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Clarity comments on Open Thread - Aug 24 - Aug 30 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I have developed a learned helplessness and external locus of control about gardening and personal food production. Since I care about close quality monitoring, I will be remediating this and learning to garden properly. Any guides to edible gardening for rationalists?
Grow what you will actually eat, not what you wish you would eat but won't actually eat. Learned this the hard way.
As such I now primarily grow tomatoes, green beans, sweet potatoes, malibar spinach, and strawberries despite being good at producing other things that would go to waste with some regularity.
(Still working on winter / fall gardening. Gonna try turnips and Fava beans.)
I would add to that that your first year or so, it is not bad to plant something easy that will overproduce. In the long run you aren't going to want much zucchini, but your first year it is motivating to have something come up that is edible, once the birds have eaten your berries, the insects have devastated your lettuce, and your tomatoes have mysteriously decided not to give you anything. I would have given up early on if I didn't have something that produced a reasonable amount the first year. And you can often give away excess fresh vegetables, gaining some small amount of social capital.
(OTOH, if you need to lose weight, eating what you grow rather than buying something you might like a little better should help. At least it pushed me from 44 to 40 kg (I am 157 cm high).)
ETA: there were other reasons, too, but I think this was what did it.
How to garden is site-specific. It will be different in different microclimates. I live in Canada, and once I read a gardening book from the UK and I had to laugh at the part where it said what I could plant in January. In Vancouver, maybe, but in the rest of Canada, no.
So...find books suited to your climate or maybe talk to people at a local garden club or nursery. Or talk to your neighbours, since their yards are most similar to yours, and so they may have experience at what works well in that type of soil and climate.