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You can have garden-fresh vegetables, without investing huge amounts of time. The trick is to limit the size of your garden, but to grow intensively. Who wants to weed and water a huge garde, if you can get the same production out of a few smaller beds?
Lay out your garden with permanent beds, preferably running north/south. Make the beds no wider than you can reach to the center of, while standing on the paths between them. I like 4-foot wide beds. Make them wider, if you are tall and active, or slightly narrower, if you have a shorter reach or you garden with children.
Dig up the beds, getting air into the soil. Double digging the beds is best, but is a lot of work, so do one bed now, another this fall, the third next spring, etc. To double dig, remove 10-12 inches of soil from the north two feet of the bed. Place that topsoil in a wheelbarrow. Next work the exposed subsoil with a spading fork, breaking it up, removing big rocks and mixing in air. (If you ar down to hardpan, use a pick, if you have the energy. Dont' worry if you can't get deep. Whatever you do will help.)
Turn the topsoil from the next two feet south onto the subsoil that you just fluffed up; then break up the subsoil in that new trench. Work your way down the bed in this manner until you have fluffed the subsoil at the south end of the bed. Cover that trench with the topsoil you removed at the north end and you are done. You will probably have sore muscles the next day, but your veggies will love that bed.
Once you double dig a bed, you don't have to do it again for a very long time. Of course, this assumes you do not compact the soil again by walking on it. From now on, work while standing on the paths.
With permanent beds, you also have permanent paths. Remove the top 3-4 inches of topsoil from the paths and add it to the beds on either side. Cover the paths with newsppaers at least 4 sheets thick; then cover these with about three inches of bark, wood shavings or ground wood chips. This path treatment prevents weeds and keeps your feet clean and dry.
Have you noticed that you have a raised bed? You can frame the bed with wood, but it is not necessary. When you fluffed up the soil and added the paths' topsoil, it became higher than the surrounding compacted soil. Now mix in compost and whatever fertilizer and/or lime needed and you're ready to plant.
Use transplants whenever possible. You will gain 2-8 weeks depending on the crop. Learn how to raise your own transplants to save money and to have them available exactly when you need them.
Double digging allows your plants' roots to go deep. You can space crops more closely without the plants competing with each other. Plant in blocks instead of long rows. Pay attention to the "space between plants" on the seed packet, but ignore the "space between rows."
Do intercropping. When you plant the little broccoli or Brussels sprouts transplants 24 inches apart, sow a quick crop, like radishes, or choy, between them. You will be harvest the intercrop 4-5 weeks later, just when the main crop is getting big enough to need the room. Try lettuce transplants as an intercrop around tomatoes and summer squash.
Grow upward whenever possible. Pole peas and beans take a little longer to come into production, but bear a lot more than bush varieties. Don't let vine crops spraw. Tomatoes, cucumbers adn winter squash should be trained up a pole, trellis or frame. The soil they would otherwise cover can be used to grow other crops.
Nothing suceeds like succession. As soon as one crop is done, add some compost and fertilizer and plant something else. In our long growing season many crops can be planted as late as July and August. Keep those beds full and your total production can equal that of a neighbor with a garden twice as big as yours.
Hortsense: Managing plant problems with Integrated Pest Management
