin)
The Feast Nearby (Mather)
Weekend Homesteader (monthly editions) (Hess)
A Chicken in Every Yard (Litt)
A No-Nonsense Guide to Growing Your Own Vegetables (Spivey)
City Chicks:  Keeping Micro-Flocks of Chickens (Foreman)
DIY Projects for the Self-Sufficient Homeowner (Matheson)
Farm City:  The Education of an Urban Farmer (Carpenter)
Mini Farming (Markham)
The Essential Urban Farmer (Carpenter)
The Home Canning Guide for Everyone Who Eats (Falbe)
You Grow Girl (Trail)
The Working Chicken (Hess)
The Quarter-Acre Farm (Warren)
All New Square Foot Gardening (Bartholomew)

.... and I'm reading more.

I am a super newbie at this gardening stuff, let me tell you.  And boy have I learned alot from these books.  An example of how green under the gills I am?  I was doing alot of reading about canning.  And boy does it sound hard -- lots of rules!  But after all my reading I was super confused.  I totally didn't get the point of canning.  Each of these books said that the flavor and nutrients are lost in canning, and I thought to myself "what's the point then?"  I thought, to make it easy on me my first time canning, I might goto the store and buy a bunch of tomatoes to can as pasta, just for practice.  But I thought, "why would I want to go to all the effort to can all these tomatoes, if they are just going to lose their flavor?  Why would ANYBODY want to can anything?"

Ahhh.... and then it dawned on me.  People can large crops of their veggies prior to winter because they aren't going to have access to those fresh veggies during the winter!  (folks, lemme tell you, it took a few minutes for things to click with me)  See, "kids nowadays" just don't know anything about gardening, farming, canning, homesteading, etc.  A very simple aspect of some people's life -- canning -- was totally lost on me because I grew up in a city that has no winter (San Diego).

Oh well, I say to myself...  I may not understand why people can, but at least I'm not like some of these children nowadays who don't know that the chicken they eat for dinner originally started out as having bones in it.  Or who think that milk is just a bottled beverage that comes from the cold section of the supermarket.

From Joel Salatin's book:  "A friend was buying staples at the supermarket recently. He had flour, salt, sugar, bags of potatoes, boxes of butter, and the lady behind him in the checkout line asked, “What do you eat?”  .... To her, this cart of staples was completely foreign. He looked in her cart, and everything was ready-to-eat, whether it was frozen pizza, canned ravioli, or canned soup. It was all completely processed and just needed to be reheated in a microwave."

(Salatin, Joel (2011-10-10). Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World (p. 86). Hachette Book Group. Kindle Edition.)