A very good place to start

When I was three years old, my parents had a vegetable garden in the back yard.  I don't remember everything they grew back there, but I remember carrots and mint.  The carrots never got to full size, because I'd pull them when they were a couple of inches long, wash them off in the garden hose, and eat them fresh.

That was my first experience with gardening.

As a kid, I never grew anything more complicated than marigolds, and in my young adulthood, apartment life (not to mention my short attention span) never really lent itself to cultivating a green thumb.   But I come from a family of gardeners, and so I've always hoped that I'd gain the skill by genetics or osmosis, if not from practice.

When Scott and I started looking for our first home, I began to fantasize about what I could grow there.  Before we'd even closed on the house, I had checked out every book I could find from the Austin library about growing native plants, about vegetable gardening, about what works well in central Texas soils.  I didn't even know whether our yard would be black clay or limestone.