Well, I have to tell you, we moved 6 months ago and we're still surrounded by boxes. In the old house we had a beautiful garden with fruit trees, veggies, herbs and flowers. I fed my children home grown fruits and veggies and my husband (who does all the cooking in our house) cooked with fresh herbs. Now we're starting over in the new house. The garden is looking good, but it's taking a very, very long time. The first thing we had to do is thin the trees - you can't grow anything in a deep, dark forest! The neighbors responded as if we were thinning their children. We had people yelling at us, swearing at us and telling us to "go back to where we came from." Then we also had some people singing tree songs and reciting tree poetry at us! After the trees were done, we put up a fence. That went over almost as well as the tree thinning. We have small children who need to be kept in and a large garden that we need to keep the deer out of. The fence was also esthetically needed - but apparently the neighbors' taste and ours don't quite mesh. It didn't bode well for a happy move with all the people around us yelling about all the things we were doing in our new yard. However, things moved on - we now have a beautiful fence, the yard and house actually have some sun - I believe for the first time in years - and over the winter months we had a huge supply of firewood for the woodstove. With the woodstove, the garden, the forest; you might think we live out in the middle of nowhere, but actually we are less than 15 miles from Washington, DC. The house is old; built in 1953, but beautiful and well built. The garden isn't finished, but the seasons don't wait for man so I've planted as we prepared it. We have zuccini, tomatoes, canteloup, cucumbers, green beans, green peas, eggplant, bell peppers, hot peppers, lettuce, raddishes, beets, blueberries, elderberries, basil, parsley, rosemary, tarragon, cilantro, dill, sage and thyme for eating and medicinal herbs - lavender, comfrey, twin leaf, calendula, eidelweise, chinaberry, cotton wood, hawthorn and rue and just for beauty - geraniums and some new flower my 6 year old picked out. The house came with hostas, ferns, hydrangias, dogwood, rodadendron and lilly of the valley (all, you'll notice, things that can grow in shade - because of the trees). You might think we have acres and acres, growing all that, but it really can be done in a normal, suburban yard. We use the square foot gardening method that Mel Bartholemew invented. He used to have a PBS show and has a new book out. Absolutely a must buy if you want to grow a lot of stuff in a small space and not kill yourself with work. Our last house was a townhouse and we grew cherries, apples, peaches, plums, almonds, pears, blue berries, asian pears, all the veggies and herbs that I mentioned above as well as crepe myrtles, japanese maples, magnolias, azaleas, day lillies, asian lillies, irises, hyacinths and grapes. That was a corner townhouse lot! It absolutely can be done and you can keep your full time job as well. Now, in that house we used up all the available land as well as growing in some containers. There was no mowing at all - no grass. Since it was a townhouse community there was lots of "open space" that the homeowner's association maintained and my children had plenty of space to run and play. The new house is a single family home and we have a bit more than half an acre, so there's some grass left over after the garden because children need space to play and have picnics and the like. Grass, for the most part, seems such a waste of useable land, so much of our property will be given over to growing edible or medinical plants. Yesterday I put up the trellises for the vine plants - the tomatoes, canteloups, zuccini, beans and peas are all grown up a trellis to save space. They also grow so much better than when they are left to grow out instead of up. It's harder to find the veggies, harder to pick them and they rot if left on the ground - you have to put something under each one as it grows or it turns to mush. When they're grown up a trellis you can find them hanging there on the vine, they stay nice and they're easy to reach and pick. We use a product called soil revitalizer to put minerals in the soil that we grow our fruits and veggies in. This ensures that we have optimized the mineral content of our produce. That's one way to get your children to take their vitamins and minerals! We still supplement quite heavily, but much of the food we eat is fresh - 5 minutes from garden to kitchen - and it has more minerals and nutrients to start with as we put them in the soil. The average fruit or veggie in the US has travelled 1500 miles from the place it was grown to the place it is eaten. Many nutrients degrade over time even under the best conditions and so that fruit or veggie necessarily has less nutrients when it is eaten that it did at it's peak. Add to that the veggies are picked before they are ripe in order to make that trip, they are bred for the toughness needed to make that trip not for the nutrient value and they are ripened by ethelene gas in the back of an 18 wheeler as they make the trip (by the way ethelene gas is a known carcinogen). All these factors mean that the average produce available in the market has the least amount of nutrients possible rather than the most. The best thing you can do for your family, if you can't (or won't) grow your own veggies is to buy them from a local farmer or farmers market where you know they were picked only the day before instead of several weeks before. They look better, taste better and are soooo much better for you.