How does your garden grow?

This year we are planning on putting in a garden. I've been gathering information long enough, and we just need to jump in and do it! You don't see many gardens in our city, and I think it's because the city water is so full of junk it kills the plants. At least, that's my excuse for the houseplants. But I've heard that from other people as well. And our dirt is just crummy. Nothing grows in our backyard except poison ivy, which is a yearly clean-out project so that the kids don't get too badly affected by it. So we're attempting to circumvent both those problems by 1) building raised beds and filling them with purchased good soil (I can't believe I'm going to spend money on DIRT!), and 2) collecting rainwater to use for watering the garden. I went to Lowe's today and did some research on the guttering that we'll need to divert the rainwater off our roof, and learned that by having some guttering up in the area we need to collect from it may even have the added benefit of keeping water out of our basement. Bonus! So, all (ALL?) we need to do now is purchase and build the beds - planning 2 4ft by 12ft areas, 12 inches deep, fill them with dirt, get that rainwater system started (ohh, and all the rain that fell today!), order seeds (got a fat juicy Burpee catalog in the mail today!) and plant them! Sounds easy enough, right?

Ideally this is going to give the kids something productive to do, as well as encourage a little more veggie eating around here and saving the budget (if we were buying tomatoes every week at the store [which we don't usually because the tomatoes are all nasty at the grocery stores here because they have to come from so far away] and paying 4.50 per pound [actual price last week] we could save [not spend] 45.00 per month)! We plan to have some tomatoes, basil, loofahs, mesclun greens, carrots, potatoes, onions, sunflowers and maybe some peppers, if we can squeeze them in. I can't quite convince the kids that we really don't have room to grow pumpkins and watermelons!